[Sigia-l] Usability in Fancy Clothes?

[Whitney Quesenbery]

At 05:49 PM 10/18/2002 -0400, Paul Bryan IA wrote:
>Did someone say user experience design is usability dressed up in fancy
>clothes?

So, would it also be fair to say that information architecture is indexing 
dressed up in fancy clothes?

I know that we are in the midst of a struggle for clarity in terminology, 
but I wonder why we so often seem to do it by denigrating others.

Making a site or application or product that works for all the stakeholders 
(business/owners, users of all types, authors, etc) takes a lot of 
different skills. The boundaries of the fields are squishy (to use the 
terminology that Lou came up with for a panel  - Lou, myself, Ginny Redish, 
Beth Mazur, Bill Gribbons - at STC 2002), and that makes it difficult to 
clearly define each field.

What I think is that it's a group of vectors. We all started in different 
places: library science, hypertext, graphic design, tech comm, quality, 
ergonomics, usability to name just a few. Somewhere along the line, we 
noticed that we needed more than just the "small xx" skills, and started 
redefining the discipline to "big xx" as we moved along the vector from 
isolated skill to integrated result. So now, we all call what we do "big 
xx" and we're seeing the sparks as the terminology meets.

The terminology will settle down. Not in my lifetime, perhaps, and not 
necessarily with the words we are using now -- but it will. (see 
http://www.wqusability.com/articles/whats-in-name.html)

In the mean time, I wonder why we feel the need to be so angry at everyone 
we think is "not us"



Whitney Quesenbery
Whitney Interactive Design, LLC
w. www.WQusability.com
e. whitneyq at WQusability.com
p. 908-638-5467

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