User Experience - UX

by Dirk Knemeyer and Eric Svoboda
"User Experience", often abbreviated "UX", is the quality of experience a person has when interacting with a specific design.
Originally used in reference to human-computer interactions – and still largely associated with those disciplines – the term is now used to refer to any specific human-design interaction, ranging from a digital device, to a sales process, to an entire conference. Perhaps due to its organic development and lack of formalization, "User Experience" may be defined by, and the responsibility of, very different departments from organization to organization: in some organizations, it is owned by marketing; in others, it falls under information technology (IT). Then, from a solutions perspective, some organizations base their "User Experiences" around the research and academic-based approaches of human-computer interaction (HCI); others treat interface and/or product design as the source for "User Experience," while still others let marketing or IT drive it.
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Want to learn more about User Experience?

Being an emergent discipline, User Experience does not yet have a strong, formal body of knowledge. Formal books that include the term in their title often cover only subgroups of user experience. Here are some online resources to get you started:

www.uxnet.org - local and cross-disciplinary resources on UX

www.informationdesign.org - despite its label, the pre-eminent daily UX resource

www.functioningform.com - a consistently strong resource on the UX design process

www.nathan.com/resources/index.html - an enormous collection of UX- related resources

Designing Interactions is a book and a DVD as well as this website.

You can browse by chapter as well as by interview. When you choose an interview, a small version of the segment from the DVD plays. You can also download (free) the chapter of the week together with the relevant interview segments from the DVD.

In the Book Bill Moggridge introduces us to 40 influential designers who have shaped our interaction with technology. The introduction and final chapter combine to describe the approach to designing interactions that has evolved at IDEO. The 800 page book is illustrated with 700 color images. With the book is a DVD of 37 interviews, intercut with examples of interactions.