For those in the User Experience field, be warned. Designers are taking back usability. You’ve had it for a while. It’s cute, trendy but not egalitarian. Designers have sat by, picking out colors and fonts, but no more. We’re discovering that usability was already in our repertoire and we’re reclaiming it.
Designers are finding out that a User Experience job is actually a hodge-podge of other jobs. It borrows from several backgrounds but mainly from design, industrial engineering and anthropology. You can’t argue that a User Experience job isn’t a great gig. It’s perfect recompense for developers who slaved and made little money during Web 1.0. How did designers let this happen? Research, I imagine. Any job that involves words and numbers scares us. We like to play with colors and shapes. In hindsight, we didn’t know how to apply the whole design process to the Web. But that’s changing. Years of awful sites taught us profound lessons in the medium. And what vocations emerged through bad practices will quickly be gobbled up by other designers who get it.
Credibility, desirability, and usefulness are integral to the design process regardless of application. Those ideas are “baked in” to what we do. If applied correctly, design solutions are framed with usability practices from the start. With a movement towards sustainability in design, we’re seeing a growing emphasis even on specification. As more artists bend towards sustainable design, they’ll push safety, performance and environmental considerations to the forefront. This emerging trend will require Web designers to incorporate more usability practices early and often. The result: I anticipate UE positions will be enveloped by designers in the next 3-4 years. So, designers can stop creating custom brushes and gradients and get involved in the application side of the solution. If for the sole reason we’re jealous of your UE salaries.
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