Happy twenty twenty! We hope you all had a good start to the new year!
Although it's almost the middle of January, the question remains: What's coming in the new year? Which topics and questions will (continue to) occupy us as user experience designers this year? We have put together a selection of six (meta) topics that are close to our hearts and that we will (continue to) work on. Have fun!
- Inclusion and diversity in design
- User research
- Thinking along with non-user personas/served personas
- Ethical design - and the Valley mantra of "move fast and break things" should continue to be scrutinised very critically
- Design for digital "wellbeing" - or: Behaviourism by design ad
- Polite Design / Polite Design
Inclusion and diversity in design
It was once thought that the internet and new technologies would make society more open, more transparent and more equal. Well, we probably took a wrong turn somewhere. It is often the established mechanisms that cement social inequality and keep outdated stereotypes alive. For example sometimes gender role-specific stereotypes are also programmed into the technology (here Wozniak's tweet about it https://twitter.com/stevewoz/status/1193330241478901760) which can lead to the perpetuation of traditional roles. Among other things, this also manifests itself in the eternally female (language) assistant: always friendly, always serving - but still a bit ... er yes incompetent and please just not too *pushy* -" She even smiles away insinuating remarks with a meaningless smile. How practical! Therefore, the same still applies: We need to include marginalised groups and also (contextual) minorities in our design process to break this cycle.
By the way, here are three great books that deal with the topic in the broadest sense, maybe you have more tips? Feel free to send them over ðŸ™'
Which leads us directly to user research.
User research
Does anyone remember the theme music from the German Sesame Street? Who, how what; why, why why - those who don't ask remain stupid. Very clever, we think - should be the theme song of every project! But, here too: In our design processes, user research - from evaluative methods such as usability tests or competitor analyses to basic and explorative user research - is unfortunately still too often neglected. No time, no money, above all it has to be done quickly. Yet it should be integrated into our processes as a matter of course - because: UX-U = X. Yes, that's exactly what the Nielsen Norman Groupfrom whom we stole this clever formula (which gets to the heart of the matter). After all, user research is a very powerful tool for driving positive change and remaining competitive. The time you invest here definitely pays off, it can even save a lot of time and money.
Also interesting:
Thinking along with non-user personas/served personas
"They are not users of the product, but they are directly affected by the use of the product " Alan Cooper wrote very wisely a long time ago in his classic book "About Face" at Served personas to describe. It is important to pay more attention to this, especially in the future: Many services and design decisions affect our immediate environment and often involve people who do not use the service or product at all - with the urban trends that are currently emerging, such as e-mobility, this means keeping wheelchair users or people with pushchairs with whom you share the pavement in mind; with new driving services, consider the general traffic load in city centres or, as another example: with native smartphone apps that access the phone's contacts, consider the people in the contacts who do not necessarily want to end up in your database.
A not so distant relative to this is the following topic:
Ethical design - and the Valley mantra of "move fast and break things" should continue to be scrutinised very critically
2018 was Elaine Herzberg was run over by a self-driving car during a test of these cars and died. After the crash of two Boeing 737 MAX 8 Machines in quick succession must remain on the ground until further notice.
This is not about a moral dilemma like the trolley problem, which we will not solve in the digital context either. This is about responsibility and Human error by design, which apparently withstands many decision-making processes. We cannot simply shift responsibility onto the machines, pilots or drivers of self-driving vehicles when the corporate culture is being "Disruption", Innovation, Profit and Speed about security. We think so: Slow down and fix things. It is therefore important to create awareness of how and why such mistakes happen and then consider how they can be minimised.
This also leads us to....
Design for digital "wellbeing" - or: Behaviourism by design adé!
I experienced something similar myself a few years ago, and it actually gave me a bit of a fright: Somewhere on an advertising banner, a red dot appeared out of nowhere, similar to the one that appears as soon as you receive a notification on Facebook."Oops, a message, quickly check what's new", my brain reported madly (there was no message!).
By the way has shown that dopamine (a neurotransmitter often referred to in everyday life as the "happiness hormone") is released during notifications. This means that we - i.e. our reward centre in the brain - react like Pavlov's dog to a bell - not literally drooling, but approximately - physically to a red dot as a triggering stimulus that we have continuously learned. This is called engagement in business slang, among other things, and is best described as infinite- In other words, to keep the users in line, as the saying goes, or as one could also say: "Design for Business" - and that means business only. Yes - infinite scrolling is definitely part of it.
And this is precisely the challenge that we as "user experience designers" are confronted with time and again: Who are we actually designing for? The "business" or the users? To do this, you have to realise that Business goals often diverge widely from user goals. And that's not just an ethical issue - it's also a trust issue, which in turn can have a huge impact on the business goals you want to achieve - and negative ones at that, but that's a whole separate, bigger issue, as you can read here to some extent.
The key question that remains is: How do we bring the required business and user goals together in such a way that it is ethically justifiable and we thus remain with human-centred design, which we as (user) experience designers are supposedly so committed to?
And last but not least - not to be sneezed at either:
Polite Design / Polite Design
Grouchy and stroppy service staff, rude, pushy or silent salespeople - these are all examples that seem very absurd and unacceptable to us in "real" life - and yet over there, in the digital world, this behaviour often prevails: Accounts that you can't delete and over which you have no control, pop-ups that appear every two seconds and ask us twenty times if we want to sign up for the newsletter, confusing error messages that don't help us and so on and so forth. In other words: there is often still definitely no self-evident "Human/user first approach".
User-centred design or user experience design is therefore - if it is considered necessary at all - still often simply seen as a topping on an existing product. Here too, our mission continues to be to change this.
