User Experience Design — A little more than just design.
“No product is an island. A product is more than the product. It is a cohesive, integrated set of experiences. Think through all of the stages of a product or service — from initial intentions through final reflections, from first usage to help, service, and maintenance. Make them all work together seamlessly.”
- Don Norman, inventor of the term “User Experience”.
As stated by Don Norman, Experience Design is a broad field that encapsulates various ideas and paradigms. As the world moves from technology-driven innovation to human-driven innovation, organizations need to strategize the way in which they can make their products bring value to their customers in order to succeed. Due to the intangible nature of experiences, this field is often confused with other relatable fields like User Interface Design, Usability, Product Design etc. Therefore, in order to truly understand the nature of the term Experience Design, it is of utmost importance that we do not think of it in terms of technology or design of a device, but think of it as the meaningful experiences that have been created by the device.
Through this article, I try to put across what I think Experience Design is and how it has impacted me by presenting one example. I also talk about how Experience Design relates to fashion to show how UXD borrows various paradigms from fashion. Lastly, I talk about the impact of evolving technology and the future of UXD Design to give a broad idea of my view on Experience Design.
So what is ‘Experience Design’ after all?
I like to think about Experience Design (UX Design) as a process that takes place before designing a product. As experience designers, the focus of the design should be on the “why” should the user be using the product, rather than “how” should the user be using the product which is more closely related to usability, aesthetics and technology. To further explain what I mean, we can think of this way — experience design can be thought of as thinking about what is desired by the people and how the product impacts people, their decisions and their actions. Through this, we, as designers, can coordinate controllable interactions with the product in a way to reduce negative interactions. Although it is true that it wouldn’t be possible for designers to have complete control over the user experience as the latter half of the interaction depends on the user. But it is up to the designer to provide the user with simple, yet effective interactions that have a profound effect on the user’s mental and physical state for the interaction to be considered as a “good” experience. Thus, experience design goes beyond making the life of a user easy and delightful, to actually shaping the way the customer feels. UX Design is important as it helps to consider every single interaction, and coordinate them strategically to best convey the experience. Every touchpoint can be considered as a medium to produce the experience that the designers have designed the product for. It is also important to think about the fact that while designing experiences, it affects the whole business.
How has it helped me to reshape myself as a designer?
Over the past few months, through various literature reviews and hands on projects, I’ve been able to reshape the way I design experiences. One principle that I believe should be at the heart of every design that will fight the test of time is Language. Language — the words that we choose to communicate, can have a profound effect on the user’s experience. Words help to set a voice and tone that help extract the brand personality as well as shaping the design. Often neglected by designers with the usage of the famous ‘Lorem Ipsum’, language in a design has the ability to improve the user experiences leaving users happy and delighted. Having said that, measuring the user’s experience by working on the language can be a difficult task. Since language can be interpreted differently by different users, it is very important to know the target audience really well, in order to choose words to effectively communicate.
Will UXD turn into a field of fashion?
Another important topic of discussion when it comes to UX Design is to see how it relates to fashion. To me, these two disciplines are very similar. It is true that fashion definitely impacts UX Design in a both, positive and negative way. UX Design uses the fashion concept of recyclability to bring back long forgotten design paradigms (eg. skeuomorphism) and give it a new touch to make it feel modern. Fashion also negatively impacts UX design by introducing common fads such as having social media sharing buttons on applications — which greatly affect the user’s usability by creating excess visual noise and distractions. Therefore, we can safely conclude that that fashion has a profound effect on UX Design. I believe that this will cause UX design to be more standardized. Gone are the days when products were designed bound by technological restrictions. Moving forward, I strongly believe that user-centric design can help in the product being more successful through shaping experiences.
How does evolving technology affect UXD?
Any conversation about Experience Design would probably be incomplete without talking about the evolving technology. Just like fashion changes over time due to various factors, UX Design, too, changes over time. One of the major factors that fuel these changes are technological advancements. Technological innovations have completely reshaped, not only the user experience, but also the way in which design these experiences. In recent years, one of the biggest changes to the idea of UX has been through voice assistants or voice UIs. Devices like Alexa, Google Home, Siri etc, have introduced an ‘invisible’ interface where voice is the primary mode of interaction. While voice UI continues to grow, it is undeniably true that this sort of interaction is much different from traditional graphical interaction and therefore has majorly impacted the user experience. Therefore, as experience designers, in order to design and measure experiences related to voice, it is important to understand different aspects of vocal communication. Another field of technology that has recently seen a steep growth is Augmented Reality. Improved UX in immersive technologies can greatly affect real world experiences in various fields. Although, with such exciting technological advancements comes greater challenges. These new technologies could render useless if they do not meet the user’s needs and enhance the user’s experiences. For designers, having the desire to continue to learn, and to rethink and recreate mental models to shape human-machine interactions is the biggest challenge. Furthermore, it is also important to incorporate ethical and social aspects while designing experiences for these upcoming technologies.
The future is bright…
Lastly, I’d like to talk a little about the future of UX design. I feel like UX design is still in its nascent stages, and its growing popularity can be highly credited to the technological innovations. As more and more companies demonstrate the power of UX Design through their success stories, I think that it will continue to be adapted by many. This also relates to the difficulty of UX Design. Coupled with the ideas of emerging technologies, I believe that UX design will always be a difficult field to master as there are so many factors that need to be considered. Therefore, as designers, we need to be ready to receive feedback from the user, strategize, embrace emerging technologies and continue to adapt to the changing situations in order to design experiences that will lead to successful outcomes.
Thank you for reading, I hope you have a wonderful day!
References:
[1] Pine II, B. & Gilmore, James. (2014). A leader’s guide to innovation in the experience economy. Strategy and Leadership. 42. 10.1108/SL-09–2013–0073.
[2] https://uxdesign.cc/experience-design-a-new-discipline-e62db76d5ed1
[3] https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2018/01/universal-principles-ux-design/
[4] https://uxdesign.cc/ux-fashion-2dff96a983a8
[5] https://customerthink.com/impact-of-new-technology-on-user-experience-design-in-near -future/
[6] https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/ux-design
