UX can no longer keep up with our world: what comes next?
Our outlook has changed. The world has changed. UX has to change.
I make my living through the practice of UX. I enjoy doing it. I think it has meaning. It gives me meaning.
Yet UX is beginning to show its age. Its bones are creaking as it struggles to keep up with a technologically saturated, inflamed modernity.
UX trumpets its maxim of “putting users first” as the solution to all ills. “Users first!” it demands at a minimum, and indeed, at a maximum. This foundational ethos is effective and important, but also too narrow, too shallow, too limited.
This is how UX has summoned its own limitations. Whereas once it was seen as ground-breaking and eventually essential, the bar has now been raised, the world has changed, and our outlook has shifted. We can now see where UX is ineffectual and are able imagine practices and theories of design that allow us to transcend UX’s limitations.
The limitations of UX stem from 4 aspects inherent in the practice:
Solipsism
Anthropocentricism
De-mediation
Internalism
If we break these issues down, we can address them — and find out what practice might fill the gaps.
Issue 1: UX is solipsistic
Only a single user ever exists.
One single persona, one person, one user facing a computer, one mobile, one experience. When a UXer designs, it’s only for one person — the user. The user is the centre around which all UX design orbits. ‘The user” is the reason behind and for UX. This is solipsism — the idea that oneself is all that exists. UX is just this — the perception of a product or service from one person’s view. And only that one person.
Unfortunately, the implications of a designed object go far beyond the person using it.
This fact only becomes more true as designed objects increasingly exist in a multi-touchpoint, omnichannel universe.
An example here is Ofo, in which a bike and app are a designed infrastructure in service to one user. The system is user-centred, with a clever app that locates the nearest bike for the user and provides convenient access through a barcode scanner. Yet the larger community of people who see their community cluttered with bikes are not taken into consideration.
Even mobile phones and digital devices aren’t designed to acknowledge the needs of people around the primary user. People yell into their phones, disrupting passersby, or stare into their devices, ignoring how they physically interact with the people around them. This could be solved through a better design, emanating from a more effective design practice.
But UX lacks the scope to think about this in a significant way, especially from the perspective of a digital-first UX designer. Dan Hill suggests “Strategic Design” could remedy these issues — “externalities” — of tech. Strategic Design, he argues, is a framework for holistically designing at the scale of both the city and the individual.
He claims that individual fields within design fail to address design challenges:
Judged from a pure interaction design practice point-of-view, Uber is clearly an exemplary user experience. Yet judged from a wider urban design point-of-view, its impact appears to be hugely damaging, with vast numbers of vehicles incentivised to drive into the middle of cities, apparently leading to increased congestion and reduced public transport use.
He sees UX, urban planning, architecture and other fields orchestrated under a “Strategic Design” conductor, harmonising to address socio-technical challenges.
This is one of many forms of wider service-design oriented practices that push back on a bottom line ethos and instead tow an ethical line, seeking to improve on the now tellingly parochial UX practice.
But with this broadening of scope of consequence to community it’s difficult to parse what is UX, and what is a different field entirely (though perhaps that matters little). A similar UX successor, Transformation Design, for example, employs participatory design techniques which are ostensibly included in UX (but, in my experience, are rarely used).
Yet regardless of the the title, this widening of the horizon of consequence in design is inevitable. But it can’t stop there.
Issue 2: UX is anthropocentric
In the era of the anthropocene, the primary force behind ecological effects are humans. But anthropocentrism has been at play since humans had language. This belief entails that humans are fundamentally different than other animals — transcendent — and able to transcend to even greater heights through religion or science. We’ve embedded this way of thinking in our in our societies, in our language, and in our designed objects.
The notion of transcendence is one in which everything is viewed in a subject-object dichotomy, with humans being the subject and everything else being part of a series of objects. This isn’t true of all cultures of course, with many indigenous peoples viewing humans as a part of a larger system, or animals as subjects in their own right.
Yet these anthropocentric attitudes prevailed and reached their height in the modernist attitudes in the late-20th century with the height of corporate, city, industrial and environmental planning.
The world is tamable, humanity claimed.
It’s now, within the anthropocene we see the effects of our anthropocentricism: climate change, astronomical deaths and suffering of human and non-human animals, and a failing ecology. Our perception of all things as objects which we might control, extract and destroy in order to construct different objects has led us here.
When we design, we have little regard for the subjectivity of a natural ecology involving lifecycles of countless organisms, weather cycles, and geological forces. It’s all just objects involving a system that points to us.
Of course, if you’re designing the navigation menu of an app that sells kitchen utensils you may wonder how your practice involves preserving a severely melting glacier. These problems are bigger than those which can be designed out of, let alone impacted by granular designs of interactions in digital objects.
This is why the successors fields to UX see the practice not only changing its area of focus, but also its scope; the role of the UX designer should become one that escapes the silo of individuated user interactions to a focus on frameworks to incorporate larger, systems-based questions.
Will someone still need to design navigation menus? Yes. But we need to expand, to look beyond humans as the primary subject of affect, and instead examine the wider ecology as subjects in and of themselves. In this way, UX could become a mindset that investigates every decision in a product lifecycle.
Cassie Robinson offers a range of practices addressing this , ranging from ecosystem design to consequence design (many of these also address the solipsism within UX). She offers provoking questions, such as:
What could you displace?
What are you accelerating?
What are you encouraging or incentivising over time?
Are you adding health in to this system?
How can you give prominence to care in your interactions?
How can you repair or maintain this system?
Anab Jain, too, looks to extend the frontiers of design beyond the human, as noted in her excellent talk:
Anab Jain’s fantastic presentation: a call to consider a Post HCI, ecological-first approach
Similarly, UX pioneers IDEO propose a “circular design” method to look at deeper ecological consequences.
Yet IDEO frame this more as a profit-driven exercise:
A new mind-set for business is emerging. It’s worth around a trillion dollars, will drive innovation in tomorrow’s companies, and reshape every part of our lives.
This doesn’t bode well for the long term sustainability of their idea. This is the issue with some successors to UX — they remain anthropocentric in their outlook, seeing financial gains as their motivator, without leveraging legal, political, and economic ways to find value systems other than financial.
There’s no way around it — looking at the bigger pictures won’t always be monetarily beneficial. But approaches that disentangle value from capital are necessary for our very literal survival and well-being, as well as for survival and well being of the animals and ecology we are enmeshed within.
Accordingly, the successor responsibilities of a user experience designer involve collective action in driving change. And not just surface-level changes of an anthropocentric, and accordingly, destructive system — but deeper structural changes altering how we go about deciding what and how to design, and what a ‘good’ design entails.
By some arguments, the application of superficial rather than structural changes is what happened with sustainable development (sometimes referred to as “greenwashing”).
Greenswashing via elkhiki
Even the IEEE Standards Association is waking up to structural changes. It makes bold claims about a form of responsible participant design, which aims to prioritise people and the planet over profit and productivity.
But hasn’t UX always been ultimately antithetical to capitalism anyway? It was always what’s best for people, not capital, at its core. Ultimately, we need to expand on that idea in our collective visions — beyond just the human to the living ecology we happen to be a part of.
Issue 3: UX de-mediates
Traditional UX frameworks inherently view technology as a medium which the user can control and affect: the product is ultimately neutral with respect to the user. That this could be more than a one-way relationship was never cared for, or otherwise considered.
We see designs that are highly usable, but are actively ignorant or uncaring (or both) of the effect they have on the user and the world. We see this in how designers didn’t have the foresight or skill to reflect on what it meant that Facebook was addictive, created filter bubbles, or was able to generate political agency in its users. Yet Facebook is indeed capable of all of these, as recent history has shown.
Technological determinism — the idea that technology dictates how we behave — is not the argument here. Instead it’s what the academics McLuhan, Latour, and most recently Idhe have discussed: technology mediates. Mediation in this sense means technology creating and shaping conceptual attitudes toward how we think about our world, and accordingly, how we behave in it.
Mediation occurs through new human-technology relations. It’s not the technology or the human by themselves, but the new relations that exist between them that create new actions and ways of thinking.
For example, “at work” means different things when have constant access to Slack and work email. Ideas about what it means to plan and think about “going shopping” have changed with how we engage with ecommerce. “Being online” wasn’t a thing 30 years ago, and it meant something different one or even two decades ago compared to what it means now. Indeed every technological artifact — whether we want it to or not — mediates, affording some behaviour and not others, changing how we think and what we think about.
The UX process has no space to scope out how a technology mediates. In this way it is actively de-mediating.
The UX framework wants to think of the product it helps to create as invisible or at least as transparent within a “Jobs to be done,” primary-task type of approach. But it’s not just your tasks that change with a new product: you, now mediated, have a differently structured life, which cascades to your thoughts, which cascades to your actions, which cascades to society.
At most UX has a mild sense of how a user’s behaviour changes with relation to the product — i.e. “What will make them come back to our product?”. We see amoral, shortsighted academics like Nir Eyal and BJ Fogg cultivate this line of thought in their Machiavellian works(“A Guide to Building Habit-Forming Products” — *shudder*). Of course, there’s no investigation into how behaviours and indeed thoughts change outside of the envisioned product use relationship.
Is a product incentivising unforeseen activities? Are users’ understanding of the world changing based on how the product has affected them? Are old terms given new meaning to them? Are their roles in the world changing? We don’t know.
Design frameworks other than UX fare better in seeking answers to these questions.
Speculative Design is one of the approaches that seeks to understand, among other things, future technological and societal paradigms, and the effects that these may have on people. “Design fictions” are very literally physical, embodied “future objects” that foster debate of possible futures. Participants in design fictions are intended to experience and interrogate how a potential future may impact us, our societies, and our environments. Inherently political, speculative design is a powerful tool for policy makers.
Design fiction playing cards via Garnet
In the study of Human-Computer Interaction, post-phenomenological research investigates the mediating influences that technologies have on people and their relations with the world. Post-phenomenological HCI sees people as interwoven in their environment, investigating the multi-dimensional uses of technology and how that affords different behaviours and thoughts. Peter-Paul Verbeek, a leading proponent of this approach, has an interesting course on Future Learn that I recommend.
Both of these practices are quite a ways from making an impact on design in the private sector. Once again, it’s likely because these practices don’t fit nicely into a process diagram next to accounts and engineering; they are inherently unbounded and political.
Issue 4: UX is internalist:
Do you remember everything you need to know?
No, you do not.
Instead, you often remember where are things you need to know. Important information is in Slack, or your email inbox, or on a note you scribbled and left near your door. These aren’t just reminders, they are your memory, externalised. You implicitly realise this, so you don’t put effort in to remembering.
But your environment functions as more than just your memory. When you are writing, designing, or doing some other creative or information task, what does your environment look like? If you are doing your taxes, you likely have different bills scattered around, if you are designing you likely have design inspiration littered around you. This is an active cognitive process — you are using your eyes to call up information as you need it and integrate it into your thought processes: epistemic action, this is called.
This theory that your mind extends into the world is known as extended cognition.
With the interweaving of our lives with digital technology, the plausibility and explanatory capacity of this theory has only increased.
You offload your directions to your app map. You store your memories in photos . You have browser tabs open that you cross-reference with each other. This ecology floats next you, interweaving with your life, accessible from different touchpoints.
But UX doesn’t care to examine how people think and remember using objects. It states that a person thinks toward an object in the format of
person →object
Yet as extended cognition theorists have been saying for years, we must consider the coupling of person plus environment as single bilateral unit in the format of
person ⟷environment
- a single unit of thought.
This reframing shatters our ability of how we consider the manipulability, transparency, personalisation of tech. Just as we don’t consider the subjectivity of the world around us, we don’t consider how we integrate into this greater subjectivity.
Entirely new affordances can appear by shifting our horizons to consider epistemic action. Think of a set of scrabble pieces in front of you. You may physically move your chance-determined pieces between one another to investigate prospective words. This physical act of thinking creates connections in the forms of words that you may not have seen otherwise.
Now consider a much more complex information environment a user may create in a tightly coupled human-device relationship— what connections might they be able to generate? Everything they’ve read in the past week, each song, their browser history, structured, sorted and fungible in ways that flex and fold and bend together. Users offload, manipulate, contrast, reference, theme and associate within this ecology via their mobile, laptop, or any number of other devices. In doing so a user is able to shift their focus from being directed towards individual content to the relations between content: patterns, associations, themes, etc.
How can we possibly design for this? What are the frameworks that help structure taxonomies? How do we even begin to conceptualise this?
I’ve yet to see any UX framework/process that even begins to address this thought, but philosophers and cognitive scientists have begun putting together conceptual categories for examination.
Andy Clark and later Richard Heersmink have suggested we ask questions about the nature of the human-environment cognitive couplings such as:
How reliable is the connection in terms of what is required to maintain it (e.g. electricity, distance etc)?
How durable is the connection in the face of stress such as uncoupling or coupling?
How can information gathered through the coupling be trusted?
How transparent is the process for transmission of information?
How easy is it to interpret or understand the information that is transferred?
How easy is it and to what extent can we personalise the cognitive coupling environment?
How does the cognitive coupling transform our brains?
How this applies to digital environments is likely highly complicated. Yet I haven’t even seen any conceptual frameworks even try to make sense of our personal digital ecologies.
But it’s clear that as we become more tightly coupled with our technologies we must at least attempt to understand how we think with our environments. Because this is already happening. And we have to be able to conceptualise it in order to design for it.
All of these issues are related. They all funnel and intertwine and challenge the foundations of how we think about design.
“UX is dead” was a trite canard that some years ago floated around Twitter and the more mediocre design blogs. Are we here again?
Yes and no. There’s no way UX is going anywhere.
But with the multiplication of factors to consider from both a theoretical and practical perspective, UX has been sent spinning down a path from which it won’t rebound without deep structural change. The role, the scope, even the theoretical underpinnings have to shift in a way that may leave it totally unrecognisable.
But that’s a good thing. Don’t hold on to those post-its too tightly.