User Experience is a Quality, Not A Discipline

One of the things that has been hard for the "usability community" to accept is that usability is not really interesting in and of itself. And that usability isn't really a goal, and it's definitely not the end-all be-all. Usability is simply a quality. It's an important quality, but just one of many. And it definitely doesn't warrant being a "discipline."

I've begun to think the same thing about "user experience." In a prior post, I wondered if user experience is dead. I wondered this for a few reasons:
- the people who were "leading" the discussion about user experience were doing so back-asswards
- there is a seeming lack of energy behind the concept of "user experience"
- people feel passion for disciplines such as "information architecture" and "interaction design," but if "user experience" were to go away tomorrow, no one would notice.

Perhaps the best response to that post was Dave Rogers' "Is UX Dead?" And in that post, and elsewhere, I slowly realized that "user experience," too, is nothing more than a quality. When user experience is discussed by people outside the profession, they talk about a site or product offering a good user experience. When Kottke writes about Google Maps and user experience, he doesn't talk about Google's user experience designers -- he talks about how the sum of elements leads to a "useful user experience." (Via peterme.com)