What La La Land Tells Us About The Future Of UX.
For the last 10 years user experience has dominated design thinking.
Retailers, publishers, service providers and designers are obsessed with putting their users at the heart of what they do. We have a myriad of tools to produce heat-maps, stats, replays and user surveys to profile our customers. In today’s age no excuse for bad UX. So why do we still have bad experiences?
Don’t get me wrong. Research is important and the desire to understand human behaviour is a vital trait to success in the personalised economy.
However while watching the new Damien Chazelle film La La Land I was inspired by Seb’s response to Mia’s hesitation to put on her own play because nobody will turn up. He simply tells her ‘f**k them!’
Mia’s play is written intuitively, no focus groups, no A/B testing, no carefully written personas or scenarios. It’s written from the heart. While I agree this is a fictional storyline not based on reality, it got me thinking.
How much market testing did La La Land go through? The musical movie industry in an unpredictable one. For every Chicago ($170 million in the US) theres a Nine ($20 million). So you would think La La Land would have been carefully researched to really deliver what the audience wants. But I get the feeling that like Mia’s play, this film came from the heart.
To help the movies saleability Damien Chazelle could have got some big stars to write the music. Instead he got his old roomate Justin Hurwitz to write the score. The decision to shoot with 35mm Cinemascope film to give it an authentic look and feel (and hassle during filming) could have been done digitally.
The emotional sensitivity, the gorgeous jazz music, the seemingly effortless but very hard to do one take set pieces. These things are not trendy right now. Damien is dragging us into his awesome vision. He is not asking us ‘is this good?’ he’s telling us its good.
As a creative professional I think we are at risk of loosing this intuitive sense of good and bad. Ive seen so many projects fail because of watered down vision. Because something didn’t test well. Or because everything needs to be above the fold. Or because red sells well, lets make it red. Seb where were you then!
UX is a vital and necessary tool. Especially when our systems become more and more complex. However It’s wrong to think that research and data is the magic bullet that will unlock truly engaging design and content. Creating something special with vision and purpose still requires a human intuitive touch.
Unfortunately we can’t all be creative genius’ like Damien Chazelle. But what if there is a way to massively improve our UX tools set. We need to stop pushing our users away and replacing them with data. We need to start pulling our users closer to capture true human behaviour on an empathic level. To see what our users see and feel. The next step in UX could be around the corner.
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