How do we fix this?
I was coming back home with my brand new Spotify premium app delighting my ears, totally isolated of what was surrounding me.
Suddenly I remembered the first time I had a Walkman, I think it was one of the best days of my life. Thanks to it I could hear the music I like and felt in my own world.
Then I though in my other favourite invention: the text message. It’s wonderful, isn’t it? you don’t have to make a call or pick up the phone anymore, you don’t have to talk to people.
Then Internet appeared and people like me found the perfect place to chat to other people without being seen and more important: it was a way to leave the real world. I wonder if the name “Netscape” has any relation with that concept.
So my top 3 inventions are:
• The walkman,
• the text message,
• the internet.
When I thought about it freaked me out. As an UX, it worries me to build a product for people that are not total nerds like me, and transforms their social behaviour into anti-social behaviour. So, I have a crisis.
Most of the UX articles I‘ve read recently are about “not wasting the users time”.
Ok, Let me tell a story.
My first UX lesson and I didn’t even know it then.
Do you know some women in Sahara have to walk around 14 kms to get water?
Once upon a time I had the opportunity to work for a charity organisation.
After filling hundreds of papers to get fundings to build a tunnel in Sahara, my team were really excited to go there and give some good news to those women.
When they tell them, those women faces turned in a way we weren’t expecting at all.
They explained:
“The hours walking with our best friends going all together to get some water without men company was the best part of the day.”
They truly enjoyed doing this. What would they do with this time from now on? Being in the camp with their men and children was not very exciting for them.
We never built the tunnel. Instead, we will be waiting for these women to ask for it.
What I learnt :
• We forgot to ask them if they wanted something many other people need.
• So, not all users want the same.
• Check what is really important from the human perspective, not only for its comfortability.
Are we still human beings? Or have we evolved in something new?
Are we isolating users giving them absolutely everything? It’s supposed we were here to make their lives easier and allow people to go home earlier but it seems people spend more and more time in front of a computer every day.
Do you remember last time you used your brain to recall something instead of googling it or asking Siri?
Neither do I.
The worse thing is sometimes we don’t even check if this information is correct.
My hope is that soon enough will appear a new job type related to preserve the “humanity” on web sites.
But, hold on a second: this is UX!!!!!
Ok, let’s back to 1929 economic crisis.
Many people think the key point to resolve the crisis was the beginning of WW2, but they were some other benefits that the Great Depression brought to some people and that later on were applied to restore the economy. Like for example…
…Cutting the working hours!
Sounds crazy but in that way people were finishing at work earlier and they could feel happier spending time out doing stuff like dating, going to the cinema, for dinner and other things that implies spending money and — surprise! — increases the economy.
In the same way, the user experience could be used with similar purposes. The problem is that everything is so easy online that users don’t need to go out to do shopping, going to the cinema, or… don’t know… dating?
I saw this on Facebook last 14th of February:
Saint Valentine’s day 2017.
For some of us, no comments are needed, right?
So, should we cut the internet hours to resolve the present crisis like the working hours in 1929??
I posted this illustration above on Facebook a few weeks ago. Someone commented:
I would buy the internet hours of someone else.
I can perfectly imaging why. Going out is becoming extremely expensive, (at least in London), I can have everything I want with my computer, why I would go out and spend time and money with other humans.
Also, technology is every day better, you can consume much more content than 5 years ago without having a headache. For example, fonts are much readable on screen, responsive design helps to keep going with internet any place you go, etc.
Can I find something negative? Of course: Social Networks are becoming since a couple of years ago specially aggressive. In my case, I cannot even talk in a rude way to Siri but there are many people they don’t have a human being in front of them very often and the consequence is that they are forgetting that we still have feelings behind those windows. If we hide, this people become more aggressive, that’s why personally I rather prefer to show my shyness and vulnerability than answering rude comments with more rude comments.
But , to get to the point: how do we fix this?
