I feel really guilty because I’ve been neglecting this blog about interactions, especially when almost everything I do for a living involves designing for interactions.
Instead, I find myself spending more and more time blogging about careers, which in a way doesn’t have anything to do with interaction. Except for one thing – the human condition.
The real kick behind designing any interaction is the effect you get when a human being interfaces with it. Whether it’s good or bad – it’s one of those things that turns me on like nothing else – seeing someone actually interact with a dumb thing you actually built and expressing an emotional response from it.
But when I go out and read all the blogs that talk about user experience, interaction design, usability, bla bla bla… so much of it is so arcane that my eyes start focusing beyond the screen into emptiness and my mind begins to chant mindless syllables.
UX is losing its Touchy Feely
What ever happened to all that user magic that Norman used to talk about? The stuff where he’d complain about the affordances of door handles being one way and not the other and talking about how people would get confused and how we ought to design to love and make people feel nice and fuzzy inside. What ever happened to that?
Now, the only thing people end up talking about are new things that were invented two hours ago – Experience Themes? Who writes a blog post titled so arcanely these days? I thought we were much better at copy than a lot of other people.
And look at how much time went into creating this user journey diagram. It’s pretty, but I don’t know what in the world it’s saying. I showed this to some colleagues of mine (folks who actually do “get” UX common sense) and they too couldn’t make head or tail of it. And this came up tops on Google. :-/
No One Understands Us Outside of Us
Why can’t we just stick to simple terms and communicate things clearly and simply? Do our customers, bosses, users, readers, colleagues and friends really know what we mean by all these words we use? It’s funny how we spend most of our time building for these people, but talk in a language that doesn’t make sense to them.
Are we as designers supposed to build things that way – where we act as folks who fix things and have our own codes of conduct, and can never have normal conversations with the people we solve problems for?
UX Designers aren’t really Designers if they’re more Geek than Human
We compare ourselves with engineers and say we’re more user friendly, but there’s no doubt that every UX person I know is a geek in their own way. They just don’t do code, that’s all.
I prefer a person who does code, because it’s one level below the abstraction layer (towards the technology, not away from it). You can’t have a web UX designer without a programmer. The programmer gets to call the shots, because he actually builds the stuff that makes it work. UX designers ought to pay some respect to the engineering community who built the thing in the first place.
A UX person only has my approval only if they really do care for other human beings, and tell me about their stories. Don’t talk to me about methods or crazy terms and phrases, because I can toss that out and use something else that works. Just because engineers have fancy names doesn’t mean UX designers need them too.
Speak English?
Engineers need fancy names because computers can’t speak for themselves. UX designers already have a language they can use that’s already widely available, is extremely portable, and is fairly universal – it’s called English. They don’t need to invent new words to describe the things they do, which by the way, was copied and stolen from other disciplines like psychology, sociology, marketing, management, etc.
To be fair, I’ve had my share of that design-speak. But I’ve gain nothing except credit from other fellow designers who’ve done the same.
If designers can focus on explaining and speaking out what really represents people who use technologies, it would be a lot better for everyone… rather than inventing new languages to use between themselves.
