What's the interconnection between UCD & UX (User-Centered Design & User Experience Design)?

Right now, I feel that researching usability can be a nasty jungle.

I’m kind of letting the good parts of ‘everything’ I read sink in and trying to keep my own judgement as a thinking designer intact. I like methodologies, but don’t believe I’ve found the one single practice which constitutes the answer to everything in my field of work (site usability).

um…i have no idea…. and don’t know why fluther recommended this question…BUT!!!

Alas! I am now intrigued as to what a UCD and UX are….

please tell me…. or at least hint at what its got anything to do with….anything??

respect to you all

x

P.s Are you allowed to answer “i don’t know” to a question on fluther? Or is that banned?

This my quick and dirty interpretation of what I’ve gathered so far:

Design in its essence, is a pattern with a purpose.

UCD is a design philosophy. It stands for user-centered design and is a practical way of making design decisions. It’s usually referring to interfaces, and most often digital or paperbased such, but the methodology can naturally be extended to whatever else you are about to design, with the key prerequisite being, that it must involve some form of interaction—or user interaction to be more precise, because UCD is all about designing with the user in first priority.

Any user has their own skills or problems—characteristics—and those must be defined in some sort of document; often called Persona, or User Profile or similar.

UCD has 3 models for implementation:

1. Cooperative design, where you gather a bunch of users and try to record their reactions, etc. when testdriving the interface.

2. Participatory design. To my understanding, virtually the same as Cooperative, but it’s a North-American name for the same thing (someone correct this if I’m wrong).

3. Contextual design, which is more focused on the user as a customer, but lends a lot from Participatory design as well.

UCD is meant as an iterative process—i.e. a multi-occuring event—where you usually meet up, or by any means try to communicate with your users, like in the model approaches above.

There are some key elements that UCD deals with. I’m not describing them any further other than listing them here:

• Visibility
• Accessibility
• Legibility
• Language

There’s also the Rhetorical Situation, which among other things, will judge what language to be used, what termonologies, graphics, etc. The Rhetorical Situation has 3 elements of which to consider:

• the Audience
• their Purpose for interacting with your interface
• the specific Context within which they’re using the interface

Heck… I need to go to bed! Work tomorrow… (will be happy though, sharing what I’ve got in here, if there’s anyone up for discussion or having their take on my question above.)

Without one there cannot be the other.

can it be used for example in creating bespoke art for people…or is UCD more tailored to engineering or technology etc?

re: usage of UCD methodology in bespoke art.

It’s mostly tailored, or thought of, as a methodology for some sort of interface (where there is an interaction involved). If the artwork contains such an element, sure, it can definitely be applied as a method of design considerations specifically targeted at the users partaking in the experience of the piece. Coming to my mind, exemplary situations could be installations, public (interactive) art sculptures, a weird type of elephant trunk shaped flute megaphone, etc.

If it’s something like bespoke paintings for, say, a restaurant or hotel, same thing.

On the contrary, though, I don’t think such a methodology would turn that effective in more personally originated art. In this case, it would just be in the way of things, as you are the “user” (of sorts), of your own experience making art.