The User Experience

Design Methodology Seminar

“The experience is the product.”

— Merholz et al., “Subject to Change: Creating Great Products & Services for an Uncertain World: Adaptive Path on Design,” (2008)

The Kodak camera is the cornerstone and the starting point of making technology accessible for everyone. This invention forever changed how we design consumer products.

A successful Kodak camera slogan from the Eastman Company celebrated a photographic process that granted simple control to amateurs. — Source: Eastman Company, Outing 15 (1890): 12. Image courtesy of Harvard College Library via Google Books.

This democratization of technology on a larger scale can also be seen in emerging countries like Brazil. Their main goal was digital inclusion, which they strived to achieve through free culture. By heavily taxing imported goods and promoting open source software, they were able to strengthen local industries and lift themselves up in order to be independent of foreign big players.

With the new media landscape we have today, it is easy to get lost in and be overwhelmed. The danger of relying on adding new features to an artifact instead of analyzing the appropriate solution is omnipresent. With innovation at every corner, one might become enamored with new ideas that initially seem to be solving one problem, but later reveal to cause more. For instance, Uber started as an answer to the monopolistic taxis that controlled transportation on the street, as private transportation. They opened up the market and made private transportation more accessible to people. However, Uber didn’t fundamentally change private transportation, instead they chose another approach an tapped into a preexisting system.

Uber vs taxi driver — https://oxfamblogs.org/fp2p/to-uber-or-not-to-uber-that-is-the-question-whats-your-answer/

In conclusion, as Merholz et al. mention, we need to stop looking at design as a standalone product. The experience at large has to be addressed, which can either mean building a system of our own or tapping into an existing set up. Yet most importantly, the overall experience has to do nothing more or less than what the user needs.

The most important message I found for myself was the notion that experience is a product, a service and a system simultaneously. Yet I wonder how we can achieve more than one user experience at a time.

Sources:

Merholz et al., “Subject to Change: Creating Great Products & Services for an Uncertain World: Adaptive Path on Design,” (2008)

Heather A. Horst— Free, Social, and Inclusive: Appropriation and Resistance of New Media Technologies in Brazil, International Journal of Communication 5 (2011)