So Mark Hurst has jumped into the fray with the latest issue of his Good Experience newsletter. He writes:

Somehow "user experience practitioner" doesn't roll off the tongue so easily. Hence the inevitable effort for UX-types to name what it is they do: at conferences and in newsletters, for years, I've seen the endless discussions. Should it be "usability professional"? "Information designer"? "Interaction architect"? Some other permutation?

Here's my proposal - easy to pronounce, easy to understand, just two easy words: "Who cares?"

No surprise here...I care! That said, Mark makes a great point that the name may not really matter by noting all the different labels applied to the information technology field.

The highlight of his essay (and his title) is actually:

This brings me to my own highfalutin solution to the *real* issue usability professionals are trying to address - namely, that they're not taken seriously enough in the organization:

Usability professionals must disappear.

Instead of singing "me me meeee" about their job title (and, for that matter, their peculiar UX-centered research methods), usability professionals should *disappear* - like any good interface - and just serve the company and the various groups inside it.

Actually, I couldn't disagree more. And perhaps I'm just picking apart words, but I think just the opposite is true. Mark describes the UX as facilitator role and notes:

As facilitators, truly caring about the organization and how it can best serve its customers, practitioners will then be more valued.

Well, if "truly caring about the organization" is code for serving the organization's bottom line, then I agree with Mark. As Challis Hodge said on Tog's interaction architects list:

Business leaders are challenged with 90 day reporting cycles, growth as a primary business objective, limited resources, regulator scrutiny, competition, media, shareholder demands, political pressures, socio-cultural forces and more. ...

If we do not map our value offerings to business needs (read business context), we will be having this same conversation 20 years from now.

Now this may be arguing a bit strongly, as making products useful, usable, and satisfying can help business leaders. We just aren't yet making the case to them to hit critical mass.

One option is to increase the visibility of the case study. In the most recent issue of interactions, Microsoft's Dennis Wixon addresses this in "Evaluating Usabilty Methods." He suggests that all the energies directed at the "how many users are enough?" question re usability testing miss a bigger point: that the premises inherent in the current usability research "render most of the literature irrelevant to applied usabilty work." (Yikes...how's that for a position!) Instead, he suggests that:

If our discipline is serious about public discussion of usability methods as they are applied in industry, we will move beyond these lines of inquiry and take a broad-based case study approach, examining outcomes that are relevant to both practice and business. Our relevance as a discipline and our career success as practitioners depend on such a change.

Interesting timing. Just this summer, AIGA-ED created a case study archive as an outcome of DUX2003. Perhaps it's a start!

03:17 PM | linkme | home