UX Design & political incorrectness
The hatefulness of the design fraternity towards UX Designers has long been out of the Davy Jones locker and I don’t believe there is any point being defensive about it anymore. But as we seldom do, we can ask why. In the Hogwarts schools of Design, one can often find faculties portraying UX Design as a fancy apartment building meant for only one thing- ‘Accommodate a large crowd with alluringly little cost’. “You can choose to be creative or become a UX designer and pay your study loan back.” the words from one of my faculties still give me the screaming abdabs and often hint me at reconsidering my life choices. But what have the UX Designers done to deserve this scorn? Well, a disclaimer- one of the answers may be really thorny without a rosy result.
“The term ‘designer’ was first used in this sense in America. It does not refer to an industrial designer, who designs machines or mechanical parts, workshops, or other specialized buildings. He is, in fact, a design engineer, and if he has a motor scooter on the drawing board, he does not give a great deal of importance to the aesthetic side of things, or at the most, he applies a personal idea of what a motor scooter ought to look like. I once asked an engineer who had designed a motor scooter why he had chosen a particular color, and he said: because it was the cheapest.”
-Bruno Munari, Design as Art.
This is exactly the kind of predicament the field of UX design is facing right now. Still, in its early stage, very few of the contributors to the field have been observed stepping out of the vicious boundary of ‘user requirements’ (don’t kill me for using that adjective) and tried creating a digital experience that could be considered Poetic. On the flip side, designers conforming to other disciplines like Industrial or Visual Communication Design have witnessed a creamy evolution of the innovations from adherence to manufacturing constraints to reshaping them. They have created products that have personalities, archetypes, products reflecting far more complex emotions than delightful, motivating, or learnable (common emotional goals in UX design) and sometimes products that exude emotions that have not yet been termed in English! Juicy Salif by Philippe Starck and the poster for Final destination 5.
One of my friends in a recent conversation told me, “UX Design is boring because it has no story.” I do completely agree with that. A culture is made up of stories and ‘Al could now know the location of his stay on his Airbnb app’ is hardly a story. Without a plot twist, tragedy, or the death of a superhero, a story becomes ‘predictable’, which quite ironically is considered one of the attributes of a “Good UX Design”. Ultimately, digital experiences become mundane, usable copies of Mr. Meeseeks running the show. Quite not sure if it is the designerly way of mitigating the existential threats of artificial intelligence.
“̶A̶ ̶g̶o̶o̶d̶ ̶U̶X̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶a̶ ̶p̶o̶l̶i̶t̶i̶c̶a̶l̶l̶y̶ ̶c̶o̶r̶r̶e̶c̶t̶ ̶(̶d̶e̶a̶d̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶s̶a̶f̶e̶)̶ ̶U̶X̶.”̶ Ever heard of Frankenstein’s monster?
I’m not at all ruling out the importance of usability of the interfaces; that would be considered blasphemy. A golden blunt knife is a showpiece (just like most of the curated websites on muzli). But the term, ‘user requirements’ has been on the driver’s seat for far too long. It’s time to let the poetic instincts ignite the digital engine. It’s time to mint information architectures which could make the user laugh, feel disgusted, or in fact jealous when needed. It’s time to put an end to the safe journey.
“That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”
-Friedrich Nietzsche
To be honest, it’s not at all a moonshot. Airbnb has already done something quite similar when the creative team decided to eliminate the profile picture from booking experience in an attempt to reduce racism on the platform. Now, this is a really ‘on thin ice’ decision. Because while some applaud this step with the rationale, “A person is not what her face looks like; thus it’s a good attempt for manipulating racial judgments”, others (including me) believe that our face is a crucial representation of our identity. And if the company decides to hide it because it may influence the decision of a white host, it is indirectly batting for extremism for making money. However, the debate is hardly the point. The process Airbnb followed to reach the conclusion is a story worth listening to and the result is a bold digital experience open for controversy. There are other such examples for sure, but unfortunately, these are like needles in the hay; thanks to our flawed perception of ‘stories’ which are coded not told.
