The Buzzword Factor: Do We Misrepresent UX?
Are online UX communities misrepresenting UX? Are they portraying an image that isn’t accurate and can cause a great deal of confusion for new designers?
The way we use digital products (apps & websites) today is seemingly an ode to some age-old axioms from an obscure digital source that nobody really knows of & nobody can really lay claim to. When you look at modern UI/UX trends & practices on websites like Dribbble and Behance, the way we place our buttons, the way we choose our colour palettes, how we construct our font hierarchy, and how we build our design systems, it almost seems as if some magical talebearer revealed themselves to us one day and highlighted these “golden” rules of digital product design for us designers to follow.
That’s not exactly where the tale of UI & UX originates from, though. Experienced product designers who’ve kept in touch with the field’s changing dynamics and volatility will be the first ones to narrate to you tales of how different certain design trends used to be, back in the day.
But no matter what the opacity of your drop shadow may be, no matter how rounded your listing cards are, and no matter how palatable your colour scheme is, there’s one fundamental rule to design that hasn’t changed & won’t ever change: how usable is your product? Is it easy to use? Can I understand it with minimal fuss? Is it solving a problem for me? Are there alternatives that help me better? Is there some value in using this product?
We’ve pondered over the importance of these questions for years now. There are designers out there who will post something on LinkedIn along the lines of how usability is important, while also posting two very similar, non-consequentialist snapshots of their design and asking the community to rate one over the other. Understandably so, UX has become the biggest buzzword in our community, with “empathy” being a close second!
Are We Fairly Portraying UX?
In the common hysteria of being as buzz-word friendly as possible, there’s a lot that we collectively misrepresent under the umbrella-banner of being “empathetic” to our users’ needs. There’s been a marked increase in the number of people mistaking and convoluting ever-changing UI trends for robust, tried-and-tested UX principles in online design communities and social platforms.
When I was just entering the field, it seemed to me that there was an overall “empathy at any cost” attitude all across the UX spectrum, and that there was a substantial disconnect between this ideology and the way most design teams operate and the way business requirements are framed from time to time.
How do we handle volatile business requirements?
The idea that all of our business requirements can be analysed to fit the mold of one of a few UX problems defined in something along the lines of a beginner UX bootcamp is almost absurd. Sometimes, you do face problems that aren’t along the lines of building a restaurant app for a very apparent, well-defined user. Sometimes, we don’t know who the likely users of a particular feature or module will be, yet we still have to design it. And sometimes, the technical constraints of our products mean that we end up building a very small, compartmentalised part of a larger digital infrastructure.
Defining UX as a science
The issue then becomes, how do we move away from the idea that all we need to be successful UX designers is a touch of empathy when in reality, we need so much more? After all, no matter how we define it, UX is a science. We wouldn’t expect Physicists to solve mathematical equations without a rigorous understanding of mathematics, right? Then why do we expect UX designers to magically come to terms with hundreds of different UX scenarios with just the “tool” that empathy is, if it can even be quantified in that regard.
Again, this is not a post claiming that empathetic design isn’t important. It absolutely is. No matter how we put it, a strong understanding of our user’s needs & motivations does help out when designing a product. However, I do wish to bring attention to the popular reductionism that UX is going through in our online UX communities. The narrative that understanding the fundamentals of UX becomes a breeze if the designer is willing to be empathetic is costing organisations time & money as we speak.
UX is slowly being reduced from a science to a feeling, when it deserved to be treated like the complex concept it is. It involves data, statistics, feelings, emotions, UI, foggy scenarios, and grey areas that can’t be navigated only with buzzwords. This is where rigorous product management needs to step in and supplement our design knowledge in both agile & non-agile environments.
The Importance Of Designing With Stats & Analytics
As our field continues to saturate, it’s very easy to fall into the alluring trap of assumption. As we keep designing interface after interface, we sometimes tend to place much less emphasis on cold, hard, user statistics than we should. Any designer can design an interface. A good Product Designer has to account for the number of people that use a feature, what they use it for, how long they’ve been using it, and how exactly these users can be described and categorised.
The data-driven mindset
Instead of just attempting to beautify an app or website, the narrative needs to shift more towards how there are certain KPIs that the app/website needs to display and how good design can help achieve those targets. For instance, a Product Manager and Designer working together may take a rigorous look at a property listing module for a real estate app and find that there’s a lack of leads being generated from the property listing. Together, they analyse the data and come up with a solution. They implement the solution and it leads to a direct 150% increase in the number of leads being generated from the listing page. This is the importance of creating a good, usable, and useful experience for both the users and the company involved. One that creates value based on an in-depth analysis of what users are looking for and how to help them get there as easily as possible. The general belief that being a good designer alone will help you rise to the top of your field is no longer true, a good UI/UX designer needs to have a data-driven, dynamic skillset.
Conclusion
The marketability of UX is growing day by day. Not only is usability an increasingly important issue for product companies and product owners, there’s another concept they need to account for in our ever-changing digital age: The Pleasure Factor (Bi, W., Lyu, Y., Cao, J. and Lin, R., 2021).
Modern companies need their apps to not only be very easy to use, but also to tap into some ambit of human psychology and provide some degree of pleasure to their users (think Tiktok with short videos that fuel our minds with dopamine and facilitate our decreasing attention spans, or Facebook that shows us notification prompts we have to tap & view to make the “itch” go away, or even the gamification of UX as a valid pleasure factor mechanism).
Point being, UX has changed and is changing quicker than ever before while also staying within a religiously defined circle of usability practices that have worked and continue to work for our users. But if we keep trying to fit UX in a box that it has grown beyond, we risk misappropriating the most vital and under-appreciated segments of our field.
Point being, UX has changed and is changing quicker than ever before while also staying within a religiously defined circle of usability practices that have worked and continue to work for our users. But if we keep trying to fit UX in a box that it has grown beyond, we risk misappropriating the most vital and under-appreciated segments of our field.
References
- Bi, W., Lyu, Y., Cao, J. and Lin, R., 2021. From Usability to Pleasure: A Case Study of Difference in Users’ Preference. Engineering, 13(8), pp.448–462.
- Mirnig, A.G., Meschtscherjakov, A., Wurhofer, D., Meneweger, T. and Tscheligi, M., 2015, April. A formal analysis of the ISO 9241–210 definition of user experience. In Proceedings of the 33rd annual ACM conference extended abstracts on human factors in computing systems (pp. 437–450).
