Last week in class, we talked about main ideas from our readings and tried to make sense of all the terms thrown at us such as usability, user experience design, and so on. Many of the terms I have already come across before, but discussion did prove to organize them in a better way.
When told to group the terms ourselves, I tried to look at all the terms we had and group them in some way or another before putting it into any sort of hierarchy. I noticed that we had a lot of principles listed such as visibility, mapping, feedback, etc. We also had specific metrics that could be measured, and different types of design listed that could be seen as different approaches. But left were other items such as user research and personas, that really seem to be part of the design process than anything else.
Before we grouped items together, I had thought that “usability” was the over arching topic. I figured that all these design approaches, metrics, principles were about making a product easy to learn and easy to use. But after grouping, usability ended up being a part of user-centered design (along with other items), which ended up being under design as a whole. My partner and I almost took the entire hirarchy as a process, where UxD was a small branch of design, that led to usability testing, where the final product was a user interface/product. I’m sure there are many other ways to look at it but here is the web my partner and I concocted:
I thought Dr. V really explained it best:
– Goal-directed design is an approach: it is a philosophy and way of viewing the world.
– Design is a process, a recipe. It has certain steps you take.
– User-centered design has a set of principles.
Design With Integrity 