User experience and user interface is simply ancient
Specialization and technologization in user engagement ironically creates an unengaged stifled environment
Even during the Middle Ages, there was genuine concern with user experience and interaction. Governments, churches and even fishmongers relied on a complicated hybrid language of text, pictograms and color to “share data” amongst its mostly illiterate users. As illiteracy waned towards the end of the 14th-century, the intersection of user experience and interface — user engagement — saw greater experimentation with design and representation of text and picture. Icons morphed into abstractions, narratives transitioned in prose laden with textuality and art expanded into new dimensions; there was more “data” available to readers than ever before.
Information became an art.To further demonstrate the prowess of medieval new media pioneers in the 15th-century, Erik Kwakkel, medieval book historian at Leiden University, shares this:
In medieval times, books were not just made by monks. By the thirteenth century commercial scribes had become the go-to people for a book. To attract clients, the professionals running these “bookstores” made advertisement sheets, like this one. They were usually put on display outside the shop’s entrance: clients looked at the samples and choose a letter type for the book they were about to order. This one (pictured above) is from the shop of Herman Strepel in Münster, Germany, and dates from c. 1447. Herman did an excellent marketing job because he wrote the names of the letter types in gold next to the samples.
Perhaps adding further injury to 21st-century digital agencies, “immersive” content and a structural approach to user interface was well in practice before the first light-bulb flickered on. While this is not a discussion of the divides between high-art and low-art, the delineation between art and design or communication and engagement is important to consider.
At its most basic reduction, user experience and interface as a framework for the transmission of information has been in practice for nearly 40,000 years. One of the first known examples of humans creating visual information clearly demonstrates critical thought about presentation and interaction. Not only were the walls scraped and smoothed at Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave to achieve a more uniform color and surface, they were etched to give them greater visual depth and impact. One of the first human artists seems to have been a user experience designer as well. But even our friend in France was bested by another; the journal Science reports an artists’ workshop in South Africa producing colored pigments 100,000 years ago.
Perhaps that’s what is most troubling about consumable nature of mass audience data. Unlike formal art housed in temples of cultural religiosity protected from the effects of time, “objets de design” are fleeting, disposable by nature and created for immediacy. Advertising, as it turns out, was just as brutal and deep in ancient Pompeii as it is now. Slanderous political campaigns? Yes. Sports sponsorships? Yes. Product branding? Yes.
In fact, the walls of Pompeii acted as a modern day Twitter and Foursquare as graffiti wasn’t necessarily as random as it is today. Perhaps even more interesting was that select wall space on the city’s most prominent structures was highly prized and relatively controlled. It’s known that the graffiti was an industry with wealthy patrons hiring painters and poets — a possibility exist that their might have been actual agencies dedicated to the practice. And much like the conversations we have today about removing negative comments from our own social networks, business owners then may have preferred to leave them be. “Two friends were here. While they were, they had bad service in every way from a guy named Epaphroditus. They threw him out and spent 105 and half sestertii most agreeably on whores,” scribbled on a wall of an inn in Herculaneum maybe have been one of the world’s first Yelp reviews.
Looking outside of the history of the West, perhaps the most proficient interface and experience designers are found in Africa. The Metropolitan Museum’s Art of Africa Resource For Educators provides a introductory understanding of African art. Their art, unlike European art, is an exercise of process rather than idea. The power and significance is increased through interaction — objects like nkondi are thought to have the power to hunt witches increased by the number of nails driven into the statue while bateke had specially designed cavities to be filled with organic matter to increase their spiritual power. African art is essentially an interface, designed by user and craftsperson, for a desired spiritual experience.
The struggles of interface and experience designers has always been a question of relevance. “In part, this research has exposed the immaturity of the UX field. For all the growth, interest, and importance surrounding user-centered ideas and practices, our professional milieu is still a disorderly jungle. The fundamental issue is that we’re growing outward faster than we’re firming things up inward, and new concepts enter the conversation before old ones have been fully established, methodized, and universalized,” Jonathon Anderson and Didus write in the article “Who are we and what are we doing?” for UX Magazine.
“Human perversity, then, makes divisions of that which by nature is one and simple, and in attempting to obtain part of something which has no parts, succeeds in getting neither the part- which is nothing- nor the whole, which they are not interested in.” ― Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy
User interface patents now make up 2% of total design patents averaging about 500 patents a year. But the concept of applying design patents to interaction is dangerously authoritarian — while protecting the work of designers, it has the implication that innate human behaviors belong to someone else. Even then, design patents just force more effort and resources into reinventing the wheel rather than creating applications for the wheel.
The allure of user interface and experience was the approach of bringing in ideas and reimagining products from user-centric perspective. “Design is really an act of communication, which means having a deep understanding of the person with whom the designer is communicating,” writes Donald Norman in The Design of Everyday Things. Clearly, though, designers aren’t listening to users as close to 600,000 of Apple’s 900,000 applications in the App Store being zombies. This makes defining success in the digital product market a bit murky about whether failure in products lies with designer or developer.
Applications with functional deficiencies will not be saved by interface or experience design. If we consider the market cap to be the sum of all available free hours of all internet and digital content users, any new product or service introduced is simply competing for time with growth in user based expected to be less than 2% annually. Outside of video and television, there’s already some recent discussion that the market online is already saturated by Facebook alone.
Consider the uproar caused by the Facebook redesigns, the backpedaling on Windows 8 Metro interface and even Apple’s audio port change wasn’t safe from backlash.
In an ironic twist, interface and experience design amongst other design principals has become design for design’s sake. If user engagement is suppose to bring outside perspective about how users interact with products, consider this discussion on entering the field of user interface and experience from Interactive Design Association. Design is about negotiation, experimentation and open-mindedness— unless you’re digital designer.
