On the same day of the course I was attending the Oxford Podcasting Open House at Wadham College (more about this on the blog soon). Also there was a whole team from Berkeley, including Judy Stern, whose job title (according to my notes) is User Experience / User Interface Designer. Interesting job title I thought...
Doing some research into this I found two concepts, with definitions taken here from a presentation by Allison Bloodworth & Ian Crew at Berkeley: User-Centered Design in IT: the Low-Hanging Fruit.
User-Centered Design (UCD)
a design philosophy and a process in which the needs, wants, and limitations of the end user of an interface or document are given extensive attention at each stage of the design process
Goal: to make the user's interaction experience as simple and intuitive as possible
User Experience (UX)
the overall experience and satisfaction a user has when using a product or system
Goal: meet user goals and tasks while satisfying business and functional requirements.
UX and UCD are a great way to describe at least 90% of my viewpoint "designing IT services by first understanding how people behave". I've been talking about this for ages but without the right words. Having the right vocabulary should make in much easier to be articulate about it in future :-)
There's lots more to read in Allison & Ian's presentation, explaining why this important and introducing tools to improve usability of products and services. Fro even more info (I always like a reading list!) they give these books:
- “The Inmates are Running the Asylum” – Alan Cooper
- “The Design of Everyday Things” and “Emotional Design” – Don Norman
- “Usability Engineering” – Jakob Nielsen
- “Don’t Make Me Think” – Steve Krug
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