

User Experience And The Poison On The Tip Of The Arrow - mikek
http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/15/user-experience-and-the-poison-on-the-tip-of-the-arrow/

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GuiA
User Experience (and to some extent User Interface) design are, I think, the
two most misunderstood things in the valley and startup world.

There are so many words thrown around UI, UX, IxD (interaction design), etc.
So confusing! Concretely, most of the people I've met who qualify themselves
as practitioners of these disciplines are really graphic/web designers. But
the field of user-centered design (a term that I think encompasses well all of
the former) is so much more than that!

People like Don Norman, Bill Moggridge, Bill Verplank, etc. who pretty much
founded the modern field of interaction design did not make their career by
pushing pixels on Dribbble or implementing fancy JQuery transitions between
their website's forms.

User centered design is much deeper, fuzzy and humanistic than that— if you
claim to be a UI/UX/etc. designer, please step out of {Photoshop | Firebug
console} for a bit and delve into the works of the aforementioned authors, as
a start. It might be harder to read than colorful blog posts, but your work
will be so much deeper because of it.

