The Power of Experience Design

I'm leaving Config this year feeling inspired in a way I haven't felt since I was a wide eyed, bushy tailed college grad looking to leave my mark on the world. I'm almost a little embarrassed about it, with the voice in the back of my head saying "It's just a conference Katherine, what's the big deal? Does it really require a manifesto on LinkedIn?" And yet, I can't help the fact that hearing from such a variety of thoughtful, vibrant, creative people (and specifically, women!) brought so much color back into my creative world that was starting to look a little grey. So I'm here to process some of my thoughts, and if I'm lucky maybe even bring a little bit of that inspiration to someone else ??

From now on I will be, as Simone Giertz put it, following my enthusiasm. It's a fickle friend to follow, and it will never take you on a journey that general advice says you should be on (re: the aforementioned voice in the back of my head), but when you are doing something that you feel genuine joy for, it has a tendency to transcend the rules. Josh Wardle said the same when he explained that his success with Wordle came not from following some of the most common rules of viral success, but rather from doing something meaningful to him. It's that inexplicable feeling he was able to bring to his game that struck a chord with people. It wasn't a carefully thought out URL, a complicated set of game mechanics, or a robust monetization scheme. It was the simplicity of it, the feeling that he built this game as something for he and his partner to enjoy together, that resonated with the world.

These moments of feeling are what gives software a soul, which was explained beautifully by Karla Cole and Nashilu Mouen Makoua . I won't even try to paraphrase them here, you should watch their talk for yourself because it was wonderful in a way I didn't know software could be. But what I did take away is how critical it is that we continue to bring the moments that shaped us as people to our work, to tell the stories that scare us, and to seek inspiration from outside the world of technology. We can't forget to make things feel human in a world increasingly centered around technology and AI.

And that's what software is at the end of the day, it's a central part of the modern human experience. As Andy Allen put it, it's not something we interact with at our jobs and put away to go back to our real lives, it's a part of our lives, whether we want it to be or not. So sometimes as designers we're not meant to save people time by ensuring the fewest clicks to get us from point A to point B, but rather give them something to savor. Software is a tool that has given creatives the power to shape culture in a way we haven't really seen before, and we need to use it to create a culture we want to be a part of - one that has soul, emotion, and creativity, not a sterile, functional world that lets us accomplish our goals in the fewest number of steps.

Which brings me finally to Joyce Croft , who sums my thoughts up beautifully by reminding us that being a designer isn't a tech job at the end of the day, but an exercise in understanding people. I've compared it to studying psychology or anthropology, she compares it to being a therapist. We need to not just understand, but genuinely care about people's wants and needs. We need to value their quirks, their emotions, their ups, their downs, and their in betweens, and create experiences that make their lives better in some way. Sometimes it's glamorous and you get to create beautiful, award winning designs, but sometimes it's more invisible, like learning a complicated new topic you know nothing about just so you can improve a few spreadsheets and make someone's workflow a little bit easier.

At the end of all of this, I'm reminded that no matter what your title has before the word "designer" - product, interaction, UX, UI, the list goes on - at the end of the day we are all experience designers, the ones in charge of shaping the experiences people have in their everyday lives. They might be the big experiences, like in the electric car you drive to work, or the software you use to do your job; but it's about the little experiences too, like the time you smiled when you checked the weather, or when your browser did just exactly the thing you needed it to do. We have an opportunity to shape what life looks like in the world today and into tomorrow, to make it joyful and full of color and life and inspiration. And wow. What an amazing feeling that is ??

Figma #Config2024