March 22, 2005
Enterprise Search Report Review
Tucked away in Adaptive Path's latest newsletter is Chiara Fox's review of "The Enterprise Search Report: Requirements, Costs, Products, and Practices." Chiara gives the report high marks, which is good, since the report costs $1,350.
March 21, 2005
Adaptive Path Celebrates, March 24
As is written on the company website:
In honor of our fourth anniversary, and as an office warming for our new space, we’re having a party. All are welcome — stop by, meet the team, have a drink. Thursday, March 24, 5:30 p.m., Adaptive Path World Headquarters, 363 Brannan St., between 2nd and 3rd.
Please RSVP
Is "User Experience", for all intents and purposes, dead?
Reading the notes from a recent panel on UX disciplines, and remembering the notes from an earlier, similar, panel, I am left with the thought that the phrase "user experience," as a meaningful term describing practice and concern, is dead.
Dead dead dead.
Which is disconcerting, since my company has all but bet the farm on the concept.
The reason I say, "dead" is because my experience in reading the goings-on of these panels is one of self-flagellation. I feel obliged to keep up with these things, but the degree to which the discussion is an exercise in semantics, territoriality, inaccuracy, and pointlessness, suggests that if I'm a willing reader, I must be a masochist.
Over six years ago, I began describing my efforts as "design[ing] 'User Experience.'" I'm wary of that now.
The organizations that attempt to claim it (UXNet, BayDUX) have only done an extreme disservice by rendering the term irrelevant.
(And don't get me started on DUX2005... the conference is only a little more than 7 months out, and there's pretty much no substantial word about it anywhere. Take *that*!, "user experience community"!)
"User experience" feels like a term, and concept, whose meaningful time is over. I don't know what (if anything) will take its place. But there's clearly a lack of interest and effort in meaningful evolution. The energy seems to be behind the terms and concepts of "information architecture," "interaction design," and "usability engineering." Maybe we should take that as a sign.
