Designing successful experiences for bald apes
As we squint into a bright future, let’s first glance back at the user experience industry’s well-meaning, but mostly murky past. UX’s foundation is a sordid mix of lies, shams and idiocy: We never designed experiences and things like mobile have always been adjectives, no matter how many times we sold them as nouns. Now we’re hyperventilating about designing responsively across channels.
That might seem overwhelming, but it’s really just a more complex version of the same old shit: Helping a bunch of bald apes do things. In the mid-1990s, those apes took control of context and disrupted everything. That has evolved into experiences defined not by devices or individual digital products, but by the user’s data, specifically their stated desires, implied interests, opinions and proclivities. It’s a huge design challenge that won’t be met by device-based breakpoints or any other new-fangled rocketship technologies.
