Is "Good User Experience" a Good Thing?

UX is a recent buzzword. I first heard of it at Microsoft in 2003, though the label dates back at least to 2000, and the ideas go back much further than that. (Microsoft's publicity machine jumped on the term - see here).

What is UX? According to the Nielson Norman Group, who organized a User Experience World Tour in 2000:

"User experience" encompasses all aspects of the end-user's interaction with the company, its services, and its products. The first requirement for an exemplary user experience is to meet the exact needs of the customer, without fuss or bother. Next comes simplicity and elegance that produce products that are a joy to own, a joy to use. True user experience goes far beyond giving customers what they say they want, or providing checklist features. In order to achieve high-quality user experience in a company's offerings there must be a seamless merging of the services of multiple disciplines, including engineering, marketing, graphical and industrial design, and interface design.

This investment in "experience" is gaining popularity in the art world too. When discussing The Gates in Central Park, Christo and Jean Claude repeatedly stressed that their work had no special meaning other than "the experience of it". Their website says: "Our memories of this experience are how the artwork changes us." As another example, take Olafur Eliason's The Weather Project. The blurb on the Tate site uses the word "experience" no less than six times in their description of the work.

With so many media messages to compete with, it is not surprising that artists and companies are looking for ways to create stronger experiences in their audiences. However, there are dangers.

Take the case of "Rich UI". For fifteen years, I (and many others) have been advocating Rich UI technologies, which enable animation and multimedia to be used in computer user interfaces. In that time, I never guessed that the Rich UI technologies would ultimately become controlled by advertisers. Now I find myself in the frustrating position of having to turn off, disable, uninstall or block the very Rich UI technologies I have been advocating and helping to build for so long - just so I can read the New York Times website without being distracted by a high-speed musical motion graphic. Animated advertisements have terrible usability. They invariably launch automatically, rather than under my control, and they almost always lack a "stop" button. Also, it is going to get much worse: companies like the New York Times have made it a clear goal to increase the amount of audio and video advertisements on their websites, as well as the number of "pre-roll" animated advertisements, which you are required to watch before you can see the real content. Simply reading a newspaper article has never been more challenging. (See my #e44 project, which I created partly as a response).

As we shift from Rich UI to compelling UX, the agenda moves beyond simply communicating messages. The goal of UX is to consider (and therefore manipulate) all aspects of contact between the user and the product -- to create a much deeper and more psychological relationship between products and people. And where product designers go, advertisers are sure to follow.

Perhaps an early example is the Deadwood installation in MTA's Times Square Shuttle. HBO was not satisfied with a standard advertising message, so the producers of the HBO TV series decided to create an "experience". They purchased the rights to redecorate the entire interior of three New York subway cars -- including the walls, floors, ceiling, and seats. Talk about pimp-a-ride! The S is a public shuttle line, so travelers have no choice but to use one of the decorated cars. The MTA has been converted into a mandatory corporate theme experience.

Computer interfaces today are being embedded in refrigerators, desks, walls, and furniture. As advertisers, too, shift their focus to "User Experience", how long will it be before they realize that our living spaces would make ideal mandatory corporate theme experiences? Will I have to install a music-blocker on my toilet seat, in order to prevent the "Ajax disinfection experience?"

Communication Skills

The new focus on experience in art and technology follows, in my opinion, a much longer project focusing on "communication".

Deborah Cameron (on the radio) has done some valuable research in this area. She observed that, in the last one hundred years or so, we have moved from a culture of conversation to a culture of communication. In Oscar Wilde's era, people were idolized if they were good at conversation. The emphasis then was on what was left unsaid. Today, we are driven by communication. Even job postings for Janitors list "good communication skills" as a basic requirement. The goal of "communication skills" is the opposite of leaving things unsaid -- it is to express our internal states early and clearly. Oscar Wilde was a fabulous conversationalist. He had lousy communication skills.

Cameron points out that corporations have embraced the notion of communication, especially in commerce and advertising. The aim isn't necessarily to communicate well, but rather to convince the customer that the company cares about communication. For example, American shops frequently employ greeters who stand by the door of the store greeting customers as they enter. The individuals who do this job couldn't be more disinterested in whether you have a nice shopping experience, yet they always smile pleasantly and say a few encouraging words. The goal is to give the impression that the greeters care, and by extension the company itself cares.

For a while it worked: sales went up and customers gave positive feedback. However, people today are much more canny about what is genuine and what is fake, and the effectiveness of greeters has fallen off. So corporations are focusing not just on the words, but on the whole experience. Simply saying "have a nice day" is not enough. Now, the goal is to make you have a nice day, whether you want one or not.