Don't know why, but Bruce Esrig wrote a reply that isn't showing up. Bruce wrote:
"This answer is for the question posed at the beginning of the thread: how can I help my organization define these terms? The top priority is to be able to convey meaning. That's why defining the scope is so effective. A good definition will connect each term with one or more sets of specific items (responsibilities, behaviors, goals) that it may cover in particular contexts according to particular speakers. The recognized bundles of meaning can then be recognized as possible scopes. Once the scopes are defined, someone in the organization has to issue a ruling stating which terms stand for each scope. It's a brave try to make "user experience" stand for the entire experience of users and to make "customer experience" stand for the entire set of positions held by people who actually buy the product. It's a linguistic grand unification: notice how you can take the words in the noun phrase, read them, interpret them, and tell the story of how your interpretation is driven by the component words. It's just great. It makes it easy to talk and be understood. But user "user experience" isn't just a noun phrase standing around asking to be assigned its natural meaning. It's a marketing term for one or more designers carrying out one or more design disciplines. Even though many leading interaction designers have adopted it with delight and defined it as an umbrella term, the community that traces its lineage via usability also has its natural definition of what the term should mean, a definition that homes in on usability issues, which then can also be defined broadly or narrowly. Now I am noticing for the first time a third community, of IxDA list members for whom user experience has taken on the meaning that user interface design might have had before. That's natural if your perception of interaction design is formed from the most common application area where interaction design is known to happen: in digital user interfaces. So the meaning that you choose for the term may depend in part on what community you are trying to assert you belong to, or perhaps the opposite: you might choose a meaning based on the community you belong to. But you're better off choosing a meaning based on the community you need to talk with. If you're being asked to define it, and if you're really lucky, you can do water-cooler ethnography. It sounds as though your organization has already determined how to assign responsibilities to groups. If not, that's the first step. Then, you can ask what terms the people you work with assign to each of these sets of responsibilities, especially the people whose usage is likely to influence the way the organization talks about it. Make sure the key influencers either adopt the usage you want or tell you the usage that you're going to use, so that the terminology becomes stable inside your organization. That way, they'll know what to say when they want to fund the activity. If you already knew this, then the discussion should confirm your suspicions. Adopting terminology is a social process, and much though "the community" would like to answer your question, the participants on this list don't form a single unanimous community, and there are multiple definitions to point to. It's those definitions that you need to discuss internally and assign names to. If the right people are comfortable with the terms, everyone else will take their cue from them, or else the exercise, ending without consensus, will enable little subgroups of individuals to wink at each other, knowing that they share an interpretation. The key is to enable everyone to understand one another, whether or not they can all bring themselves to use the same language. Best wishes, Bruce" . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=49125 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
