Taking a look at some of the job titles in the tech industry for interface designers today: User Interface Designer, User Experience Designer, Interaction Designer, Product Designer, AR product designer, etc. We soon realize that digital interface designers are everywhere. Job descriptions are usually a good place to get a taste of how these designers are shaping interfaces. Here is a screenshot of a typical job description of an interaction designer in a big tech company for an “Interaction Designer” at a junior level:
This is how the role of a junior interaction designer fits in the definition of interface design:
The inner system
Depending on the nature of big corporations today, the inner systems of one application are broken down into feature-level “products,” and assigned to different teams to work on the design, such as a navigation bar that exists in a social media application. In another sense, the inner system that a junior interface designer can comprehend and manipulate, is a small component isolated from the bigger system. You might argue this feature is more important than it sounds, however, we have to acknowledge there is only so much room for manipulation.
The outer system
We can easily identify phrases that hint at the root of human-centered design in the job description, with phrases like “integrate user feedback” and “experience.” Design in tech today has a mature system of research and design infrastructure to observe and reshape human behaviors. But, what if the interface is not a connecting point between machine and human, but between machine and machine? What if the design methods structured around human empathy play less of a role in facilitating design? Do designers have room to investigate the impact of design decisions on topics such as urban planning, sustainability, equity?
Activities that the interface is mediating
There are different stakeholders to be considered in the design process. The stakeholders that designers most frequently interact with in real-life are people who ship the products: product managers, engineers, and sometimes other people who pay to enjoy the service of the product. Yet, beyond getting the product to work and be “successful,” designers rarely get to think deeply about the activity the interface is mediating beyond information. As the scale of the product goes up, the more disconnected the designers are from the real user and real user scenario.
The rigid paradigm of interface design is bounded by the scale of reach, the structure of the workforce, and capitalist obsession with growth.
Keep in mind that this is the reality of an entry-level interface designer today. Unfortunately, it takes a long time for a designer to climb up the ladder to a leadership position within a corporation, where they have more decision-making power. The rigid paradigm of interface design is bounded by the scale of reach, the structure of the workforce, and capitalist obsession with growth.
However, there is also a very small group of research designers in both industry and academia, actively pushing the boundaries of interface design by incorporating systems thinking and challenging success metrics based on growth. For example, the accessibility and inclusion teams for some companies emphasize digital equity over growth, therefore forging a more diverse outer system that interfaces can interact with in the immediate future.
This is a chapter of the thought on “Design Beyond Interface”. If you are interested in reading more, you can find the table of content here.
I am an interaction designer. You can find me at https://mikibin.design/.
