Cry the beloved UX!
“People ignore design that ignores people.” - Frank Chimero, Designer
It was a starry winter night not so long ago. My riding buddies and I were toasting potatoes around a brilliantly glowing campfire. The logs were glowing and crackling… and then it happened. While stoking the fire a burning twig got separated from the main heap. As I watched in amazement, it glowed for a while… then began to smoke and slowly peter out. Separated from the heap, it was nothing. As part of the collective, it was everything.
Almost instinctively, I pushed it back to the collective heap. Within seconds it burst forth into the most effusively glowing twig that I had seen. It then struck me later that night. This nondescript episode was a metaphor for what’s currently happening to retail UX, where greed and maximizing shareholder value is intentionally isolating burning twigs, aka customers… and allowing them to peter out.
Let’s take a drone view of the UX scenario over the last three decades. Decade 1, from 1997 to 2007, can be called the golden era of online UX, when companies were willing to invest in listening to customers in order to serve them better. Retail, finance, healthcare, travel, and other sectors all had some interest in improvement.
Decade 2 was when things changed. The period from 2008 to 2018 was a time that UX teams experienced a diminished influence in the organisation. There were many factors at play, but a major one was the rise of the start-up culture. There are some great products that this era gave us. But the sudden "get rich quick" mentality that had caused the 2008 crash was being adopted by big tech and a slew of wannabes. Suddenly data and algorithms, not UX was the flavor of the month. UX was a shallow sop for users. Not that you’ll catch anybody admitting it. But you don’t have to, their actions speak louder.
Decade 3, starting a few years ago and still very much in force today, transformed UX into an entirely new discipline. Of course there are exceptional teams still practicing "good UX." But the larger trend in the tech industry today - led more strongly than ever by big names, is an entirely new way of relating to users.
A perfect example is the cancellation procedure of a particular service offered by a ginormous online retailer. The procedure is long, and consists of six separate pages. On each page, the consumer is nudged toward keeping their membership, even though they have began a procedure to end the agreement. The long scroll on the page, with caveats about how cancelling the membership will mean the loss of many benefits, adds insult to injury.
Other examples are legion. In fact we don’t have to look far. On home ground, it’s difficult to find even one official website or app that’s usable. The point however is, beyond isolating and frustrating customers, it’s drained talent and expertise away from mission-critical projects. On the other hand, the best-trained UX professionals are put to work rationalizing the manipulation of online customers. This of course has its consequences. In frustration, anger and resentment, customers pledge allegiance to other services.
Can we consciously try to bring back the once-glowing, now isolated twigs aka customers back to the great collective experience once offered. Can we go above and beyond to help them glow again. To ignore this is to risk perishing.
Behemoths perhaps won’t feel the pinch, as there zillions of vulnerable users being on-boarded by the minute. But as a mid-size, small or startup business with shallow pockets, you would do well not to ignore great UX. Doing so would be at the risk of perishing. As cliche as it sounds, retaining existing customers is easier than getting new ones.
Because we all clamor to create or design things that impact our world, let me leave you with a quote from a man I’ve long admired:
“If we want users to like our software, we should design it to behave like a likeable person: respectful, generous and helpful.” — Alan Cooper, Software Designer and Programmer