[Sigia-l] Usability in Fancy Clothes?

[Dr. Pittas Marios]

> 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.


I am not sure of other benefits that one can find of the ".com" era, but in
my honest opinion and from my experience, the ".com" boom was probably one
of those great catalysts that made people understand that there are many
stakeholders in the development of systems (e.g. marketing, process owners,
etc.) as well as that there are a multiple different skills needed (e.g.
graphics designers, usability engineers, programmers, marketing, etc.).

It could be because of the nature of the systems developed (call them sites,
call them services if you like), or it could be because of the browser
"richness", or it could be because of the general targeted user population,
whatever the reason might be it is probably the critical and catalyst period
when people have realised (not necessarily being "evangelised", "preached
at"), that different skills are needed in system development.

As for the definitions of each skill.. oh well.. it will take a long time
before those definitions are defined and settled down or acceptable
boundaries of the roles are discovered.

Marios

-----Original Message-----
From: sigia-l-admin at asis.org [mailto:sigia-l-admin at asis.org]On Behalf Of
Whitney Quesenbery
Sent: 20 October 2002 23:59
To: sigia-l at asis.org
Subject: Re: [Sigia-l] Usability in Fancy Clothes?


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

Upcoming Presentations:
Designing a Usable Intranet - Web Based Surveys and Usability Testing
October 27-30 San Francisco - http://www.iirusa.com/webbasedsurveys/

Looking, Finding, Searching
How Users Do It
November 19, STC Tele-seminar  http://www.stc.org/seminars/

UPA: www.upassoc.org
STC Usability SIG: www.stcsig.org/usability



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