As a user experience designer, I thought my job was to make things not suck. Until recently. As technology has evolved, human behavior has evolved along with it. Since behavior is the basis of user experience design, my job has evolved as well. Now, my job is to make things people love. At the 2009 IA Summit, Karl Fast articulated the value proposition of user experience design with sparkling clarity. “Engineers make things,” he said, “we make people love them.” And then he held up an iPhone as an example.
This is a crucial change, the importance of which cannot be overstated.
The iPhone is Not Easy to Use: A New Direction for User Experience Design, from Johnny Holland - It’s all about interaction
This is directly related to something I’ve been pondering a lot lately: namely, how to easily differentiate—and explain the difference to uneducated aduiences—between unexpected delightful interactions and unexpected bad interactions.
Obviously the key difference is supporting what the user intends to do versus what you want the user to do. And even if you choose the former path, there’s a problem associated with assuming too much about what the user wants to do.
Example: having a car automatically unlock when the owner’s within a certain range is a nice anticipatory feature, but having the car start up as soon as the owner gets inside is assuming too much about what the user intends to do. Result: The owner is startled and confused. Eventually, the owner will be used to the car automatically starting, but will be continually irritated, not pleased, every time they go to the car just to get something out of the glove compartment.
