Step Outside Your UX Bubble

What am I doing?

Have you ever sat behind your screen and been overwhelmed by the feeling that the things you’re designing or programming are totally meaningless? That your work might have no impact at all? Or, even worse, that you’re part of the problem? The problem that society is steering full speed into the abyss and you’re not designing the breaks, but just another tool to accelerate the process.

To put it bluntly, designers are in a pretty rough spot at the moment. And it makes total sense to ask yourself a few questions sometimes.

Our clients of course expect us to continuously deliver and create beautiful and useful things. We have to be on top of our game, be creative, smart and innovative to feed the markets with new ideas and desirable products.

Looking at history, product and fashion designers have always designed objects and items that are desirable, supporting consumption and people’s eagerness to buy more new stuff all the time. Traditionally, we’ve all been working for the industry with the goal of stimulating consumption for the benefit of the corporate world.

Take responsibility

Especially now, in times of fed-up markets, global warming, and idiot governments ignoring it, designers have to take responsibility too—reflecting on their work and, in the best case, contributing to society.

The topic of the World Usability Day 2016 in Berlin was Sustainable UX. Pia Betton and myself prepared a talk on the growing importance of UX design in this paradoxical setup. We asked ourselves: what’s the role of UX design, and how can digital designers contribute to a paradigm shift that has sustainability as a focus?

Take Apple, for example. The benchmark for a lot of designers. In my opinion, they don’t understand what sustainable UX means—or actually, they do understand, but they just don’t care. They left the route of user-centric design years ago by forcing us to buy their products in ever shorter intervals. How? By constantly updating their OS versions. Functioning products turn to rubbish because the older hardware is incompatible with the new software. The iPhone 4, which is still a nice device, has become obsolete.

App wars

During the research I came across many examples. Just take the app cosmos. If you browse App Store and look for the big car manufacturing brands from southern Germany, for example, you’ll be inundated with dozens of mobile apps, created and launched by probably five different departments. What are the use cases for all of these apps? And do their customers really needs that many?

The number of apps downloaded worldwide increased from 179,628 million to 268,692 million between 2015 - 2017.

The problem is that the figures don’t reflect reality—about 20% of users abandon their apps after the first use. And furthermore, the percentage of app usage drops by almost 80% in the first 3 days.

Many app developers realize that their apps aren’t performing as they expected. After about 2 months, many abandon their apps— and the great graveyard of apps grows and grows.