Rebound effects in UX-Design

The process of reflection is a great tool. It is part of many workshops to evaluate feedback and collect all the impressions, we could learn from. Growing from student to master (if there could be mastery in anything), the conscious perception, reflecting on something we see or consume, helps to understand the nature of how something was done, or to start questioning to get to the core of the matter.

To reflect my own story, I start with the year 1999. I am pretty sure, I wouldn’t even have heard of the word usability or experience. The word UX-Design wasn't even born yet. At that time I did my civil service as an ambulance man at the red cross.
While doing patient transportations it was important to give patients a good feeling. Empathy is a core quality to do so. While being in a state of emergency, sprinting to an accident, it was important to stay alert. Being at the accident, everything was about reducing or avoiding pain.

Sometimes today’s business and results of applied digital designs feels the same. UX-Designers tend to reduce pain points, instead of delivering what could be called an experience. In fact, they strive for delivering good usability and call it an experience because it sounds more fancy.

Why did we become problem-solver, instead of creators of wellbeing?

Interactive technology is meant to be practical, helpful and if possible beautiful. Something we could sum up with the term “usable”. Looking at current briefings, designers are asked to solve a problem by making a product more efficient or more beautiful. The most obvious action items achieving this goal would be

• “a great user experience” by putting some nice visual look and feel to the surface
• Adding more interactivity to deepen the level of engagement with the product
• Or reducing usability flaws

…to name a few. The core problem about this approach is that still too many people imply that a great user experience will be achieved by eliminating negative experiences. Would someone call you automatically happy if you are not feeling bad? Kind of assuming your normal mental state would be negative?!

I also called myself a digital problem solver on my homepage. As I think I am quite good at solving problems based on a brief. Solving problems is within my comfort zone. It's a process of searching for insights we could translate into precise action items. Similar to working on your own notes to accomplish defined goals. But is this really the way to create pleasurable experiences?

Over the years we created more and more bootstrapped design options within the contemporary design domain. It’s easy to come up with layout frameworks for apps or websites that want to accomplish a given task better or faster. In fact, the start-up industry and agile working environments accelerated standardization and one-size-fits-all approaches. By narrowing down our rules, streamlining laws of UX or recently discovered psychological insights, we paved a way to be checklist designers. Creativity and experimentation fell short mostly.

Same for me: Depending on budget range and available insights I structured the project. First, I went through the checklist and if possible, I added an additional perspective to give a feeling of a more experiential approach that might also affect hedonic needs. And by doing so, might be much more pleasurable to use. But honestly that approach took at least double the time and mostly earns most criticism from the guy sitting there who heard basics about usability. Finally, when it comes to budget, most clients tend to use the approach that is connected to the common design realm.

Stepping out into the real realm of user experience, the step towards enjoyment, towards fulfilling psychological needs or to achieve something that got coined wellbeing is mostly not happening. Or to put it in the simplest term: How many digital products do you know, that are fun to use and enjoyable?

I guess often, we describe products with a great UX that are, as Prof. Dr. Michael Burmester calls, usability + x.

UX-Design or Design for Usability?

The world of fulfilling needs and a systemic approach to craft great experiences is different and more work than just shaping an intuitive way of using a product.

Slaves to efficiency

By stripping down our processes in digital design towards good usability and by gaining a lot of knowledge of the user, we learned to walk down well-worn path. Creative thinking, combined with delivering pleasure or fulfilling psychologic needs, had to step behind usability and systemic ways to streamline production. Designers seem to value the work of establishing and documenting design systems more than the explorative energy released when going new ways to fulfill hedonic values and to bring pleasure to users.

Our efficiency paved the way for dark patterns being part of the daily lives of the user. We support hooks, triggers and try to trick users to accomplish actions by design decision. As we all play with the same set of rules and cues, this dark world becomes natural to the user. I guess we must pay attention to avoid a growing scepticism towards the medium. There are too many bad influences, such as fake-everything, fake news, fake reviews, fake profiles,... Trust is waning.

As I referred in my headline, mentioning the rebound-effect, efficiency gains lead to some backfire effects. Not only dark patterns. Another example if we strip down user experience to efficiency is sustainability. If all things get more efficient it would lead to more consumption. The delivery of fast information supports the fight for our attention. Why not focus our energy on providing more valuable, enduring moments (if appropriate)?

Of course, this is a dark picture as often the designers’ tasks are providing room for great content. I would even assume that at least 80% of web designers work is more the work of an architect. To create a wrapper for great things that could happen within its hull and together form a momentum, that feels good (I am sure I will elaborate on the interplay of designers and content creators in another post).

Beauty and brains, pleasure and usability - they should go hand in hand.

Don Norman

Reflect your work to aim for the better

What am I aiming for with this article? I want you to reflect on the work you do. Being part of our rapid evolving “tools first” world, it becomes natural to lose our souls to false prophets, whoever and whatever they are. And though you might be in your comfort zone solving problems, it would be better to focus on actions that are orientated towards creating a preferred future or truly great experiences.

Therefore, smart people created smart methods/approaches on how to work on solutions. Design Thinking uses logic, imagination, intuition, and systemic reasoning to achieve preferred outcomes for the project and the user. It's the preferred way to work on innovation. If you want to stick more with the user, the people using the service, stick to human-centered design. Basically, both methods share similar ways of working on a project.

There are challenges, real world challenges we must tackle, such as more inclusive products, how designers could help building a sustainable life and of course upcoming technological transformations including the rise of AI and the evolution of our workspaces.

Until I write my next article, here’s a small collection of interesting articles and a collection to resources that help you opening your mind for more mindfulness and to reflect.

Literature

1. Positive Design: An Introduction to Design for Subjective Well-Being
2. Designing for Motivation, Engagement and Wellbeing in Digital Experience
3. User Experience Is All There Is: Twenty Years of Designing Positive Experiences and Meaningful Technology
4. User Experience and Experience Design
5. Emotion & Design
6. Usability plus X

FAQs