Title: Why User Experience Cannot Be Designed
Context: We can take lots of things into account when designing UX, except the most important part: the user.
Synopsis: Sure we talk about “user centered design”, but what does that really mean? That’s like saying your mechanic provides “driver centric auto repair”. Maybe that’s true to a certain extent but the reality of the situation is that the “user” is the biggest unknown variable in the whole process. Want to build some personas? Go right ahead. Conduct some ethnography research? Be my guest. But these are sketches. Assumptions that we make in order to construct an apparition against which to measure our hunches. We are not talking about real users with real experiences in their past. This is certainly a necessary shortcut that we must take but it is also a fact that we should not gloss over as an irrelevant footnote. Embracing these very real limitations on what we are capable of producing can actually help us to design for better experiences rather than trying to vainly dictate the experience in it’s totality.
Best Bit: “… why is it argued that UX cannot be designed? It’s because UX depends not only on the product itself, but on the user and the situation in which they use the product.”
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