Wa-aaay back in 2006 Gartner published a report [PDF] basically saying the GUI is evolving in the direction holistic, humane UX is taking it. Mike Kuniavsky’s blog pulls out a summary.
So it was with great joy that I recently found this
MSDN post that is from a newbie to UX, bless, who lives in the software world. He relates Software Architecture and User Experience to the same fabric of building good software. The comparisons are good (especially the table at the end) and may help me in better explaining what I do to those more “numerically and logically” inclined.
His quote from a friend describing what you need to do get the
UI right in a project is particularly enlightening:
“…just have some graphical designers doing the UI with usability concepts in mind, some developers coding the behavior… and it’s done! The rest is solutions architecture as usual. How much more can you say about that? Maybe, updating the speech to the current line of products, you can mention Microsoft Expression for UI designers, Visual Studio 2008 for developers, XAML as lingua franca for both and that’s all, folks!”.
Are there really folks like this still out there? This shows I have (a) a job for life and (b) a lot to still learn about my audience.
Sentience and Intelligence Research 