What is UX and What Could it be For Our Future?

April 29, 2013 By BJ Cook,

To give you all a little bit of context, I am 7 months pregnant, so the idea of posterity has been on my mind quite a bit lately. Let’s take a moment to break down UX for a second. For the layperson U=User and X=Experience. Many times the abbreviation UX gets caught up in a bunch of boxes, arrows and wireframes -- seemingly very static stuff. The fact of the matter is that User Experience is extremely fluid and constantly changing, which is what makes it so exciting. With new generations come new baselines of technology and new status quos. If the digital landscape is changing at a rapid pace, the context to those experiences will change as well. The User: Each generation is born with their own opinions based on the context of how they have grown up or been affected by their life. With each new generation, comes a new mindset that is open to new things and alternatively, may be closed off to others. This informs the experience that they are looking for. The Experience: 10 years ago there was no iPhone. Now, toddlers can navigate their way through games on a touch screen. How will that landscape change in 5 years? in 10 years? How savvy will they be in interacting with and consuming information digitally? Will they still be consuming information or interacting with it in real-time. In everything that UX designers do, the experience is defined by the users wants and needs. By solving those problems in the right way, the experience comes closer to being seamless. User + Experience: User Experience is the human and the digital element intertwined. When you combine the two in the right way, you have the potential for magic. User Experience has always been the marriage of human interactions on a digital platform and how we can make these interactions as intuitive as possible, more specifically, how transparent can we be in solving your problem. The more that people become familiar with these experiences, the more we can begin to blur that line between a digital experience and and a physical experience. When the web was first introduced, it was a tool that was separate from the human experience, now we strive more and more to close that gap in presenting a digital experience from the perspective of a human one. Visual Examples of these “ah-ha” moments in User Experience include: iPhone, Tablets, PS3 Kinnect, OLED Screens, Interactive displays, Influence of Touch Screen. What’s next? Stay tuned for more of DOs future thoughts on UX.