The Name "UX" Both Helps and Gets in the Way of Helping

User experience is not the thing we all are about. It is a label, useful in some contexts. A barrier and worse in other contexts.

This post is me considering a portion of the meta of UX. I find useful ideas when I journal like this in brief sessions and not as useful when it goes on too long. Going meta for too long I get lost. I promise to keep this brief for both of us. My intent is to encourage us all to care about what we name things in design without getting lost in only that.

"Like a finger pointing to the moon"

We care about what it feels like for others to encounter and take part in what we create. If the jargon gets in the way, look to your feelings and follow them to a descriptive reason.

We don't need to fight about UX.

Not most of us most of the time anyway. But what about when you see the name just not working for a group of people you're serving? Recognizing a conflict and investigating is part of our design work.

The Name Alone Doesn't Do the Work

Some of the things you encounter: someone cared nothing or very little what it would be like for you to encounter it. Other things you encounter, many someone's did care a great deal and put in effort to understand your perspective or one very similar to your perspective.

The Work of Caring and Learning and Using the Learning

This is where we can point to what brings us to care about the experience of others. We know it takes work. It takes understanding people of different perspectives, skills background, lifestyle and life event situations.

You can call that user experience. You can call that other things too. Customer experience, service design. Anthropology. Systems thinking. Human Centered Design. Human Factors. Flerp-a-derp. Name it in a way that gets people working together.

We work together to make challenging decisions big and small what to focus on, what to be less concerned about in influencing the shared intent.

The design represents the shared intents.

The blueprint concept of what it is we're making that is a useful map to get us to making the thing. We know we can arrive at the what to build with far greater caring confidence when we feel credible knowing we are representing the people we serve in all the things we design.

That is what so many of us mean when we point at the moon.

User experience, used for something.

It's that we care about people that connect with what we create and how what we create affects them.

And we know this whole approach is also greatly helped with having principles that give us boundaries we can easily describe. IN these principled boundaries we can thoughtfully choose and compare. What fits ad what is not fitting.

User experience gives us a powerful set of tools to understand. What we do with that understanding is what we do with our given power. Principles set us up to use that power in ways that make the well met experience sustainable and even a competitive advantage.

We live and work among groups who are willing to do anything from ignoring caring to caring a lot but without principle which leads to using power in ways that does not include or represent the people they claim to serve as users of their systems.

Care about experience, principles, practice that makes us better at what we all do. We make things for others to use, benefit from the power we share.

You care about what we name things, that's a worthwhile thing to care about.

When you find conflict with the words like "user" or "experience", remember what brought you here and find new words because we will always be together in what we care about but maybe not in how we describe it.

It's a quirk of designers. Those we come after and those that come after us. We care and will find ourselves in new contexts that the old words don't always meet well.

The words we use to describe the work are part of the work.

The names we give capture all kinds of context.

Isn't that why we started using the term user experience in the first place. UX wasn't the first way to say we care and it won't be the last.

If you want to show you care beyond our community and are looking to go somewhere new and dig further into ideas that make us all better, please dig deeper once you find an old term that doesn't meet you well. Ask why. Describe your feelings and principles. You'll find the new ground and you'll find the common ground and see where you're going to push things further and better.

When you do that, we're all moving somewhere better and will be learning together.