Why do products and packaging look the way they do?
And why do some people in the design, Web, marketing, and branding industries often talk so impenetrably? “Content management”? “Data architecture”? “Experience design”? Cool! . . . Um, what?
And I might as well admit it: Though I use the word fairly freely, I’m really not sure what “branding” is. Does it actually mean anything—anything concrete?
It appears that all these questions may actually be related.
In the past couple weeks, as I’ve spelunked deeper and deeper into the curious realm of Twitter, I have continually encountered the letters “UX”—tossed back and forth by some tweeters like a secret password to an alternate universe.
A quick surf through Wikipedia clarified things:
User experience design, most often abbreviated UX, but sometimes UE, is a term used to describe the overarching experience a person has as a result of their interactions with a particular product or service, its delivery, and related artifacts, according to their design.
OK, maybe “clarify” isn’t exactly the right word. So I went to this:
Experience design is the practice of designing products, processes, services, events, and environments with a focus placed on the quality of the user experience and culturally relevant solutions, with less emphasis placed on increasing and improving functionality of the design. An emerging discipline, experience design attempts to draw from many sources including cognitive psychology and perceptual psychology, linguistics, cognitive science, architecture and environmental design, haptics, hazard analysis, product design, information design, information architecture, ethnography, brand management, interaction design, service design, storytelling, heuristics, and design thinking.
Clicking through this list of terms does reveal some fascinating stuff. Haptics, for instance. This refers to the interaction of people and electronic devices via touch—like joysticks and other computer-game paraphernalia.
Still, some of this verbiage has the feel of taking some traditional marketing notions—positioning your product, making it look attractive, researching your customer’s needs—and shooting them up with several hundred PSI of obfuscation.
But to be fair: It may be that traditional product and marketing ideas are undergoing continuous mutation in this post-industrial, digital, social-media world. UX and their related fields are evolving. If “field” is the word: People in these realms seem to prefer “discipline.”
If I’m gonna find out whether there’s a there here, I’ve gotta talk with some disciples.
Great piece, Gene! As you've heard me say, I despise the language of the digital marketplace. It's often alienating, especially to people who typically own the purse-strings, so I wonder LOUDLY why we would continue the practice. People in my field complain all the time that they never have enough budget to get done what needs to be done. Well, perhaps it's because the buyers have NO IDEA what they're buying.
On the other hand, the concept of User Experience (UX) is something I believe unique to the interactive field (well, OK, product development as well). Traditional media is fairly linear it how it's used. A newspaper and a magazine utilizes a single motion -- turning of the page. A web site, rather, provides ample opportunity for the designer to fail to accomplish what he or she is intending for the consumer to do. Failure is helplessly baked into digital design. And yet it's infinitely improvable because each click is an indication of a user's behavior -- be in a successful one or one that fails. This is why measurement and analytics are inseparable from digital marketing and communications.
Posted by: AEklund | June 04, 2009 at 01:41 PM