Are we programing users?

or are we underestimating them out of fear?

I would like to look at the rising trend of user experience designers and why it is very important to work with UXers who are concentrated on designing a product that people can not only use, but one that they wonder where it was all their lives!

Simple and intelligent design, that people can’t live without

Digital designers are changing in many ways these last years. We are not only designing images and beautiful layouts, we are designing interaction, predicting user logic and overall experience. Since people are problem solvers by nature, technological interaction is in a sense a series of small problems that spark our interest, with an obvious goal in the end of the experience. (eg. online shop, navigation app, chat app.) The moment we learn how to do something new in the app, we feel this rush that we beat it! We beat the designer behind the problem we had to solve and it felt good. Not to the point where it gets frustrating, adding challenge to this sort of micro problems would result in a terrible user experience, as everyone expects for the experience to be smooth and not spending twenty minutes on finding out how to send out your message in a text app! However I can see another trend arise, which is most applications are not only taking users by the hand, but removing any sort of exploration when it comes to using an app or system. Everything is done in a very obvious and usable way. This is not as bad as I make it sound, however if designers are not careful, we might end up creating products that are so sterile when it comes to user experience that they become dull to the point where you use them out of necessity rather than pleasure.

“That’s isn’t that bad, is it Mike?” — you might ask? And this is a valid point, however I believe that having the small challenge of discovering how a system or application works is as important to the success of it as it being usable. There is a thrill of discovering some new function or shortcut while using the system to go about your business.

I want to give an odd example, one that is a bit detached to technology, however proves my point when it comes to experience in our daily lives. Synthetic meat has been created in labs and the first cultured burger beef patty was eaten at a demonstration for the press in London in August 2013. The reaction was, it tasted just like meat, however tasteless. The ting that was missing is the fat. Fat could not be grown with this meat, it was pure muscle. This small, usually avoided detail took away the flavor. We need to be careful when designing our products as to not take away the “flavor” away from the user.

Thank you for reading, come back for more if you liked it!

/Mike