Humans, not Users: Why UX is a Problem | Johannes Ippen | TEDxYoungstown

I am in a small cabin in Denmark I just finished high school and me and my friends we are traveling my friend Tom sits across on a couch from me and he asks hey Joe why do you want to be a designer what is so cool about making things pretty what impact can you possibly have these were great questions and back then in that moment I didn't really have an answer I knew that I wanted to go to design school I knew that I wanted to work in international design teams I knew that I wanted to learn from the best designers in the world my design heroes I knew that I wanted to write about design and eventually someday have my own design company but back in that moment on that couch in Denmark I didn't have a great answer I said Tom you know design is more than making things pretty design has have an influence on people design can manipulate people and that is what I want to do I knew that design could do more I knew that the future of our global society does rely on the design decisions we are making today see everything around us is designed the chair that you are sitting on right now is designed by an industrial designer the slides you see behind me they are designed by a graphic designer and even the way that you are experiencing this table right now is designed we call this experience design or UX design and that is what I do I am a UX designer yes my friend Tom on that couch in Denmark he was right design does have a lot of creative qualities to it a big part of what we do is create visuals but yex design is so much more as a UX designer I am like a psychologist I am like a researcher I know how to take a complex problem and turn it into smaller more digestible pieces I know that red circles for example attract attention not only the big one I am standing on right now but also the really small ones that we carry in our pockets on our smartphones every single day and that's something that we can't help being attracted to red circles is a primal instinct it's a primal trigger something that we need to survive something that we are born with and I know how to take these triggers and mix them with flexible rewards to turn them into products that you love to come back to every day habit-forming experiences I know of the importance of good user experience design but also the impact the negative impact that bad UX can have I know that this overly complicated password field will probably make you forget the password right after you created it and never sign back into that account again you know what I'm talking about right actually in 2018 advisory company PricewaterhouseCoopers found out that 32% of all negative experiences resulted in the people having those experiences never coming back to the brand never coming back to the product again abandoning it completely and the designers at companies like Facebook Spotify or at which they know about that those companies are dominant in their space because of great UX they know how to create amazing experiences for their users and that is a problem because see all of these products all of these companies are services they are targeted towards a mass audience and they monetize through advertisements the more people use these products these services the better actually those services only work when people do use them how good the product is can be determined through key metrics like use a trade or retention we call this engagement and we base our design decisions on them so we design to grab your attention to kidnap it to lock it in and hold on to it we design these products to be used the real world impact of that is horrifying last year there have been almost 800,000 divorces here in the United States alone over a third of them a British study found are blaming Facebook for these divorces so the design decision to give couples a tool that gives them full transparency of interaction and a crazy amount of information about the other person about the significant other does result in unhappier relationships and giving them a product that is designed to be used and attention-grabbing doesn't really help either so whenever you read a news story about a kid spending too much money in a mobile game or how we are spending 13% of our productive time in social media or how great user experience products like uber or Airbnb are driving the gig economy all of these are design decisions someone at these companies made a design decision that truly stands out and my opinion is snapchat streaks so we know that snapchat is an important and yeah really cool a social media and direct communication tool when you are sending a message with a friend force and back for a couple of days you are on a streak you get rewarded by this little fire icon right next to your name and you have to keep the streak going longer the better and users of snapchat do take this very seriously so what started as a fun little feature to showcase and emphasize relationships now resulted in something that drives anxiety that results in labor and that creates fear of missing out so we make these design decisions to optimize for a longer usage but we do underestimate the impact that has on our relationships on our health our life our future Society we create these products that cause fear of missing out anxiety we create products we get addicted to great user experience and this is a direct result of the lack of broader thinking see as designers we are basing our decisions on short-term goals we want more users we want more views we want longer usage times and we do not understand the impact that it has what we do understand though is that we need to shift the way we are thinking about design we need to think beyond engagement metrics we need to think beyond the user we need to stop of think to think of human beings as users we need to start designing products not for when they are being used but for when they are not being used imagine the human being you are designing a product for their dreams their needs their wishes their purpose in life imagine your product being a part of that this is an app we designed with the University of Leipzig in Germany helping war refugees to deal with PTSD post-traumatic stress syndrome a very serious topic so instead of getting people back into the app by using notifications and make them do their exercises in the app we decided to ditch these completely so there is no notifications instead we put up a big red emergency button right on this third screen of the app so in case a user would experience an issue a stress attack they would start the app and get immediate guidance get immediate help from the app imagine a product not there to nag you to come back but waiting for you until you actually need it imagine a world where you designed for humans not users it is time we stop thinking about user experience design and start talking about human experience design it is time we start basing our design decisions on the human beings we are designing for helping them to fulfill their purpose in life and respect their time the good news is there are already efforts being made to tackle the issues of addictive design right now Instagram and Facebook are running an experiment to remove the like counter from the newsfeed removing a source of social anxiety and peer pressure dating app bumble lets you snooze your account in case you want to take a digital detox for a couple of hours or a couple of days but it's also the really small decisions this is a messaging app we designed for a client and we decided to completely remove these red notification circles so removing a one primal trigger replacing them with green circles and creating a much more mindful experience for the user so design UX design and digital design does have the ability to create positive impact if we designers strive for it attention is not the key eyeballs is not the metric and usage is not sustainable try to think of the human being you are designing for switch perspective what would you expect from a digital product if we want to live in a world where design where digital design does serve us and doesn't hold us hostage we need to start making the right design decisions today because the design decisions we are making today do have an impact on the future of our global human society thank you you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 33,694

Rating: 4.9065013 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Design, Digital, Empathy, Impact, Product design, Society

Id: dpXBV3COwJM

Length: 11min 58sec (718 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 25 2019