Do we really need to care about UX?

Upon waking up in the morning, you want to perk up with a fragrant cup of coffee and start your day off right. Approaching the coffee machine, you place your cup and press the convenient large button on the front panel next to the screen. The beans start grinding, and the screen lights up with a greeting. You are immediately offered coffee type and portion size in the main menu. Then, you can start brewing or adjust the desired temperature and strength. You press start, and a minute later, your favorite drink is ready.

But let's stop dreaming for a moment and return to today's reality.

Recently, I was gifted a new expensive coffee machine from a renowned brand. And of course, the first thing I wanted to do was to give it a test drive and brew some coffee. After prolonged struggles to find the water and bean container openings, the task was finally solved. I knew that in this model, I could choose the grind size of the coffee beans, but how to do it? Despite going through all the menus, I couldn't find this function, but later, it turned out there was a small wheel behind the container where the beans are poured. The menu of this model assumed a huge set of functions that were not intuitively understandable, and at that moment of despair, I had to resort to the user manual. But all attempts to read the manual only confused me more than they helped, creating the impression that the person writing the manual had never used the product himself. And indeed, why bother with intuitive UX design when we have the Internet, where you can always find reviews on YouTube or information on forums? And this applies to almost all the products that surround us.

The user experience does not depend on what we use, whether it's a kettle or a mobile banking app. UX design surrounds us everywhere, in interactions with physical as well as virtual products.

But let's talk about modern technologies in the IT and software sphere, where inexperienced users sometimes find it challenging to buy a plane ticket, schedule an appointment to a doctor, pay utility bills, make a bank transfer, or even set up an app. And now imagine if you are using it for the first time, or if your parents are starting to use it.

Perhaps there are more technologies than benefits from them? Developers often forget how important it is to make the interaction with the product as intuitive and comfortable, without creating unnecessary questions and without complicating our lives. Or maybe most of them started thinking that it's more important to make it look nice rather than make it user-friendly? Developers have long ceased to consider how important it is to create an app that we will understand immediately, rather than one we will get used to. They have long stopped clearly formulating error messages to the user, but we'll discuss this in another article.

There's another side to the problem, mentioned briefly earlier. The vast majority of developers are focused on making the product beautiful, often falling into the trap. In my observation, flashy and unusual designs are often inconvenient to use. Just think about which app you would use: a beautiful, confusing, and useless one, or a neat, well-thought-out, and convenient one? The answer is obvious.

As a professional in this field, I try to find solutions, but there are countless examples of bad UX design, and let's consider just a few:

1. Excessive and distracting animations that hinder the user from focusing on the main task. Like most of us, I enjoy cartoons and beautiful special effects. Even the paperclip and dog from early versions of MS Word can't save my time.
2. Fields that cannot be highlighted, and the absence of an icon nearby, but there's an ambiguous hidden way. I feel like Hercule Poirot.
3. Confusing navigation, which is almost a panacea for most applications, when it's sometimes unclear where to find the necessary action or what to do next. It feels like Christopher Columbus didn't discover America but accidentally discovered Antarctica.
4. Modern forms sometimes offer to fill out a bunch of fields, a huge part of which is irrelevant to the current action. Personally, I always fill out my tax return on time, but not in all jurisdictions at once.
5. Overloaded screens with excessive information, when instead of the main or frequently used actions, all the information is displayed on one screen. Of course, as a child, I dreamed of becoming an astronaut, but I never wanted to sit in the mission control center.

So what happened to the IT technology industry? One of the main points is the change in the decision-making center. Sometimes, higher-ups, but incompetent in this area, shape the product themselves, confusing beauty with convenience. And UX design itself has ceased to be a priority direction in product development. It's roughly the same as what's been happening in the automotive industry lately, where marketers shape the final product, not engineers. Even companies that have always stood out for exemplary UX design are now facing huge problems in this area.

But the main mistake lies in the fact that people often confuse UI and UX, sometimes even considering them the same thing. If the former focuses on visual aesthetics, and these are the people who create design in the broadest sense of the word, then the latter does almost invisible work that goes beyond creativity and is more of a science than an art. Beautiful doesn't mean convenient, convenient doesn't mean attractive; these are not mutually exclusive but complementary concepts. But unfortunately, today only one concept has formed: beautiful means good.

Have you ever felt fear while comfortably riding in a modern car? Personally, I did when it got hot, and to turn on the climate control, you have to go to the menu on the large beautiful screen, select settings, then climate settings, then climate control zone, then select the temperature. It's important not to get into an accident.

In conclusion, let's go back to the beginning of the article. After all, we want our tomorrow to be comfortable, right? As I wrote earlier, there's not much necessary for this, namely, delegating specific tasks to experts? in the field, giving them more freedom, not reducing everything to a single decision-making center, and of course, combining aesthetics and science into a single product. And then there will be even more happy users.

So why do I raise this issue? To make the world better!