According to Tom Sterwatm the Chair of the sub-committee of the International Standards Organisation (ISO), the new version of ISO 13407, the International Standard for Human Centered Design (which will be called ISO 9241-210 to bring it into line with other usability standards), will use the term “user experience.”
The term user experience is now widely used, especially by major players in the industry including Apple, IBM and Microsoft. However, in many cases, the term is contrasted to usability which is often depicted as a much narrower concept focusing on systems being easy to use.
Other exponents explain that user experience goes beyond usability by including such issues as usefulness, desirability, credibility and accessibility.
The Information Architecture Summit 2008 will be this week (April 10-14) in Miami, Florida. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to attend but hopefully videos of some of the presentations will be posted on the web. I hope to go next year.
I just came across UX Zeitgeist, a new tool to track the books, people, trends, and topics in the user experience community.
Think of it as a mix between User Experience, Web 2.0, social networking, and publishing. When buying UX books, a major factor in my decision is the ratings and comments of others on Amazon. UX Zeitgeist takes it one step further by asking 3 key questions to UX professionals:
If you could have only one user experience book on your self, what would it be?
What user experience book deserves more attention?
What user experience book needs writing?
For a more in depth preview of UX Zeitgeist, check out the YouTube video:
At the time of this posting, UX Zeitgeist is still in beta mode.
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