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There is a discipline that a lot of people that hold themselves out to be UX professionals have never heard of. it is called Human Factors and is a subset of in
by kls 16y ago
There is a discipline that a lot of people that hold themselves out to be UX professionals have never heard of. it is called Human Factors and is a subset of industrial psychology.
If a person has never read a book on Human Factor theory, they are not a UX professional they are a design hack.
Human Factors focuses on what the mind wants to do rather than individual opinions of how one thinks it should work. There are years of scientific method based research in Human Factors studies that is willfully or ignorantly ignored by the web design community.
If you want to be great you need to ground yourself in Human Factors as well as aesthetic design. They are different disciplines and both are important to user experience. As well a subset of human factors specifically focused on computing is HCI, while you can short cut and just read HCI related info, there is a wealth of info that can be drawn upon from other elements of Human Factors such as product design, and ergonomics while not directly related the theories can be adapted to UI usability.
- vitovito 16y agoIn a previous workshop, we talked about what's necessary to call yourself a UX. Part of the problem is that UX is the evolution of the original "web designer" catch-all role, and many designers with a current title of Senior UX or IA or some such are really "grandfathered" into the role; they wouldn't be able to get hired for it today, because they didn't keep up. http://vi.to/workshop/20100621/2dlevels.png http://vi.to/workshop/20100621/2dlevels.png is an illustration that came out of the workshop, indicating at what experience level you should have various types of knowledge to be able to call yourself a UX: theoretical marketing knowledge, commercial concepting knowledge, etc. The 1-6 levels are the range of knowledge from beginner-to-expert, which come out of the "levels of knowledge" discussions from a few years ago: http://particletree.com/notebook/levels-of-web-development-knowledge/ http://particletree.com/notebook/levels-of-web-development-k... The (sorely incomplete) skills matrix, that provides the 1-6 definitions for each component is here: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=0Aqp_zIiwlin7dGN5QnBLY0MydlpYZlQybXVmWUYtZ1E&hl=en&output=html http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=0Aqp_zIiwlin7dGN5QnBL... The illustration pegs everything at level 2, but it should actually be around where the green items are. I am totally open to additional input; we won't be revisiting this in the workshops for a while.
- mschaecher 16y agoAny recommended reading on Human Factors?
- kls 16y agoHandbook of Human Factors and Ergonomics The Human-Computer Interaction Handbook Human Factors in Information Systems