During the week the general terms of User Experience and Usability become interchangeable. Huh?
Well the ISO standard ISO 13407 - the International Standard for Human Centred Design (gets a new number too! - ISO 9241-210) is being side shuffled it seems. Now it’s a standard for User Experience. Is this a good thing?
What is User Experience, really! Well for me it’s all the aspect of the front end user interaction, the emotional response to use the page, the effective usefulness, the accessibility, the audience’s perception of credibility of the site and the directive of the user towards the site’s goal. Usability (ISO 9241-11: Guidance on Usability) on the other hand is just an narrow aspect of this entire user experience
The other day I was floored and humbled as I regularly am during a session of usability testing for a site prototype. Up to this point the testing and functionality determination had gone well. Then someone put a massive road block in the way. There it was sticking up out of the ground blocking all findability of the core information on a site. Well maybe it wasn’t that bad, but it did make me think; which is good.
Well a little over a week ago AWIA pulled off another event miracle, Ideas4. It organised an evening seminar for the local web industry in little under 2 weeks. As usual it all came together nicely on the night with over 100 people attending and even a special blow-in guest from the US, who just happened to be in town.
Jordan Brock kindly videoed the two talks presented by Lisa and Rachel, encoded and uploaded them to Vimeo.
Rachel Cook, despite being 8 month pregnant, amused us all with tales of Silicon Valley and web 2.0 startups.
