Understanding Design Re-told: User Experience

February 26, 2004 8:35 AM | posted to design | permalink | comments (0)

I read this post at MezzoBlue couple of days ago. The post was all about his response to another post made by a "Microsoft promoter extraordinnaire" raising the argument about the "value of design".

It is just the usual type of debate common versus software developers/ engineers and graphic designers/ artists that goes something like this: "looks" is not that important, just an icing on a cake... ". I posted a comment at MezzoBlue about software development world do not usually understand or talk about "user experience".

One guy responded to my post and mentioned HCI(?)... I believe he was pertaining to Human Computer Interface, the one taught in Computer Science classes. Of course, this is not the "user experience" that I am talking about.

Set your volume louder, and check this site out. There is no instruction to click in any area, allowing visitors to explore with no rules and guidelines. And I do hope you click around, it leads to an array of sounds, colors, patterns, repetitions, contrast etc. I believe this kind of experience is not in any HCI textbooks, is it?

This same kind of experience is what I am talking about usually lacking in the software development world.