Design is what you provide to users.
User experience is what their brains make out of it.
Thoughts – the User Experience – you can not design.
About Design and User Experience
In this story, there are two threads.
One twists around meanings of words:
Concrete and meaningful words are often more powerful than
fuzzy and meaningless words.
The other thread is about individuals vs. system control.
In this battle, I believe in the freedom of minds.
Of these threads, you can weave your own reading experience.
It is hard to discuss contemporary product development without mentioning Design, Users and Experiences. They are basic terms. Very very commonly used terms. Sometimes without thinking about their meanings. And once a large enough mass of people have used the terms meaninglessly, others start to think they are meaningless.
Each of these three terms has a long history. Pretty recently, in Two of the terms were combined. User Experience was originally a useful and well defined term, thanks to Don Norman who introduced it in early 1990s.
On this video, Don Norman explains User Experience himself.
Gradually User Experience or UX became a buzzword used also outside the professional talk. In many places, UX has become a meaningless placeholder that sometimes means usability, sometimes UI design, sometimes graphic design, sometimes something else.
The famous picture about the difference between Design and User Experience was tweeted on 28th August 2015 by @uxlinks. I’m republishing it here on the right.
Over the years, many have argued that the picture’s message is somewhat misleading. Even the viewpoint of the photo is questionable.
In this picture there is a major conceptual problem. After all, both of these paths are designed. One was designed by someone hired to do that. The other was designed – and implemented – by a group of users. Co-creation is just a more advanced form of Design.
Whichever path you take, that will be an Experience. A User Experience is within the head of the user who walks the path. Other User Experiences are in the memories of those whom we don’t any more see in the picture.
Sidestep: From two useful terms some created a useless mixture
Next to the two pretty well defined terms, User Experience and Design, there’s a related term that nobody ever defined but many people started to use: “User Experience Design”. Human beings love to use words that go beyond their own understanding. They trust that the listeners understand even less.
Top professionals of Usability and User Experience – whether researchers or practitioners – do not use the term “User Experience Design” unless they want to joke. The reason is obvious:
The output of Design is what you provide to users.
User experience is what their brains make out of it.
Thoughts – the User Experience – you can not design.
User Experience Design is science-fiction. Each user’s brains alone create their own experiences.
We can design user interfaces. We can design various stimuli that later might trigger individual experiences. Those experiences will vary greatly. People who believe they can control minds of other people should try a career as psychiatrists.
I’m working with people who do Interaction Design, Visual Design, Audio Design, Mechanical Design and many other forms of Design. None of them claims having mental powers to create user experiences for others. In fact, most human beings do not fully control even their own feelings.
Now, having unlearned the non-sense term, let’s focus again on the original two terms.
What is Design and how does it relate to User Experience
The Design is the designer’s output. It could be physical or non-physical. Whatever it is, let’s now call it a Thing. After being designed, implemented and shared to the potential users, some of them might perceive and interpret the Thing. The perceptions will vary from user to user, and even more the interpretations.
Along processing the interpretations of the just perceived stimulus, the user’s brains consider also the Affordance of the Thing. Affordance is a subjective mental model of what one can do with the Thing.
(And no, affordance is not another Basic Term that you should use in every other sentence. If the word attracts you, first read how James Gibson, Don Norman and Leo van Lier defined it. Please.)
Based on the affordance, some people might decide to use the Thing for something. This decision and the possible actions lead to more thoughts and emotions and possibly also further perceptions about the Thing. And now our story has two possible paths ahead:
The first path is what we are looking for: the user’s brains now contain a User Experience. Shortly UX. UX is affected by not just the Thing but also – and in fact much more – by everything else that the User has ever experienced. For example, the UX of your next washing machine was forming already in your childhood when you were washing the laundry with your mother, enjoying the scent of the freshly washed clothes.
Every individual encountering with the Thing leads to an individual User Experience. Affected by later encounterings with anything, the user’s feelings and thoughts about the Thing continue to evolve. The UX will grow, fade, turn around, soften, sharpen, link to other memories, guide your life or be almost forgotten.
Sooner or later or never, this individual User’s experience with this Thing could be studied by Experience Researchers. Along describing the experience, they’ll remind us that
“user experience may be considered subjective in nature to the degree that it is about individual perception and thought with respect to the system” and “user experience is dynamic as it is constantly modified over time due to changing usage circumstances and changes to individual systems as well as the wider usage context in which they can be found.“
And what they try to say with those clumsy sentences: whatever the Thing, the user experience may be anything.
I said there are two possible paths – two major use cases. One just led us to a user experience. The second path won’t:
The decision to do something with the Thing – or to not do – may lead to a state where the user is no more experiencing anything. The user dies. Considering this use case, some designers choose to improve the design until it is safe enough, others add a sticker:
Let’s get concrete:
In the beginning there was a picture of the two paths. Pictures are more powerful than text. So now, you still remember the (literally) misleading picture better than these lines:
Design is what you provide to the users.
User experience is what their brains make out of it.
Thoughts – the User Experience – you can never design.
How to visualise the above lines?
For some strange reason, the very first example that came into my mind is the Berlin Wall. I don’t know why. The answer of “use a picture of Berlin wall” just popped up the next second I had set myself the question above.
What happened? Before this moment, I had never thought of the Berlin Wall having any relation to user interfaces, usability, or user experiences. If asked, I might have categorized Berlin Wall to political history.
During the previous decades, my brains have created connections based on everything I have seen or heard or sensed or smelled or imagined, whether things or non-things. Thanks to that the pre-work, the neurological connections now suggested my consciousness to show the difference of Design and User Experience by using a picture of the Berlin Wall.
Likewise, within the first second of looking at any new product, your brains look for answers to “can I use it for something“, “is it easy to use“, “is it effective“, “is it reliable” and naturally, most importantly, “would it make me happy?” The answers are collected from all around your brains, using every engram, every memory of your life.
And calculating all of that, the answer was Berlin Wall. Now let’s see where that path leads us to.
The Difference of Design and User Experience – the illustrated version
The Design:
The Design of the Berlin Wall was a good attempt to limit people from enjoying their lives.
The Usage
For the Berlin Wall, the planned use cases included “turn around and walk away” and “try me and die.” Some turned around, some died. However, many more walked to the wall to express their belief in something better. The Wall became a symbol of the cold war, and it turned into The symbol of ending the cold war.
An User Experience. And another. And a billion more.
Instead of pressing people down, the Wall triggered their minds. Of the many User Experiences triggered by the Wall, my favourite is the worldwide joy of breaking down the Wall on November 9th, 1989. It became one of the post-war generations’ big common experiences.
(And now, being not able to stop my thoughts from travelling in time and space, the traces of the first moonflight and the 9/11 start to glow in my mind. If I can’t control my own mind, how could anyone else?)
(Pictures above: First one taken in November 1962, provided to us by NATO Handout / Getty Images.
Second picture “Berlinermauer” by Noir, licensed via Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Berlinermauer.jpg#/media/File:Berlinermauer.jpg and third one taken 9.11.1989, http://humanities.unc.edu/programs/archives/special-events-2014/berlinwall )
Here’s one of the many User Experiences with the Berlin Wall. Yes, I have felt the Wall. That was in 1989 a few months before the famous November 9th.
Then I suddenly encountered it again on a street in New Zealand. I hadn’t been thinking of Europe for a while. Walking down the street, I saw a local newspaper at the newsstand. The headline used the biggest font I had ever seen in a newspaper: “THE WALL CAME TUMBLING DOWN”. It took me a while to understand it. And when I did, I felt very European.
The Berlin Wall has influenced to billions of user experiences. Some of those experiences are concrete, some even literally, others more abstract. They are all different.
Each of us has different experiences, and I have no idea of what goes on in your brains right now. I have designed just this page, not your experience of it.
The concept of user experience design is a child of mind control. Mind control was a dream of those decision-makers who ordered the Wall. They failed. Mind control is not possible.
Today, some organisations of the same genre claim they can design pre-defined experiences. National security is told to legitimate great innovativeness in experience design. Often, the test subjects would rather die than go through those experiences.
Some other organisations claim their products produce positive experiences. Sometimes, their users are ready to kill to experience them. However, also in these cases the substances only stimulate feelings and thoughts which will still flow in very uncontrolled ways. Just like the path we saw crossing the grass.
Both of these organisation types are more powerful than NASDAQ TOP100 companies, but still they can not design a true user experience. If you take the job title literally, anyone trying to be a “UX Designer” is doomed to fail.
Now the boss of your boss might get confused. He might raise an argument like
“The job of John the HTML5 Wizard affects users’ experiences, doesn’t it? So why not call him a UX Designer?”
Sure. Just follow that logic. Think about Comedians, Receptionists, Authors, Musicians. And continue to Taxi Drivers, Doctors and Personal Trainers. The criteria “job output affects user experience” covers all of them. And most of the remaining earth population. Did I say something about terms becoming meaningless?
Some companies have taken this road. I used to work in a company where we had tens of thousands of people working with hundreds of descriptive job titles. Then one day, someone in HR fell in love with the brand new word “User Experience.” The next year, people still did different jobs, but now every other job title of R&D and Product Management started with “User Experience…” The argumentation was logical: the new titles underlined that those jobs affect user experiences. Yes. A brilliant discovery.
Consequently, nobody could any more deduce from the title what a person did. They all did the UX. And as soon as people understood the argument of “affects user experience”, even more employees insisted that also their job title must include UX. They didn’t want to sound worthless. From process viewpoint, everybody’s contribution in a product development process finally affects the UX – may their method be component quality inspection or whatsoever.
Most of those currently titled as UX designers work somewhere in the area of UI design. In UI design, there are some core values. Transparency, clarity, being concrete in what we communicate. Let’s follow these also in communicating what we do.
Good news. The solution is already there. Get concrete.
People making music do not call themselves Musical Experience Designers. They might be song-writers, guitar-players, singers, composers. Or, to keep the precise skillset undefined, they are musicians. They have contributed to your experience, so has the CD cover designer. If the cover reveals who is musician and who is graphic designer, we others understand their role and appreciate them in being good in their profession.
Many of those currently-titled-as-UX-designers are likewise good in their jobs. They deserve appreciation, and they are worth a proper job title to reveal what they are doing:
Concept Designers, Interaction Designers, Wireframe Designers, Visual Designers, Graphic Designers, Sound Designers, Haptic Designers, Mechanical Designers, Industrial Designers, Web Designers, Mobile UI Designers,... Yes, sure they all contribute to the User Experience, but that term hides the actual competences. To make things clearer, call them by their real names.
What if the designers are multitalented, mastering half a dozen of the above roles? To keep the precise skillset undefined, they can be Product Designers, User Interface Designers, Information Designers,.. All of these still set some scope to the the work domain and skills, unlike the totally unscoped “UX Designer”.
Unfortunately I am not part of the solution. I have become part of the problem.
In the early parts of my career I was given down-to-earth and easy-to-understand job titles – such as User Interface Designer, Usability Specialist, Product Manager, User Interface Design Specialist, User Interface Design Manager, Experience Analyst and so on. And then one day, I was asked “Is it ok that your job title is User Experience Manager?”
I thought the title works alright. However, I soon realized that for most colleagues in my new company, the term UX was unfamiliar.
Starting from the receptionist, everyone was asking: What does UX mean? What does a UX Manager? Does he manage experiences?
First I thought this offers a good way to start smalltalking about the work.
“A UX Manager walks with a video camera and watches real users in their work, he looks for unidentified customer needs, he draws storyboards, he writes use cases, he fills in Excel sheets with requirements, he sketches user interfaces, or photoshops or illustrates them, he asks test users to switch on the power of the latest prototype, he listens to everybody’s opinions and tries to combine the opposite needs, he says that usability must not be forgotten when saving costs in R&D.”
However, in the long run, I started to wonder if a more explanatory title would save everybody’s time.
Managing Experiences sounds perhaps even more meaningless than Designing Experiences. Yes, I do have many experiences, and yes, I try to manage them in my head. So do all my 600 colleagues, although this challenge is not spelled in their job title. We are all Experience Managers.
Along the years, I have done my best to become an expert of experiences. And after all these years, I know that no-one can manage or create another person’s experiences. As my teacher of pedagogy studies once said: “There is no teaching – only learning. Your job is to give them tools to learn.”
I can give you some silken threads, but you’ll be weaving them yourself. We all walk our own paths. The best I can do is to wish you an enjoyable day.
Time to summarize all the above.
The first thread was about meanings.
The second thread was about individuals.
“Experience is …
a kind of huge spider-web
of the finest silken threads
suspended in the chamber of consciousness,
and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.”
Henry James (1846-1916)
—
Disclaimer: In some contexts, the term User Experience Design does make sense. Here’s a breakthrough in the treatment of depression: http://www.goodnewsfinland.com/feature/sooma-helps-to-elevate-the-mood/
“Our product is a small portable brain stimulation device”, they say. Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), to be precise. Their work I might actually call User Experience Design.
—
I welcome your comments and further thoughts.
Posts are checked to delete meaningless spams.