UX Debunked?
September 21, 2010
The consumerization of information technology focuses attention on what I call toaster attributes. The idea is that anyone with a piece of bread can usually figure out how to insert the bread and burn it to a greater or lesser degree. I have encountered toasters I couldn’t figure out. I ignored them and just ate the bread, usually with jam. Life requires adaptive behavior.
Source: http://masquerademasks.sultaninfo.com/fancyfeathermasquerademasks/ May be detected as malware.
“Can Experience Be Designed?” struck me as germane to search, content processing, and a number of information tasks. The write up contains some useful information and left me thinking that much of the content applies to search. Let me highlight a passage that resonated with me:
Everybody is a user, so is everybody a user experience designer? Since everybody is a user, everybody has an opinion on how his experience should be. And many are very eager to utter their opinions really strongly. But that doesn’t mean that every user is a designer. Asking for salt doesn’t make you a cook. The user has his own opinion, the user experience designer deals with different opinions and tries to find the best compromise. Good compromises are not in the middle, they are higher than the initial options: good compromises are synthetic (If your options are cowardly or foolhardy, the synthesis is courageous).
Taking complex functions and making them usable by lots of people is difficult. At lunch today (September 19, 2010), my son and I talked about the complexity lurking under the surface of our iPads. Most people can use the gizmos, but the innards are a mystery to many and almost unrepairable. The UX or user experience allows the iPad to be used to do “something”. Making access easy and keeping the ham handed user from killing the system with an inadvertent keystone or touch is a challenging task.
Casual engineering will not deliver sustainable user experience. Lousy quality won’t either. In fact the list of hurdles a product must get over or around is long and some items on the list are fuzzy. Other challenges may not be on the list at all.
What’s this have to do with search? The article identifies issues that permeate search and content processing marketing. The marketing is misleading if not a falsehood. My hunch is that the UX bandwagon seems easier to achieve than search systems that deliver what the user needs with a minimum of fuss and muss.
Recent search innovations like Google Instant or the hoo hah about predictive search are irrelevant to me. Some innovations are like the medieval masques. Hiding reality allows some folks to have a good time.
Reality, however, is more persistent than the UX whether placed on a mobile device or the pock marked face of an Elizabethan rake.
Stephen E Arnold, September 21, 2010
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