All of these things are now easily measurable, and UX designers are just as accountable for their design decisions as any conventional architect or engineer. Design is no longer shrouded in mystery. It is no longer a black art, understood only by the sacred few. Everything I do, I do for a reason, and my design decisions are based on a careful balance of knowledge, experience, fact and a little educated assumption.
On the other hand, what makes me attractive to my potential clients is something very different. Most people require effective design in order to deliver a ROI that justifies the risk, but what they desire is something better; something different. Something innovative.
And herein lies the conflict. To design something that consumers can use so easily that it feels natural to them, removing any barriers to conversion or engagement, means engineering something that is inherently easy to use; something intuitive. Jeff Raskin defined the word beautifully in his (still valid) 1994 paper Intuitive Equals Familiar:
"Intuitive [equals] readily transferred, existing skills."
For those who can't be bothered to read the whole paper (and I recommend you make the effort), Raskin defines intuitive as the ability to use an interface without having to learn anything new. Familiarity creates intuition, enabling an end-user to immediately adopt an interface without further research or training. But innovation, by its very definition, demands the creation of something new and experimental. If that's the case, how on Earth do we innovate in intuitive user experience design? How do we create an interface that is both unconventional and familiar, all at the same time?
When put like that, it sounds like an impossible task, and I'm sure there are many UX designers who are happy to hide behind this conflict, as justification for remaining within their comfort zone. But you only have to look at some of the big innovators in technology today to see how this can be achieved.
Until recently, the conventional means of utilising mobile phone software was via a keypad and joystick of some description. This was the case for almost a decade (it may be longer - mobile historians, please correct me) until Apple released the iPhone in 2007, changing the face of interaction design forever. With the iPhone, Apple had created a truly ground-breaking user interface, whilst making it more intuitive than ever before, by rejecting current mobile conventions, and instead mimicking the way we interact with real-life objects.
We naturally prod things, we pinch and squeeze them, and slide them around to reposition. We don't naturally do these things via a proxy, such as a mouse, joystick or keyboard. These input devices are relatively new to our consciousness, and have been adapted-to over a long period of time. Multi-touch technology has allowed us to revert to a more direct interaction with the objects we see on screen, effectively removing technology (psychologically, at least) from the equation altogether, and putting the power back into our fingertips where it belongs.
So what can we learn from the iPhone? The lesson I take from this is that in order to innovate in the field of user experience, without sacrificing effectiveness through lack of intuition, we must first look at how our current understanding of the world has been constructed. Only when we can separate truly intuitive behaviour from acquired constructs, can we begin to design interactive solutions that revolve around what makes us human. And with the almost sci-fi advances in 3D tactile touchscreen and voice recognition technologies over the last few years, we're coming closer than ever to that eutopia.
