fasterandworse

A fundamental attribute of User Experience design is its inability to change the underlying product.

The concerns of a UX designer, or researcher, are limited to furthering the acceptance of a product by an intended audience, and all of the empathy postured by the role is directed within that context.

The empathy is limited to better understanding people to entice them to use the underlying product and—if it's a commercial product—pay for it.

User Experience Design and, to some extent, Product Design are considered software industry roles—in general—and rarely referred to in any specific product category.

“Software” is not a product category. It's a material, a means, for making products. “Enterprise Software” is also not a product category. It's a market category, particularly lucrative because the product is paid for by the ones who don't have to use it, and the ones who have to use it don't have a say in the matter.

Once the software part is ignored and a product is treated like any other product the actual category surfaces. This is where the incongruence of the product design and the intentions of designers emerges. There aren't many Spreadsheet User Experience designers.

The challenge is to consider the word “design” in its rawest form, the process of satisfying a purpose. In that context the origin stories of so many tech startups that tell a tale of disruption—or the discovery of an obscure problem that can be alleviated at scale with software—do not fit this model of design.

The stories don't fit because they don't tell the purpose behind the product. For example, Uber didn't disrupt the taxi industry to satisfy the purpose of helping people get around the city cheaper, safer, and more efficiently. Rather, Uber found that people wanting cheaper, safer, and more efficient taxis were a means to satisfy their purpose of making a lot of money.

To make money is the immutable purpose of a commercial business. It's not the only purpose a person may have while running a business and it's not always the purpose that creates the product that led to the business. This doesn't change the fact that from the moment a business is created, the immutable purpose to survive via income is in place.

This means that design—again, in its rawest form—has a key element, an undeliberatable purpose in every business. The deliberation proceeds in discovering the means to satisfy the purpose and the constraints and obstacles to work with, work against, avoid, or ignore.

Whenever an organisation promotes—internally or externally—its mission statement it is not promoting its purpose. It is promoting its bullshit, which many in the organisation will genuinely believe to be genuine.

This is the designed. The products of these organisations that User Experience designers design upon. Software doesn't get sold on shelves in stores any more, and rarely takes up space on our computers and, for enterprise software, our bank accounts.

The shedding of these constraints has made software a fluid product. Something that takes up so little space in our lives that we tend to ask less about why we need it, why we use it, or what they made it for.

In some cases it is designed by the founders—perhaps not initially—to be as profitable as possible regardless of any actual benefit to the people using it.

The User Experience designer in these organisations is constrained by their own title. Any subsequent design work on an underlying product, which is openly dedicated to furthering its profitability, is marketing. More so if it uses manipulative psychological techniques and relentless removal of friction to aid in that purpose.

This is the designer. The title binds the practitioner within it to either embracing the reality and being comfortable with the bullshit (or being honest about it), believing and embracing the bullshit, or being in a constant state of despair over their inability to do the things they believed User Experience design was for.

The purpose of Marketing is congruent to the purpose of the business. The User Experience is only congruent to the purpose of the business if it results in users either paying or not preventing their employers from paying.

In this sense, User Experience becomes the product. It is now the most important means to satisfying the purpose of making money. Now that software is free of all the shackles of the physical world of products, the constraint of having to justify space in our lives is all but gone.

Software has become less concrete in any specific purpose the organisation behind it is prepared to assert.

The software is a collection of existing useful products mashed together as features, where the usefulness of the whole is discovered by the people who find ways to make it useful for themselves.

Or, as we increasingly see, the software is built on a collection of potentially useful features mashed together, hoping for a “killer app” which will convert that potential into reality.

The consistent factor in these impotent software creations is how much effort goes into making them appear easy to use, fun, human-like, and intuitive. Because the real design is the means to the corporate ends. The UX designed thing is the product that distracts from it.