The Future is UX
During one of my first weeks as a freshman in college, my roommate and I were coming back from a club’s kick-off meeting at the Kelley School of Business. As we were leaving, he struggled to open the door. While most doors in the building could be pushed open, for some reason that particular door had to be pulled at a weird angle. He vented to me, “Why does this door have such a terrible design?” That experience led to a conversation about a class he had taken over the summer called AMID-D 191 Design: Form and Function. He told me it was actually really interesting and he recommended I take it. The next year, I took the course as an elective through the school of Apparel Merchandising and Interior Design.
Although I didn’t get bit by a radioactive spider, I look back at that moment as my “origin story” to becoming a user experience, or UX, designer. I enjoyed that course and it sparked my passion for design. Five years later, I am grateful to be almost a semester away from completing a Master’s degree in Human-Computer Interaction and design.
To this day, there’s something that still puzzles me. Throughout the four years I studied as a marketing major at the Kelley School of Business, I never once heard about UX design in my business courses. I think the reason is that UX design is maturing as a profession just as crucial to a business’s success as other well-established disciplines like marketing or accounting. However, most people still don’t know what UX design is. Like any other field, experience design is a rich and complex topic. I will do my best to explain what it is, why it is important, and what I believe the future holds for our small but growing field.
What is Experience Design?
A user experience is an outcome (a function or activity). The job of a UX designer is to achieve desired technology experiences. In order to accomplish this, we predict people’s interaction with technology (the experience) and imagine a way to make it better (design).
For example, during a class assignment I was tasked with analyzing an app by relating design qualities with experiential qualities. Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, I have used Grubhub to pick-up and have food delivered, so I chose this app to analyze for the assignment.
From my analysis, I concluded that ordering food can be an exhaustive and overwhelming experience. As this screenshot shows, the large amount of menu items can feel endless while the images can be visually indistinguishable from each other. Creating an order can be time-consuming because users have to find, read, and select each individual item. This would likely deter potential customers from ordering on the app.
The qualities that designers can control are the interface (surface features like visuals, colors, text, etc.), function (what it does), and structure (the back-end data). A designer has to understand how these elements together create an overall experience. Every detail in design matters because each detail can change the user’s experience.
Since completing my assignment, I noticed Grubhub has made significant changes to the design. As shown in the screenshot here, one critical change they added is a new section called “Orders”. This new feature provides a list of purchases that users have ordered in the past. Instead of taking the arduous process of finding and selecting my items, I can now order food quickly and without exerting much mental effort (or scrolling effort). This is a huge improvement over the previous experience.
Experience design is everywhere. It’s all around us. Whether it’s opening a door or using an app on the phone, people are constantly engaging with designed experiences. The beauty of design is that it blends into our lives. Typically however, people don’t recognize the importance of design until there’s a problem with it. A designer’s goal is to see and understand this experience to try and make it better.
Why Does Experience Design Matter?
Each product or service is linked to a brand. A brand’s equity is a measure of the brand’s ability to capture consumer preferences and loyalty. This is a company’s most powerful asset. To me, the most underrated and under-appreciated aspect of experience design is how it cultivates brand value.
In many ways, marketers and UX designers want to understand the same thing but for different reasons. Both of these roles attempt to orchestrate an experience by looking at the entire journey that a user goes through. However, a marketer wants to improve the experience by increasing conversion, while a UX designer wants to improve the experience by increasing usability. To illustrate this difference, think back to my Grubhub example. From a user’s standpoint, Grubhub’s updated user interface offers an improved experience of ordering food more quickly. From the company’s standpoint, adding the “Orders” menu section offers an improved experience of acquiring more frequent purchases and customers. Both of these experiences -the user’s and the business’s- are equally important and useful.
In the future, it will be imperative that marketers and UX designers work with each other. A UX designer’s efforts will be wasted if a product, service, or idea is marketed poorly, and a marketer’s efforts will be wasted if these are designed poorly. It’s no surprise just how connected these professions are. Both are in charge of managing a brand experience and they need to be on the same page. When they aren’t, people’s expectations aren’t realized and brand equity plummets.
There are three levels to branding which can influence the level of loyalty from a customer. The weakest level is to base branding on the features of a product. For instance, a business can sell a coffee with butter-pecan flavoring and low fat milk. The problem is competitors can copy these features. The next level is to base branding on the benefits to a consumer. For example, the specialty coffee is known for its sweet taste and healthy effects. The third and strongest level of branding goes beyond features and benefits. Branding at this level is able to engage customers on an impactful, emotional level.
The third level isn’t maintained just by advertising but by people’s experiences. A brand’s power comes from the deep connections they forge with people. I am a devoted fan of Dunkin’ Donuts (or Dunkin’). To me, when I get a Dunkin’ butter-pecan coffee, I am not just having a cup of coffee. I am having a deeply satisfying experience which no other brand can deliver. This was especially true this past summer when everyone in my family was working from home due to the pandemic. Usually on Mondays, Wednesdays, or Fridays Dunkin’ would have deals like a free donut or coffee, so on these days I would ask my family what they wanted and then create an order on Dunkin’s app. I looked forward to collecting points on the app, showing gratitude toward my family, and of course the delicious food and coffee. Sure, there were a few times when the app was buggy and it didn’t exchange the information correctly, but the whole experience gave me happiness at a time when it was needed. And that is why UX matters.
A former Disney executive once said,
“A brand is a living entity, and it is enriched or undermined cumulatively over time, the product of a thousand small gestures.”
A UX designer measures the experience and manages each touch point. Just like marketers, UX designers create desired brand experiences which are meaningful to people.
Where is Experience Design Heading?
The challenge and excitement of design is to understand how context influences experience (people, time, and place). These are the aspects that designers can’t control. People change, times change, and environments change. At the highest level, design is about change.
If this year has shown us anything, the future is unpredictable. It’s hard to tell what’s going to happen, but as a designer I have to be prepared for what’s coming. Based on my personal observations, experiences, and conversations with other designers, here are my predictions of where experience design is heading and what it means for the field.
Accessibility. In 2019, Taco Bell received the Elevate Award for the Best Restaurant Kiosk from The Interactive Customer Experience Association. As shown here, Taco Bell’s kiosk design allows for a more accessible customer experience. The multi-language options help people who don’t speak English as a first language and the pictures support visually impaired guests. Another benefit is that customers can safely order food during the pandemic.
It will be crucial for designers to learn about accessibility issues and how to design for people with visible and invisible disabilities. To improve my awareness, I recently took the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) training course. We are also realizing the need for inclusive design which doesn’t alienate cultures and minority groups.
Fashion. Every design has a style or overall feeling based on how all the elements interact together. Just like clothing brands or automobiles, interface design is influenced by popular styles of the time and is moving towards a fashion-oriented industry. This is why it seems that social media apps, streaming services, and corporate websites all feel the same. It’s important designers recognize this. Fashion can give users a sense of familiarity and consistency, but it can also hinder diversity and originality. When I design, I always consider how my design’s style fits into my goals and the brand. It’s okay to follow a trend, but it should be done intentionally and not just for the sake of fitting in.
Beyond Screens. A lot of major organizations already utilize a design system providing a set of components and guidelines for visual design which adds to a brand’s consistency. Screens won’t be going away anytime soon, but some of the most exciting opportunities in design will be crafting systems for new technologies like voice assistants, robots, and augmented or virtual reality.
Earphones. After smartphones, I anticipate earphones will be the next major computing devices in sync with online platforms. Voice and hearing are seamless interactions which don’t re-focus our attention like screens do. Our current smartphones, watches, and FitBits take quantifiable inputs from the lower body, whereas earphones present a gateway to the upper body (head). Unlike Google Glass, earphones are socially acceptable to wear in public because we can see people wearing headphones all the time.
Artificial Intelligence. Artificial Intelligence, in particular automated processes, algorithms, and machine learning, will get better. I expect these will be used for more personalized user experiences in the future. Right now, a lot of companies use these for marketing purposes (Amazon always seems to be watching me to know what I want to buy), but I think companies will realize the potential to apply artificial intelligence to a user’s experience. For instance, two other students and I developed a model to measure the experience of posting a photo onto Instagram (view case study here). It would be completely possible to automate this system so it can be continuously run without the help of a designer.
The Device Paradigm. Good designers can think at both the practical and abstract or philosophical levels. There is no such thing as an absolute bad or good user experience. There are tradeoffs and consequences. For instance, by making things simpler or automated we also take away the user’s control and power. The industry is moving toward commodification or standardization of digital devices. As technological devices blend into our lives, we tend to not notice their destructive tendencies. This phenomena is called the device paradigm: technology makes life easier at the cost of disconnection and unhappiness. The pandemic has proven people don’t want to spend their lives staring at a screen. I want experience design to go beyond pushing pixels because it can do so much more. Designers understand how technology and business can create meaning in people’s lives. My hope is that UX evolves to become a field capable of imagining technological systems which help us solve the future’s most pressing issues in healthcare, sustainability, economics, and more. If you ask me, designers are ready for the challenge. It’s what we were born to do. We’re catalysts of innovation. It’s time businesses recognize UX as being just as important as any other field. If not, they’ll be left behind. The future is about people. It’s about understanding experience. It’s about UX.
