It is hard to name the good-ness of good UXD.
Intuitive?
People outside the field often say that they want a user experience which is “intuitive”. I have talked before about how under-considered that word is.
When people say they want a system to be “intuitive,” they typically think they mean that users should immediately understand how a system works when they encounter it. But you cannot really do that with many systems … not even with most systems people talk about when you ask them for an example of something “intuitive.”
Consider the mouse-and-cursor. Most of us have forgotten the first time we encountered it, and thus forgotten how unintuitive we found it the first time we used it. A little box on a string with a button or three on top? If you have just arrived from the 23rd century, you might pick it up and try talking to it. But with ten seconds of demonstration you understand it completely and have some sophisticated applications of it immediately available to you, and even if you didn’t see a mouse again for the next ten years you would still remember how it worked.
There you have what people really mean by “intuitive:” easy to explain, powerful in its implications, impossible to forget. You get that through systems that possess a clear, coherent internal logic that feels natural and obvious. Of course, it can take hard work to figure out those “natural and obvious” behaviors; we interaction designers call that work “interaction design.”
So that is not quite enough.
Delightful?
Cyd Harrell has a good critique of facile uses of “delight”:
delight [is] an ambiguous word, referring to either a level of pleasing someone (a high level) or a way of pleasing them (charm, surprise, in any case a very conscious pleasure). adopting a high level of pleasing users as a goal is good - mostly - but when designers, through some kind of linguistic slippage, adopt the “way” sense of delight to inappropriate contexts, it’s like following the script of a romance when trying to get to know a colleague — awkward. that said, lots of designers meant the level.
in recent years I’ve come to understand that the level can also be a problem in a more subtle way. if delight is a conscious pleasure - the spirit stirred somehow - multiple “experiences” or products or whatever trying to stir our spirit can be taxing. it’s not always additive & if it happens to miss — if it’s the wrong way of pleasure for the context, or the experience is just trying to make sure that it visibly, maybe measurably, exerted a high level of pleasure on you - it asks for attention it may not deserve. collectively, it can be a burden.
sometimes, especially with a longterm relationship like, well, a longterm relationship or like belonging in an institution, what we really need is the background level of assumption that we matter & are cared for, & then the occasional sparks in a special smile, the bed, a voting booth if you’re talking about stirring the civic spirit (I have a story I tell about being overwhelmed with institutional belonging in a library) - those become reinforcing & sustaining.
spoiler: those are harder to design for. & they can’t be accomplished entirely through the tools of design; so that’s where I think delight is tempting - it is suited to our toolset, & we can push it towards measurable. but in doing so (sometimes) we can get on the wrong foot.
Giles Colborne has a rap about how designers tend to justify gimmicky, interesting design as pursuing “delight”, but when one asks people about delightful experiences, they often describe effortless resolution of anxiety, a good UX design goal.
Boring?
Ryan Bigge’s In Defence of Boring UX:
“Only when a product is functional, reliable, and usable can users appreciate the delightful, pleasurable, or enjoyable aspects of the experience,” notes Fessenden. In other words, boring underpins delight — and sometimes boring is delightful.
Cap Watkins praises The Boring Designer:
Maybe it’s born out of seeing apps choose flash over function, or trying to understand just one too many indecipherable icons-as-buttons. Whatever the case, here's an ode to the boring designers among us. The designers who …
- Choose obvious over clever every time.
- Rarely stand their ground.
- Are Practical.
- Value Laziness.
- Lead the team.
Delivering power & pleasure?
I used to talk about “systems which deliver power and pleasure to the people who use them”. In 1997, when I was at Alan Cooper’s studio — then the only shop exclusively dedicated to what we now call “UX design”, we had a lively conversation about our mission statement coïnciding with us rebranding from “Cooper Software” to “Cooper Interaction Design”. Alan Cooper had a draft mission statement which was pretty good, but I was uneasy with its allusion to “designing software which is easy to use”. We were simplicity radicals then (and still), but we also worked on a lot of desktop apps which were necessarily complex.
I proposed “systems which deliver power and pleasure to the people who use them”, which I look back on with a mix of pride and unease. It has some distinct advantages as a way to articulate good UX design, and for a while the Cooper studio used it a lot in our materials. (It didn’t work as branding, though. Google search results were … worrisome.)
These days we rightly criticize the concept of “user-centered design” — we need a more global and ethical ground than that implies. (Though fergawdsake in the world we have we need more designers who are at least advocates for users.) But at that time that turn of phrase was a clarifying place to stand, and it still grounds much of how I think about UX design solutions:
Deliver
A lot of tools promise things which they do not deliver, either because they simply do not deliver the right function, or because they are too clumsy in their execution. A feature one does not use just acts as clutter, in the way.
Power
UXD should aspire to make things that are effective and make make people effective; a simple tool can be powerful if it is the right tool, and a tool should not shy from sophistication in the right context.
Pleasure
We need to talk about well-crafted design. This can mean fun, delight, or excitement, yes. But most often UX design should offer the subtler joy of an unobtrusively graceful tool.