I feel stupid

I just arrived at a place I had never been to before, and went looking for the loo. I found a sign and followed it. I walked and walked without finding anything. I got nervous, turned around and went back to the sign, that pointed in the direction from where I just came from. A woman walked by and I asked her.
“Oh, of course… down there and around the corner. We should really have another sign here!”
The loo was right there, around the corner, and I had missed it. I felt stupid. I don’t want to feel stupid. No one wants to feel stupid.

Abstract complexity, Photo by DeepMind on Unsplash

I believe this is the most valuable insight that we, as product and service developers have, and that we should tattoo it on each other’s foreheads. No one wants to feel stupid. I believe this is the foundation of any good or bad experience. It should be engraved on large blocks of granite, placed in all design studios as a shrine to visit every morning. We should print it on banners and hang outside every office of every startup, every fin tech entrepreneur and every council IT office. No one wants to feel stupid.

No one wants to get annoyed, angry or call customer service. No one wants to have to work things out themselves. No one wants to feel like they’ve missed something. This is of course obvious when you’re reading this now, but it’s so often forgotten when our daily interactions are built, whether they are roads, washing machines, transport apps or coffee makers.

The two main problems

There are two main problems here. The first is that products and services could be designed to work smoothly for most people. Touch screens can be pretty good these days. Translation, visual accessibility, good UX principles, all of that is out there, and designers are usually really good at working from human centred perspective. But designers often have very little mandate.

This leads us to the second problem. The reason most companies provide services and products we need, is not out of an altruistic will to better the world, but to earn a living, grow a business or convince investors to invest. Design is something that is used to sell more of something, and is therefore seen as an optional extra, that can be exchanged for something else that can increase sales.

Abstract complexity, Photo by DeepMind on Unsplash

The dilemma

I’ve spent the last 10 years working with design, and I’ve come to think of design as a dilemma. On the one hand we have all the tools to make the most amazing, groundbreaking, usable and accessible products and services. That’s what we’ve learnt how to do. We have a desire to solve the most wicked problems. (UNDP describes a wicked problem in this article) We have the know how to figure out what should or shouldn’t be developed and we know how to communicate this to others.

On the other hand, we are usually hired by organisations, either as freelancers or employees, and we are hired to deliver on a particular metric. We are there to make a product or service more profitable. (Jared Spool writes about ROI for UX Design in this article, and describes monetary value of design.) If we redesign the sign up flow, make a service available for visually impaired, or find new opportunities for expansion through design research, doesn’t really matter unfortunately. Since the measure of success in the world we live in, is monetary growth, everything has to contribute to that. This means that design can make a huge impact, but if there’s something else that can achieve the same monetary growth, designers can be replaced.

So thinking back at the initial very obvious statement, that we don’t want to feel stupid whilst using products or services, there’s still an explanation to why we constantly end up interacting with things that make us feel bad about ourselves.

The conundrum

So the real head scratcher here is this. I don’t believe it actually is more profitable in the long run, to provide a service that people feel stupid using. I believe we’re letting quarterly reports and fortnightly meetings determine a very short term cash flow focused way of thinking, and it might not even be financially clever to do so.

So if short term monetary measures are standing in the way for great experience design, what do we do about it? Michael F. Buckley has an interesting article about the morality of UX design. The article features a description of how product and service providers recently have had to change from “just” producing the latest and most luxurious, to producing something more. Something that feels good to use.

The morality

There is no real moral to this story, but there’s always a point where I as a designer have to face my inner self and consider morality. In each project I work on, I have look myself in the mirror and think, am I doing this for the profit, or for the user? It is the dilemma so many of us face, and will continue facing when designing for organisations that are out there to make a profit.