I stumbled upon some slide decks the other day, some arguing quit strongly against calling the artist formally known as interaction designer Tafkid a user experience designer.
Although i do agree with the key ingredients of these presentations, I also think one should avoid wasting ones time on defining meaning of words or meanings of professions. By the time that you successfully defined them, something new will have coma along that is exactly the same but 5% extra, and you can start defining again. Although it is interesting, I feel I have better things to do. If you feel you have some time left, please start working on defining art and artist, the difference between a blogger and a journalist and what web2.0 really means. I’m happy with that it is impossible, but I do believe that it is certainly possible to call a number of concepts that it is related too. That will be sufficient for me. If the world calls my profession UXD designer (or UX designer, or UE designer) than that is what I will work with.
Frank Spiller of the very interesting blog Demystifying Usability made a great illustration to cover this problem (source)
So User Experience Design (formally also know as Usability) deals with all these subjects, and many more, sometimes it will be the right name, sometimes it wont.
To quote good ol’ Shakespeare
What’s in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet.