Designing the Human Experience of the Computer
Since my decision to attend DesignLab’s UX Academy, many people have responded to my decision with “Oh! Yeah I’ve heard of UX. I’m not really sure what that is though.” Some ask if I will be learning to code websites. Still others have never heard of UX at all.
So what is it? What will I be learning? What will I be doing when I’m done? UX is often described as a broad category of design that encompasses many fields; some skills of a visual designer, some skills of a researcher, some of a data scientist, of a developer, a project manager, a business strategist, a marketer, and more. One could say that User Experience Design involves the design of everything that a person experiences when interacting with a product, to the end of making that interaction effective for the desired function, as well as enjoyable for the user. This could include the experience of using a tangible device such as a phone or a toaster — though that might more appropriately fall into the hands of an industrial designer. With the rise of service design — a very specialized and emerging sub-field of UX involving the off-screen or analogue experience of a user — even the experience of staying at a hotel, or a night at the opera, could be in the hands of a User Experience Designer.
Before human-centered design, the way people interacted with early computers was not in our own language, but in the language of the computer — in programmable computer code.
However, most of what is associated with the work of a UX designer is the design of digital tools, on-screen experiences, virtual products. Apps. Websites. Computer widgets and gadgets. This is a new field of products, no more than thirty or forty years old, at the most. The first electric computers may have been built around World War II, but the way that people were interacting with those computers was not yet designed with usability and human enjoyment in mind. The way a user would interact with early computers was not in our own language, but in the language of the computer — in programmable computer code. The age of the computer ushered in a whole new set of thinking for how humans would interact with inanimate objects.
In the 1980s, the first Graphical User Interfaces were introduced, and finally we were interacting with computers in easy, familiar, and pleasurable ways. The idea of human-centered design entered the lexicon of computers. This is not to say that there was never any human-centered design before this point; almost everything humans have created before that time were design with the human at the center: chairs, buildings, weapons, political or economic systems, legal codes. But computers were a very new and very different kind of object that we were building. These new tools had the potential to hold, transfer, and manipulate more data than anything we’d built before. Computers could contain entire virtual worlds — and as any avid video gamer can tell you, even entire universes, personalities, and political systems that one can interact with.
Computers can even rival our own rational minds. The world’s foremost expert and champion in the ancient boardgames Go, a game infinitely more complex than chess, in which players must use abstract thought and adaptive pattern recognition in addition to pure logic, has beaten by a computer application called AlphaGo, in five out of five games. With this event, one could argue that computers we have build have even surpassed the human mind not only in speed of calculations and algorithmic computations, but also in predictive thinking and strategic learning.
With driverless cars, automated stock market trading software, and refrigerators that can tell when you’re low on milk and order more for you, the age of computers taking on some of the roles of human decision-making is already upon us. How we interact with computers, with digital applications, with information stored in zeros and ones is the job of the User Experience designer. While the engineer builds the hardware, the developer creates the software, the User Experience designer places humans at the center of the interaction, assuring and directing the experience toward ease of use, efficiency of desired tasks, and in enjoyable ways. In a sense, UX assures that the digital content of computers is designed to best serve humankind, rather than humankind to serve computers.
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Sources:
Koch, Christof. How the Computer Beat the Go Master. Scientific American, March 2016.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-the-computer-beat-the-go-master/
Gube, Jacob. What is User Experience Design? Overview, Tools, and Resources. Smashing Magazine, October 2010.
https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/10/what-is-user-experience-design-overview-tools-and-resources/
PC Plus. The mind-blowing possibilities of quantum computing. Techradar, January 2010.
http://www.techradar.com/news/computing/the-mind-blowing-possibilities-of-quantum-computing-663261
Lineback, Nathan. Graphical User Interface Timeline. ToastyTech, 2015.
http://toastytech.com/guis/guitimeline.html
Lazier, Meghan. What is Service Design? DesignLab, 2016.
http://trydesignlab.com/blog/what-is-service-design/
History: When was the first computer invented? Computer Hope, 2017.
http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000984.htm
