One of the main contaminating ideas in the discipline of user-interface design is the idea of “user experience”. I mention this with some embarrassment, having been Director of User Experience in the past, run (and continue to run) workshops on User Experience, and worked as a User Experience practitioner for many years. But the elephant in the room was always that the concept never really made any sense, and was not the right way to describe what we were really after—something whose importance is not in question.
To put it simply, what matters is purpose, not experience. Who cares about experience if one’s purposes are not accomplished? Achieve the user’s purposes (which include all the desired qualities of great usability, aesthetic appeal, and inter-personal relationship qualities as criteria for satisfying those purposes), and the experience will take care of itself. The triumph of experience over purpose is principally the work of the media and marketing industries, who seized UI design from the grimy hands of the engineers who had been making unusable software for decades. But this solution was almost as bad as the ailment it was meant to cure, because it greased the rails for a takeover of the disciplines of software design and UI design by the marketing industry, aided an abetted by advertising as the chief use of the web in its early commercial years and arguably still today (as a percentage). The marketing industry’s preference (maybe forced on it by the quality of the products they have to market) for stimulating feelings over satisfying user’s genuine purposes has had and continues to have a deeply negative affect on the quality of software, especially online software. Great for marketing, but not necessarily for software product-development.
To put things back the way they should be, user experience should be properly understood as a species of communication quality, founded on Communication Theory and the advanced disciplines that describe who to analyze, assess, and how to design a communication system: General Systems Theory, Cybernetics, Information Theory, and others. Not advertising, media production, or graphics design—although they have their role to play. The foundation of communication quality is clarity about purpose, which is to be found right in the very heart of the mathematical definition of information, as it was formulated from Shannon’s work by Gregory Bateson (to paraphrase):
Information is encoded news of a difference that makes a difference to the sender relative to some purpose, with feedback loop from the recipient to the sender.
#1 by L on February 16, 2010 - 10:28 pm
Its great that you choose to question user experience, usability and achieving purpose. The timing is right. I see alot of interfaces around me which have the issues you point out.
But I like to think the answer doesnt end in saying that user experience doesn’t matter. You see, what your implying indirectly by that statement is : “Work at office without drinking coffee or socializing with your friends”, “Watch a movie without eating popcorn or cola”, “Spend your whole life running the race: get the car, the house, the bank balance without pausing to smell the flowers or notice the colors of the sky at sunset”.
That said, I think the real problem lies in territorializing areas of work. The designer, developer, usability expert, marketing guy pretending their an authority on a subject and not questioning and challenging themselves. Lines must blurr for people need to build a cohesive wholesome product. When that happens you can almost feel the team synergy when your using the interface. Trust me!
Have a good day!
#2 by Jess McMullin on February 17, 2010 - 11:08 am
Simon,
I might be misreading you here, but you seem to conflate the idea of user experience practice with creating experiences for experience sake. Maybe that exists in marketing-land (and certainly exists in the Pine & Gilmore experience economy model of experience-as-performance). But it’s a dangerous perspective if it’s then used to diminish real UX work in other places – work that is about helping people achieve their purposes.
In the ux community* that I’m part of, the goals of UX practice aren’t to create “experiences”, they are to enable “good experiences”, as determined by the people having the experience made possible by your product or service. That includes things like goal completion (or purpose, as you’ve described here).
Given that people’s goals and activities are at the heart of ux deliverables like personas and Indi Young style mental models, and entire ux-related practices like service design, I’m curious where you get this ux practice = disneyfied experience perspective.
And as someone with a psych degree, I’m not sure I’d look to information science over social science for understanding people’s purposes. UX practice has embraced social science for exactly that reason.
If you think UX is only graphic designers and advertising folks, you’re missing out on this diversity of disciplines (for a sample, see http://www.interactionary.com/files/disciplines_radial.gif ). And while information science isn’t in that diagram, it’s part of the community too (see ASIS&T).
I have my own frustrations about the community not picking up on important things. But as a UX practitioner, the answer isn’t to abdicate responsibility. If you think there are contributions from cybernetics that the community is missing, write an article for Johnny Holland or Boxes and Arrows (or come to the IA Summit and catch Matthew Milan’s session on the Structure of Strategy that has a heavy dose of cybernetics).
Anyways, I get that if you’re in an environment where ux is watered down and misused, then it doesn’t really matter. That doesn’t mean it’s that way elsewhere, or has to stay that way. But things won’t change for the better if practitioners give up on ux.
Looking forward to your next blog post on what UX can learn from information science
* My community:
IA Insitute. IxDA. Wenovski. Overlap. Boxes and Arrows. Informationdesign.org AIGA Experience Design in the day (when we had many of these same conversations about experience a decade ago).
For the perspective of that community, google Morville’s UX honeycomb, my own takes on value-centered design and the user experience cycle, Cooper’s Goal Directed Design, or the ISO’s “efficiency, effectiveness and satisfaction” from the standard on user centered design.
#3 by admin on February 17, 2010 - 11:24 am
I was being provocative to get the attention of excellent readers such as yourself. There are some very deep philosophical questions you raise about the concept of experience in information and design and the role of that concept in psychology and cognitive science. In a nutshell, the experience-centric approaches have to be one of two things logically: 1) refer to everything processed by consciousness, in which case the term is so broad as to be analytically useless, or 2) just refers to perception, in which case it is best just one element and at worst reductive. If you look for disciplines that frame systems in terms of their purposes, which is what I think a foundational discipline for UX would be based on, you don’t find it in psychology, sociology, philosophy of mind, anthropology, or ethnography (although many debates war on in each), you have to look the early forms of cybernetics, systems theory, communication theory and the like (Bateson, Watzlawick,von Bertlanffy, Rappaport, etc.) and develop a new discipline not based on experience, but on open systems defined as communicative and purposeful systems. This in turn leads to construing software as sentient… so you see where we’re headed with this.
#4 by Marek Pawlowski on February 18, 2010 - 7:51 am
Interesting article Simon.
You’ve identified one of the key issues with user experience: its growing recognition as a discipline is a dual-edged sword. On the one hand, this increased awareness is emphasising the importance of trying new ways to make better stuff for customers; on the other, the adoption of a ‘user experience strategy’ or the hiring of a ‘user experience team’ is seen as a silver bullet solution to solving wider issues within an organisation.
In reality, the remit of user experience practitioners rarely goes beyond implementing visual design changes. As a result, companies start making prettier things, but they’re still things which don’t work for their customers. User experience should never be a layer, department or process within an organisation, but rather a shared connection to customer needs among everyone who works there.
Perhaps there’s an argument no one should ever advertise themselves as a user experience consultant and instead just say: “I’m better at making stuff work than other people in your company.” I suspect, however, ‘user experience practitioner’ will remain a more convenient mouthful…
#5 by Dilini on February 23, 2010 - 10:22 am
I agree with Jess McMullin. I’ve been a user experience designer a fraction of the time that you have, so with all due respect, I am in no way trying to criticize your point of view.
I am just confused as to why you are separating “purpose” from the over all experience. How can we expect a user to have a good experience without ultimately satisfying their purpose? And If, as a user experience designer, you are ignoring that fact, then I don’t think the discipline is to blame for that.
And I do agree, marketing and branding seem to be want to control what the users are “supposed” to experience. But as user experience designers isn’t it our job to make sure the basic needs of the users (such as fulfilling their purpose for using something) are not ignored?
#6 by admin on February 23, 2010 - 11:29 am
Yes, of course. It’s like this: the purpose of a business, some say, is to make money. If we’re making money, then everything is great, right? Not so. No business can AIM at making money, it is a side-effect, a measure, an end-result of DOING SOMETHING ELSE well, that satisfies users, that’s hard to discover, that’s hard or tricky or ingenious to solve for them. Business people who just try to aim at making money fail badly, or only succeed at the expense of everyone else. In the case of UX, substitute money for “Experience”. Experience is the end result, the test— it is not the SUBJECT of the discipline, just as making money is not the SUBJECT of designing and running great businesses. In a loose kind of way it is, but that loose talk is the 10,000ft view, and not remotely adequate for getting into the nitty gritty of what we do and how we do it. Make sense?