Unlearning UX
You see what I want you to see,
You feel how I want you to feel,
You know as much as I want you to know,
You shall behave as I direct you to behave,
I am no god, I am an experience designer
These are lines that are very real and empowering, They paint a picture in your head for the godlike power of an experience designer. With this established, think of it. When god created the world, (just bear with me for this bit) did he create only good? If he wished, he would only create good but he apparently didn’t. He created a balance of good and evil that play a dramatic contrast in each of our lives. We can take this learning from god.
While we were taught about good and bad experiences, we selectively learned only about good and not the bad. Or we chose sides and deemed the bad as bad. But now i ask you this, is bad really bad or is bad a way of control?
Consider another example.
Friction as a force is responsible for a ton of wear and tear between objects, the reason why your clothes age and loose texture, the reason for you getting hurt as a child when you fell off your bicycle, the force that is the single cause for the need for lubrication. But imagine life without it. You would take birth and will remain at the same point through your life. And that’s just a start of imagining, given you are born at all, in a frictionless world. Which also has a slim chance to begin with.
Gravity, a force that prevents you from flying is also a force that holds the oxygen atoms, without which life is unimaginable, close to the surface of the earth. To sum it up, it’s a similar balance of yin and yang. Its balance and harmony between the good and the bad.
However, when we sit on our designer’s chair and wear our god hat, use our godly powers to creat an experience for our users, we seldom think about this balance. Now it’s very pure to only qualify what we deem as good experience and discard the rest. But i would want you to halt and introspect, at that thought.
What I will share next is no thought, but a mindset. A mindset that separates individuals who design screens and individuals who think everything in terms of design, the latter is the virtue.
Everything is a nail when all you have is a hammer.
So you’ve learned that a perfect nail is one that does not stick out of the furniture wood, no hard edges that would act as shrapnel and sits perfectly flush in the surface of the wood. While the theory stands true for furniture, it fails to explore the possibilities or potential of a nail. Wouldn’t you need the nail to stick out a little when you are hanging a frame to a wall?
This is very similar to our learnings of good experience, amongst other phenomenon.
You see, good and bad, smooth and rough, easy and complicated, fast and slow, all these are examples of the nail, of which we have only explored one side and hold a bias towards.
What i ask, is to think of them as tools at your disposal.
Good experience is not the goal
Good and bad experiences are mere tools, of which you need to decide, which is to be used in a particular situation. Now, reconsider everything you’ve learned about experience, all things which were goals are actually tools or weapons in your arsenal. And hammering every nail flush, is not the best possibility always.
