Abstract

I gave my fourth World Usability Day (WUD) talk a few months ago in Estonia (the talk may have been at WUD 2019’s largest event). The WUD 2019 theme was "Design for the Future We Want." That would have worked well for a design conference, which could also have focused on communicating “the value of design” and educating “the entire organization on good design and what it takes to get there.” However, these two quotes are not from a design source, but from the overview for a UIE workshop: "Lead your organization to deliver better-designed products and services through a custom UX strategy." To further illustrate how the usability field is diverging beyond UX into design, in the last six months, The Nielsen Norman Group has posted articles and videos on Design Ops, Design Thinking, Paper Prototyping, Customer Experience, Service Design, Service Blueprinting, Scenario Mapping, UX Work in Agile Backlogs, UX Debt, and Tracking (design) Assumptions. Why is there still a "U" in WUD and JUS? It’s like a garden center called Tulips R Us with tulips on just one stand in a sea of greenhouses, greengages, green willow, and more. Usability has diverged, renaming itself to UX in many contexts, with an increasing focus on design. It wasn’t always like this. Designers and their cool designs have been repeatedly in UX crosshairs.