The future of experience design is connected, not centered
Created time
Feb 24, 2023 08:14 PM
Author
medium.com
URL
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Genre
Book Name
The future of experience design is connected, not centered
Modified
Last updated December 26, 2023
Summary
• The Future of Experience Design is Connected, Not Centered focuses on how user experience (UX) has evolved in the digital age and how it should be adapted for the future.
• Key learnings include an understanding of the importance of an integrated and connected approach to UX and the need to recognize that users engage with digital products across multiple different channels.
• The book has actionable advice on how to use technology and design to create better experiences and how to use big data to inform decisions.
• As a UX designer, this book provides valuable insight into how to create products with a user-centric approach, ensuring they tap into the ever-changing technology landscape.
• For further reading, other recommended texts that focus on the principles of UX design include Don't Make me Think by Steve Krug and Designing with Empathy by Indi Young.
✏️ Highlights
For the socially conscious designer, it poses a conundrum: if not human centered, then what?
designing with compassion to support human experience, dignity, and agency will continue to be our ethical imperative
By definition, human centered design magnifies certain components (humans — as users, consumers) in our ecosystem while neglecting others (flora, fauna, non-consumer humans… basically everything else).
AirBnB has accelerated gentrification in several communities by driving up rents; Uber has contributed to traffic, pollution, and a precarious gig worker culture; Twitter has resulted in the spread of hate speech and radicalization of young people toward extremism; Facebook has platformed misinformation and illegally shared user data with historic consequences.
Human centered design emerged as a response to what existed before: business and engineering practices that did not design with humans in mind.
Human centered design has humanized design, and opened many eyes to the fact that understanding the human on the other end of a tool, product, or service can make said tool, product, or service more humane, and, yes, more successful.*
Perhaps we need humanity centered design, stakeholder centered design, activity centered design, life centered design, environment centered design, society centered design, or planet centered design…
The aspect of human centered design that requires our attention isn’t the word “human,” it’s the word “centered.” It’s not the choice of what to center that gets us in trouble, it’s the choice to center any one component at all — even with good intent, it leads to short term thinking, incomplete understanding, and narrowed opportunity spaces.
the goal here is not simply to achieve breathtaking views from 10,000 feet where we can’t accomplish much in practical terms. The objective of a wider perspective is to see how things are interconnected, and to illuminate the interconnectedness, so we can better understand, and act, in ways that work with, not against, the natural forces of an ecosystem to achieve positive change.
Systems thinking has entered the chat
If you’re keeping score, that means we can now add ideas like systemic design, strategic design, de-centered design, and transition design to the bingo card.
We need designers who have the stomach to work within complexity when it can’t be reduced, and the courage to pursue constructive and destructive interventions in pursuit of improved experiences and outcomes — for human and non-human ecosystems alike.
systems science has existed for a very long time, quite a while longer than Design Thinking (TM) has been part of the public zeitgeist; systems science led to the design methods movement, a direct predecessor of design thinking, which means comprehensivist designers and strategists have been drawing on these disciplines for decades, (with or without a manifesto labeling their unique plot among the design landscape). So, if you are working anywhere near
systems science has existed for a very long time, quite a while longer than Design Thinking (TM) has been part of the public zeitgeist; systems science led to the design methods movement, a direct predecessor of design thinking, which means comprehensivist designers and strategists have been drawing on these disciplines for decades, (with or without a manifesto labeling their unique plot among the design landscape). So, if you are working anywhere near the intersections of human experience, learning, or behavior to improve real-world outcomes, your practice should incorporate systems thinking.
Systems thinking is a discipline for seeing wholes. It is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing patterns of change rather than static snapshots. — Peter Senge
A systems oriented designpractice can still draw on the tenets of human centered design to infuse humane, constructivist values in the work, but also benefits from the added awareness that, as Senge emphasizes, today’s problems often come from yesterday’s solutions.
Increasingly, design driven organizations that are willing to invest in strategy and infrastructure to investigate ‘below the surface,’ and insight generation and synthesis practices that incorporate deeper and broader causal relationships from a systems view, will find themselves at a significant competitive advantage.
By broadening the aperture of our attention and deepening our knowledge of interrelationships and hidden influences, we can improve outcomes
Thebusiness value of services and products that better deliver on brand promises because they reflect the context of use.
Each way of seeing allows our knowledge of the wondrous world in which we live to become a little more complete. ― Donella Meadows
For example, a systems oriented approach: …in product design, provides a deeper knowledge of the context of use as well as upstream influences and downstream impacts on the value proposition of that product or touch point.
…in service design, ensures the orchestration of components across the service ecosystem can deliver an intuitive and meaningful experience — for both the end user as well as the other humans
systems oriented designers (ideally co-designing directly with stakeholders) will often: Develop personas, behavioral archetypes, jobs to be done and similar models to build shared understanding of diverse stakeholders’ (human or otherwise) lived experiences, motivations, obstacles, and unmet needs across a given ecosystem.
Map systems, landscapes, and infrastructures, to articulate current or potential future states and downstream impacts in time and space, as well as customer journeys, information flows, value transfer, invisible dynamics, and unrealized opportunities.
Synthesize and translate insights into actionable leverage points, as short term tactics, medium term experiments, long term vision, user requirements, product prototypes, learning frameworks, behavioral interventions, community programs, policy guidelines, step by step action plans,
For the socially conscious designer, it poses a conundrum: if not human centered, then what?
designing with compassion to support human experience, dignity, and agency will continue to be our ethical imperative
By definition, human centered design magnifies certain components (humans — as users, consumers) in our ecosystem while neglecting others (flora, fauna, non-consumer humans… basically everything else).
AirBnB has accelerated gentrification in several communities by driving up rents; Uber has contributed to traffic, pollution, and a precarious gig worker culture; Twitter has resulted in the spread of hate speech and radicalization of young people toward extremism; Facebook has platformed misinformation and illegally shared user data with historic consequences.
Human centered design emerged as a response to what existed before: business and engineering practices that did not design with humans in mind.
Human centered design has humanized design, and opened many eyes to the fact that understanding the human on the other end of a tool, product, or service can make said tool, product, or service more humane, and, yes, more successful.*
Perhaps we need humanity centered design, stakeholder centered design, activity centered design, life centered design, environment centered design, society centered design, or planet centered design…
The aspect of human centered design that requires our attention isn’t the word “human,” it’s the word “centered.” It’s not the choice of what to center that gets us in trouble, it’s the choice to center any one component at all — even with good intent, it leads to short term thinking, incomplete understanding, and narrowed opportunity spaces.
the goal here is not simply to achieve breathtaking views from 10,000 feet where we can’t accomplish much in practical terms. The objective of a wider perspective is to see how things are interconnected, and to illuminate the interconnectedness, so we can better understand, and act, in ways that work with, not against, the natural forces of an ecosystem to achieve positive change.
Systems thinking has entered the chat
If you’re keeping score, that means we can now add ideas like systemic design, strategic design, de-centered design, and transition design to the bingo card.
We need designers who have the stomach to work within complexity when it can’t be reduced, and the courage to pursue constructive and destructive interventions in pursuit of improved experiences and outcomes — for human and non-human ecosystems alike.
systems science has existed for a very long time, quite a while longer than Design Thinking (TM) has been part of the public zeitgeist; systems science led to the design methods movement, a direct predecessor of design thinking, which means comprehensivist designers and strategists have been drawing on these disciplines for decades, (with or without a manifesto labeling their unique plot among the design landscape). So, if you are working anywhere near
systems science has existed for a very long time, quite a while longer than Design Thinking (TM) has been part of the public zeitgeist; systems science led to the design methods movement, a direct predecessor of design thinking, which means comprehensivist designers and strategists have been drawing on these disciplines for decades, (with or without a manifesto labeling their unique plot among the design landscape). So, if you are working anywhere near the intersections of human experience, learning, or behavior to improve real-world outcomes, your practice should incorporate systems thinking.
Systems thinking is a discipline for seeing wholes. It is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing patterns of change rather than static snapshots. — Peter Senge
A systems oriented designpractice can still draw on the tenets of human centered design to infuse humane, constructivist values in the work, but also benefits from the added awareness that, as Senge emphasizes, today’s problems often come from yesterday’s solutions.
Increasingly, design driven organizations that are willing to invest in strategy and infrastructure to investigate ‘below the surface,’ and insight generation and synthesis practices that incorporate deeper and broader causal relationships from a systems view, will find themselves at a significant competitive advantage.
By broadening the aperture of our attention and deepening our knowledge of interrelationships and hidden influences, we can improve outcomes
Thebusiness value of services and products that better deliver on brand promises because they reflect the context of use.
Each way of seeing allows our knowledge of the wondrous world in which we live to become a little more complete. ― Donella Meadows
For example, a systems oriented approach: …in product design, provides a deeper knowledge of the context of use as well as upstream influences and downstream impacts on the value proposition of that product or touch point.
…in service design, ensures the orchestration of components across the service ecosystem can deliver an intuitive and meaningful experience — for both the end user as well as the other humans
systems oriented designers (ideally co-designing directly with stakeholders) will often: Develop personas, behavioral archetypes, jobs to be done and similar models to build shared understanding of diverse stakeholders’ (human or otherwise) lived experiences, motivations, obstacles, and unmet needs across a given ecosystem.
Map systems, landscapes, and infrastructures, to articulate current or potential future states and downstream impacts in time and space, as well as customer journeys, information flows, value transfer, invisible dynamics, and unrealized opportunities.
Synthesize and translate insights into actionable leverage points, as short term tactics, medium term experiments, long term vision, user requirements, product prototypes, learning frameworks, behavioral interventions, community programs, policy guidelines, step by step action plans,
