The Ubiquitous UX
Pleasant Charles
Table of contents
0. Chapter 0: A newcomer's restless ramblings.
1. What is UX? : knowledge reuse (collecting already-defined content).
2. Application process: cases already in use at professional UX firms.
3. Utilization process (1/2): custom UX.
4. Utilization process (2/2): after UX.
Prologue
I plan to post on UX for a while. To propose a methodology or solution for "after UX," I am doing some seasoning for internal understanding and shared sensibility. I also felt I ought to organize what I had scrapped or heard here and there.
My personal thoughts on the all-too-common UX.
UX is being used lately not only at web agencies but in public agencies and even in print production. I first encountered it through an N-screen forum hosted by KT three years ago. Today's climate around UX feels quite different from then. Back then, it was approached through a marketing or BM lens; today, the approach has shifted toward something more humanistic — closer to an attitude toward service or the customer.
Come on — it's like people years ago, in fashion, kept reshuffling the words around a small slice of "branding" concepts or attitudes toward the customer, inventing "my own theory," trying to build their own methodology... uh... (I think I'm getting too worked up. I'll stop. Yeah.)
Of course, I'm not saying which is right or wrong... but working in fashion, quietly running a personal brand and a small shop, the moments when I first stepped into IT 2–3 years ago overlap with all this... (Personally, I tend strongly to see patterns in many phenomena and attitudes, so from where I stand —) the definitions of UX offered by today's famous authors, experts, and veterans bear too much resemblance to the many definitions and theories developers once argued about around "object-orientation," or the debates about MVC and MVVM patterns.
Yes — I get that it's needed. I get it. And you had grad school at home and abroad, a PhD; I get the long credentials. You're great at English, so you imported something nicely made from overseas and showed it off — very grateful. So. Stop "defining" and please start thinking seriously about how it should actually be used. At a web agency, sometimes you have to deliver a storyboard for a project in one week, or in two days including the weekend. A useful UX that works on that field, too.
If you went to school and got commissioned as an officer, you should draw up strategy that doesn't waste a single soldier as bullet fodder. In the bloody field of small/mid-sized agencies, one week for UX can be a devastating and crushing battle. If you got an MBA, I think you should not only improve management at a cash-fueled giant like Samsung but also help the grandmother selling tteokbokki at the market pad her pocket. If UX is that useful, it should also pad the pocket of a CEO who's running a 5-million-won website with a few staff around him.
My first impression of UX — as a hopelessly under-equipped, small-shop-running latecomer to the field — has changed that way over the last 2–3 years. Ha — just, that's how it is. Like any useless loafer would do, I've had my say.
So what this restless ramble of mine aims at is: a usable UX
1. whose definition is concise,
2. and that is easy for anyone to use.
Table of contents.
0. Chapter 0: A newcomer's restless ramblings.
1. What is UX?: knowledge reuse (collecting already-defined content about UX).
2. Application process: standard cases already used at professional UX firms.
3. Utilization process (1/2): custom UX.
4. Utilization process (2/2): after (acquired) UX.
