Defining your UX design philosophy
The Design Philosophy of a Recent HCI Graduate.
I have come to the point in my life where I encounter the simultaneous joy and fear of graduating with a Masters in Human-Computer Interaction Design. I have been validated by my instructors at Indiana University, and I must wager my process, abilities, and ambitions towards a good fit with others in a design team. I find it can be difficult to always rehearse what my design process is, as it is contingent upon context, culture, time, place, and all other circumstances we must consider in design work. However, I thought it would be worthwhile to share it here. Dear reader, if you are looking for a 10-point list of best UX practices and principles, this article is not for you. If you would like to engage in critique and reflection of a young designer’s view on UX design, then you may find what I have to say worthwhile. Cheers!
Purpose
The purpose of this essay is to distill and communicate my current design philosophy, as a reflection upon my design practice over the past two years. The curriculum I worked through is labeled as Human-Computer Interaction Design, thus other designers silo my colleagues and I into the realm of tech and screen interfaces. However, this is only one form of what it means to be an interaction designer. My philosophy includes a critique on this perception of designer. Through this essay I will explain how I see myself as an Experience Designer, rather than an Interaction Designer, as well as display my process as I see it in the form of reason-making as well as where I would like to take myself, and my practice, into the future.
What is HCI, Interaction Design, or Experience Design?
What does Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Design mean, and how does it relate to Experience Design? HCI emerged out of the contemporary demand for interactive computing systems to afford themselves towards workers, especially in office desk jobs and the military. It was to mimic the tasks and demands that were present in those working lives. It was pragmatic. Nowadays, however, technology has become a ubiquitous network, such that every aspect of life can be augmented by some element of technology. For me, this means that HCI has evolved from something that concerns itself with efficient, easy, and pragmatic ends, to something that puts into question how technology can bring out thoughts, feelings, and create experiences for humans and non-humans alike.
As a designer, I concern myself with the experienced relationship of humans with our technology. My first and foremost concern is to consider how continued interaction with a form of technology will change the ways in which we perceive ourselves, and other human and non-human actors. After all, how we perceive is the foundation for how we act.
For instance, if the technology designed for human-interaction draws our attention away from intentional, reflective action, then the result is that technology offers an escape from our embodied states; it entrances our minds to explore screen interfaces, sitting in a sedentary state while the world outside continues to thrive in the physical state. This is not a bad thing, but it does have consequences. For instance, too much engagement with our phone screens may take away the other human rituals and experiences which we may have used to fill our time in close quarters, such as playing cards and cooking together. Then again, this same technology can connect us “face-to-face” across the world to speak to one another via screen interface. What are the implications and use-cases of both? How does it shape who we are as a species?
This contemporary situation sets the onus high for an Experience Designer because I strive to take into consideration as many future implications of my designs as possible. Which actors will be immediately affected by my design work? How can I know? What might be the shock-waves of implications and is there any way I can guarantee that the least harm will happen? These questions can become maddening if a designer believes that he or she can find any empirically correct, universal, or objective truism to move along their process to a final design.
Design is Situated, not Universal
Thankfully, design is not strictly created from universal, empirical truth. In my opinion, seeking after these universal truths is the work of science –an invaluable tradition which can inform us of the mechanisms in which the world works, but is absolutely sterile when it is the heart of design (Norman & Stolterman, p. 1–6). Design is not science. Design is situated in the infinite subjectivity of all the actants and stakeholders the designer can reasonably consider in their space of creation. It involves all of the small truths that are real in any specific use case, which in turn are always situated in a composite of truths about the culture, time, place, and desires which the stakeholders hold for that design. For instance, it would make little sense at all to think that the “right” design for a stretch of interstate highway in the deserts of the American West should be replaced with solar-powered bike-lanes. Yet, this is a very real possibility for the multitude of bike-lanes for the cycle-saturated Denmark (see “Dutch Solar Bike …”). There is no “right” design, but there is the most appropriate design situated for the stakeholders it serves.
How to Discern the Best Design
But how might we come to know when the design is most appropriate to serve our stakeholders? Horst Rittel (1988) remarked in his work, “The Reasoning of Designers,” “…that all deliberations terminate with judgments (“Good enough! “, e. g. ) which may be ‘based’ on the deliberations, but are not derived from them” (p. 5). I believe what he is communicating here is that all design must terminate in the judgement of the designer, such that the designer takes responsibility for the judgement, and the consequences which extend from it, be them known or future invisibilities. The way Rittel reasons for this is his concept of epistemic freedom. Epistemic as it applies to the ways a designer seeks to know the situational truths that pervade a design situation or problem space. As I mentioned before, I believe good designers work by acknowledging the immediate and future implications of their designs on stakeholders. And although designers can use trusted sources of knowledge to help generate ideas, there is no way in which the final designs can be evaluated as “right” or “wrong” based on this criterion. Instead, I believe it takes a great designer to acknowledge their humility (Rittel, p. 6). They must vocalize what they can know as well as what they cannot; they should explain why they trust and depend on their sources for knowledge. I do not believe cold, mechanical empiricism can guarantee the right design. I believe the only guarantor for a design is the designer or design team themselves. As is so, I believe designers must also take complete responsibility for their outcomes.
Consequences of Design Judgement
But to grasp the implications of design outcomes, judgement must be made. Either stymied by the fear of the known implications of design outcomes, or by the self-persuaded ignorance of the design space, I find myself at times threatened by what Nelson and Stolterman consider “analysis paralysis” (p. 32, 95, 98). That is, I feel unable to move forward because I am responsible for the design outcome, whether I know what is at risk, or worse, ignorant of what should be considered for risk. It is in these moments that judgments to move forward must be made at the best of my abilities. What helps is to be prototyping the alternatives when bigger judgments are made, so I am able to put my ideas out to stakeholders to interpret their reactions and determine if there is any glaring error in my design.
An example of this might be that I would hesitate to make any quick judgments in designing an interface which would integrate personal data for any large number of unknown stakeholders. What comes to mind is something such as the designed digital government of Estonia (see e-Estonia). It would require an enormous amount of iterations, a deft and gentle hand, and a democratized design co-design process to ensure an ethical outcome.
Responsibility is Imperative in Design
It is specifically because of the high demand of responsibility towards the service of our stakeholders that experience design work is so exciting. But why am I inspired by the risk involved with responsibility? I personally am inspired to act through contingent philosophies of modern existentialists, such as Sartre, Camus, and De Beauvoir. The latter states in her work, The Ethics of Ambiguity, that it
“…is not impersonal universal man who is the source of values, but the plurality of concrete, particular men projecting themselves toward their ends on the basis of situations whose particularity is as radical and as irreducible as subjectivity itself” (De Beauvoir, p. 17).
I believe that De Beauvoir here represents the attitude that is at stake in design work. Values come from people in their complete, situated uniqueness. It is up to us as designers to work to discover and notice differently the ways in which others come to place value on experiences, artifacts, rituals, and community (“noticing” a la Anna Tsing, p. 17, 24, 25, 28). Ultimately to design in service of others, as well as myself, is to constantly question what it means to be human, and how I might come to new truths by engaging earnestly with others in activity and in dialogue. Once more, De Beauvoir states,
“The goal towards which I surpass myself must appear to me as a point of departure toward a new act of surpassing. Thus, a creative freedom develops happily without ever congealing into unjustified facticity. The creator leans upon anterior creations in order to create the possibility of new creations. His present project embraces the past and places confidence in the freedom to come….[a]t each moment freedom is confirmed through all creation.” (p. 25)
De Beauvoir communicates that the act of creating something is intimately tied to our conception of our self.
To Design is to Create, To Create is to Make Meaning
We are always creating in relation to those artifacts, systems, services and rituals which came before us, and it is in relationship to one another that the creations also take meaning. Therefore, to design for others is to will oneself to become something a little bit different, in hopes that it will also change the lives of the stakeholders for the better in turn. To put it another way, Friedman (2003) posits,
“[t]hose who cannot change existing situations into preferred ones fail in the process of design. There are many causes of design failure…[including] lack of will, ability, or method” (p. 509).
Therefore, if we will ourselves into being through our creations, our creations will be molded as a reflection of how strong our will, ability, and methods to achieve those ends as design. The risk of total responsibility for a design is the promise of creation.
Every Design is Good. Every Design is Bad.
Further, I believe we must acknowledge that the designs we produce will never be of a single polarity between what is considered “good” or “evil” (Nelson & Stolterman, p. 186). I believe that the essence of evil is that which brings about separation from the whole, whether actual separation (as in death as a separation from the living) or in perception (as in the belief that another culture does not value similar things as oneself because the grammar and actions which they use to meet those ends appear different than one’s own). Yet, to design is to consciously engage in the practice of situating oneself in a specific context in order to affect change for those the design is intended to serve.
Anytime I design, I must acknowledge that the stakeholders who I privilege as being my intended users will perceive my design as “good” or “virtuous” (if successful). Likewise, those who interact with the design, and whom the design is not intended, may find the design to be deviant from their whole, and it may be perceived as difficult, “bad” or “evil.” Thus, every designer must acknowledge their designs as affording all peoples, from all encounters and from across time to judge the design based upon what they project as moral and consistent to their wholistic worldview.
Given a large enough audience and a long enough time, all designs will be seen as good and evil. An example of low-hanging fruit would be the Nazi Germany — something originally thought by certain people as something as a “national unifier,” escalated as one of the most despicable humanitarian disasters in the history of the world. Or perhaps we might argue the design of an expansion of the wall at the Southern border of the United States — for some individuals, this design promises values of protection, strength, and pride, and for others, it promotes values of hatred, bigotry, xenophobia, and an unsustainable use of resources.
What to Notice in UX Research
I have argued that a good designer must take complete responsibility for the implications of their design work, that the responsibility taken is not guaranteed by their research but solely through their judgement, and that I believe the strongest motivation to encourage this design responsibility is the existential pursuit; whereby, I create in service of others and through which I end up creating a slightly different form of myself, and those who engage with my design work as well. However, I wish to discuss the elements that I seek when trying to learn from others when I analyze them in the form of experience “users.” It is often discussed in our field the prominence of usability and “intuitive” design. When designers seek to know what makes something usable for their end users, I believe we are typically seeking to optimize the most efficient way to have users perform tasks, find tasks to perform, as well as encourage patterns of dependence such that they return to the design time and time again (think ecommerce sites or mobile games that harvest player data). The alternative hot-word is to find what makes certain designs “intuitive” for end users. As Wennberg, et al (2018), argue, the idea of “intuitive” has become a catch-all for at least 6 different secondary meanings (natural, familiarity, easy-to-learn, simplistic, instinctive, and non-conscious processing). With this plurality in mind, I seek out the underlying, specific, situated, moral ontologies of my users whenever I can and to the best of my available resources. There are limitations; at times I may only have the ability to interpret Google Analytics, heat-maps of sites, or feedback from A/B testing. However, these sorts of quantitative metrics can only tell me the traces of behaviors, not the underlying “why,” not the core of my users’ behaviors.
At my best I am able to get out in the field, speak with others, watch them as they work, how they build the world around them with their artifacts, what things they take pride in, what frustrates them, how they solve everyday problems, and cope with everyday breakdowns. I want to get to know the moral ontologies of my users (Taylor, 15–18). By eliciting their stories and living a day in their lives, good designers can provide services that react to their users’ worldviews.
However, I do not believe this always needs to be directly aligned with our users. A good designer should be able to articulate those moral ontologies (their users’ concepts of how the universe works) in order to predict their users’ expectations when interacting with their designs. Through this ability, I believe a designer must make value-judgments based upon whether or not the experience would provide appropriate amount of insight for his or her users towards their expectations. Should the designer frustrate their user? Slow them down? Speed them up? Make this feel perplexed? Perhaps allow them to feel intelligent or at ease over the design they are interacting with? It is these considerations about the quality of experience which create the intangible values atop of usability and intuitive design.
Odds & Ends
I believe it is the softer skills of discernment and articulation of users’ values, the freedom to create and become, as well as the onus for a designer to claim complete responsibility for the consequences of their design which make them a great designer in my eyes. I should add that it comes without mention that a designer must push themselves to work on their visual communication skills as well as those which realize a sequence of interactions. This includes the offline mediums such as sketching and working with their design team on whiteboards, to design and develop workshops and alignment mapping exercises as a vehicle to elicit their users’ worldviews and stakeholders’ assumptions. As well, designers must have the drive to generate creative and disparate connections, to imagine what might be, and to connect those imaginations to their sources of inspiration. Finally, designers must as well develop and follow a rigor of evaluative measures to elucidate the efficacy of their designs and to determine if the core intention of their designs have followed through to the experience of their end users.
Closing Remarks
I believe in the pragmatism of design as it is a reflexive, practice-oriented profession. I believe that in design I must be humble, arduous, self-critical, and to always take responsibility for what I create as well as for how I reflect and learn from the process of creation. I believe it is of the utmost importance to speak to and be criticized by as many peoples, from as many different backgrounds and nations as possible, in order to develop a sophisticated library of reference to situate values over why this design is appropriate here, but not to another set of stakeholders. It is my aspiration to travel to as many places as I can. I wish to be perplexed and to come to understand the why and the how of the what I observe and participate in. To be an Experience Designer is to utilize the medium of interaction and leverage it towards eliciting the ever-changing understanding of what it means to be human. I look forward to the many opportunities where I may be a small part of creating that understanding.
TL;DR
If you made it to the end of this essay by skimming, then this fun, 3-minute video I made may intrigue you! Or, if you took into consideration the wider range of design process implications I reflected upon, then this fun video may be a relaxing bookend to this read.
Below you can watch the truncated, sketch stop-motion video of my design philosophy, hear my actual voice, and listen to me noodle around a bit on guitar. Cheers!
Thank you for reading!
