It is sad for many at Blast Radius as this is Dave Lougheed’s last week here. He’s onto the next opportunity (VP User Experience of Chapters). I'm happy for him as he can put good use of his skills together with full ownership of the experience. Dave has been a Usability Strategist for more than a decade and no doubt one of the best in the industry. He provides great leadership and mentorship to the larger team and most important of all he cares. So I asked him what he can share with others. Here it is from Dave:
“But the one thing I really learned and will always remember: If usability work is done properly, the end user will never notice.”
Usability originated from the human-computer interaction design, at Blast Radius it's part of Experience Design and at some places like Critical Mass, it's part of Strategy (I was told by friends at CM). It doesn’t matter where it sits, there is always a "people" problem and a "technology" problem when it comes to the user experience. For these passionate professionals, this is what matters to them:
- User-driven everything.
- Contextual information is key
- Trust, Authority and Empathy are the pillars of information design
This "Experience Diagram" is a nice piece which I pulled from David Armano's blog Logci+Emotion which I recently discovered (he produces great visuals and insights on the subject of experience design). He expands the role of the experience designer and his ideas are very relevant to our current transmedia environment. Usability (as core of Experience Design) is the thing that has dramatically changed the way we interact with products, people and machines. It is becoming more and more important in the modern society. I see it moving upstream as part of a company’s business strategy. In 3-5 years, may be.
