something in the way

User Experience Design (or UX for short) has exploded on the software scene carrying a blazing torch of freedom and promising to guide us to the holy land. We are now dedicating time and resources specifically to user experience design. This emphasis on actually designing user interactions and the experience of our applications is a fantastic effort and I applaud all those that wave the UX flag and sing its praises. But I have one problem: UX is making me a worse software developer.

An unfortunate byproduct of the UX revolution is the misinformation that developers simply can’t design good experiences. We see article after article explaining what happens when you leave developers in charge of UX design. People laugh at how stupid developers can be, that they just don’t “get it” when it comes to designing things well. These articles should highlight the importance of explicit thought when designing interactions in applications, they should not strip developers of their confidence and creativity. And yet that’s exactly what I’ve noticed happening to me.

Let me relate a brief hypothetical example. On our software project I am the lead clientside developer. We have a UX Specialist (aka UX Guy) that is responsible for the design of wireframes and mockups that explain how the user navigates through the application. During the UX pass, our UX Guy listens to us (developers and business guys) explain what the problem is and what we think we want the software to do. Then UX Guy goes off and comes back with a set of wireframes for how the application will work. We discuss, bring up problems, send back the wireframes for further iteration. Repeat that process until everyone is satisfied with the wireframes, then move on to actual development of features.

But then during development I have found myself getting the following question from my manager: “Hey Doug, how come you can’t do Feature X in the app?” and I have found myself actually saying this (shudder): “Oh, I guess that wasn’t included in UX Guy’s wireframes, you should ask him.” That’s a bullshit response. I’m not a neutered incompetent mindless developer. If something doesn’t work or was forgotten, I can figure out how to fix it. That doesn’t mean throw the code in without thinking about design. That means pausing my code writing, thinking through the problem carefully, designing a solution that will be sleek and elegant, and then continuing on with development.

And yet in my mind I have the unconscious prejudice that I, as a developer, cannot be allowed to make “UX” decisions. Fuck that. We are all responsible for designing the experience of our software. We are all responsible for carefully thinking through every interaction. We are all responsible for making things beautiful, making things simple, making things elegant. And more than that, we are all capable.

Since it's a few weeks into September and I'm involved in design education—teaching a class in the graduate program at Pratt and another at the School of Visual Arts, both in New York City—I thought it appropriate to write a little about design students and the notion of Intent.

Intention is one of those pivotal terms in design. Many have used it to delineate design from art (bo-ring), arguing that design has a different kind of intentionality. (I'm not sure I'd want to be in a bar with a bunch of fine artists, accusing them of a paucity of intention, for the record.) But there does seem to be something to the notion that designers are intentional in a more-or-less deductive way; that the fruits of their labors (or at least the labors themselves) are somehow "logical" or necessarily so given a number of circumstances. Those circumstances can be insights from design research, for example, or manufacturing constraints, or market factors. This kind of deliberateness or intentionality finds a safe haven in the minds of designers, who, for all their paradigm-busting reputations, seriously need constraints in which to operate (I am about the millionth person to remark on this; faves are Charles and Ray Eames and Ralph Caplan).

For design students, though, the idea of being "intentional" is far from prosaic. Indeed, it needs to made explicit. Let me explain.

If you give a set of design students a design problem, the first thing they do is design something. They don't look at the design problem as a problem at all, usually, but rather as a canvas on which to paint "something they like." You hear them use this expression verbatim, actually, especially when you ask them about what's not there: "Why didn't you mock up the design you talked about last week?" I'll ask. "Well," they'll respond, "I didn't like it." This exchange has played out so many times in my years of teaching (16) that I find myself getting relatively exasperated...even driven once to retort, "It doesn't matter what you like! Liking has nothing to do with this!" Now, admittedly, I lost it right then, but what this illustrates (or at least illustrated to me that day) is that very often, a designer's response to a problem is a personal one—not driven by constraints, or research, or rigor, or objective value. And you'd think this would be a good thing for a creative person, that expression of a personal point of view. But a lot of the time, it can very much get in the way.

So you actually have to spell it out for them: "I think your design work would be stronger if your intention was more obvious, or made more obvious," I'll offer. They look at me with a blank stare. What do I mean by that?

"I mean that it's clear that you were actually going after something. That you were deliberate, intentional, methodical, [and okay, deductive] in the design process. And that we can see the design problem in the design solution."

Sometimes this makes sense to the students, and sometimes it doesn't, but I know deep down that right at that moment they are pitying me for being ignorant of—or at least shortchanging—their personal vision. At least the grad students are, anyway.

And yes, the irony here is that you need to spend just as much time hammering students to put more of their personality into their design; to have a point of view, and to not be afraid to express it. But if not the yin and the yang of the thing exactly, then these are at least two sides of one of the coins of design pedagogy: students need to be more intentional—objectively. But they also need to have a voice—subjectively. And that's where a healthy dose of prejudice comes in, which we'll pick up on next.

Please see my blog post for more info, and a live version of the demo: zeropointnine.com/blog/augmented-reality-texture-extraction-experiment/

Thanks.

Cast: Lee Felarca