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 what we've always done: Help a bunch of bald apes do things.

1. Filmstrip slide

2. Filmstrip slide

3. Filmstrip slide

4. Filmstrip slide

5. TITLE SLIDE
My name is Dan Willis. I’m the Director of Mobile Experience Design for
Marriott. There are only 5 Marriott hotels in Australia, but in another 73
countries we've got around 3,700 properties. This means I work on really small
screens for a really big company.
I want us to talk today about the future of user experience design. I hope you
think it’s a bright future; I do. Of course, it’s more than a little intimidating, even
kind of scary.
We’ll get to that this morning, but first, it’s useful to figure out where user
experience work is in its maturity. So what do you think, is it a baby? A
teenager? Middle-aged already?
However you answer that question, what kinds of things have gotten us to
where we are right now, today? What has defined the industry so far?

6. LOVE POTIONS & UX SNAKE OIL
I’m going to argue that our success has been built on three pillars: Lies, Shams
and Idiocy.
First: lies. You know, things like self-delusion never get their due credit and
that’s a shame considering that it and other forms of dishonesty have played
such an important part of our success.

7. “I DESIGN WEB SITES”
At the dawn of this century, for example, the role of designer seemed to confuse so
many. Print design might have made some sense, but then they’d ask wasn’t
designing things for the Internet just like designing the applications we’d all been
using since the 1980s? And besides, didn’t developers decide where things went
on screens?
So we told them “I design Web sites” and it seemed to give them some comfort,
and then that made us feel better, too. Years passed and screen sizes got both
bigger … and smaller. The screens we designed got scraped or showed up as part
of RSS feeds or appeared as part of other screens and sometimes had additional
navigation slapped all around the original stuff. Our work started showing up on
phones, and not in a good way.
“I design Web sites,” we said, but a more honest explanation would have been “I
get paid to design Web sites and I try to pretend none of that other stuff is
important.”

8. “I DESIGN EXPERIENCES”
Then, instead of coming clean, we changed our lie. “I design experiences,” we said.
Yeh, that’s the ticket. Except the “experiences” we designed tended to be
incomplete. We had a habit of missing important parts.
You want to take the whole family out for dinner and a movie? Get the kids cleaned
up, fed, packed into the car. Keep them moving across the parking lot, stick
together in the lobby, get your ticket, get 15 different kinds of food and drinks, cycle
the younger ones through the toilets, get seats all together, anybody sitting there?
Quiet them down, keep them focused on the flick, a couple more trips to the toilets,
uh oh is that frontal nudity? What is this movie rated? Okay, back in the car, did we
forget anybody? Traffic, traffic, traffic. Pull into the driveway, ahhhhh, home at last.
What did we do for that family? Hey, have you seen this shopping cart for tickets?
Pretty nifty, right? Don’t forget to print your tickets at 100% or, um, you know, they
won’t scan correctly. Heh.
It’s more hubris than reality to say we’d designed much of anything important. And
we had other lies.

9. “DIGITAL CHANGES EVERYTHING”
“Digital changes everything”: At some point, every user experience
professional finds themselves muttering that one.
This is where bald apes come into the conversation.

10. BALD APE ON THE STREET
That’s all we are – just a bunch of genetic experiments. Hey, opposable thumbs
are working with those opossums, let’s try it with a cerebral cortex, that’ll be fun to
watch!
We hyperventilate when a new screen size sells well for a couple of quarters, but
bald apes haven’t changed in a couple hundred thousand years.

11. NPR MUSIC
While it’s true that a screen is not a print magazine or a broadsheet newspaper,
visual contrast is still the key to moving someone through information. Proximity
and chunking and other principles of design lose none of their relevance in digital
solutions.
Contrast makes a screen like this work …

12. THE WASHINGTON POST –
LIFESTYLE
… and lack of contrast is
what kills this screen.

13. NPR MUSIC
The grid for this page contrasts one area that’s twice the size of another and
then inside those areas we see 4:1 and 3:1 ratios in play.

14. NPR MUSIC
There’s a clearly dominant main image, which creates a hierarchy for
the rest of the images.

15. ESPN APP
Proximity on the screen on
the left helps us make
assumptions about the
scores even for those who
nothing about American
football or baseball. The
lack of proximity on the
screen on the right triggers
those bald ape brains to
interpret each chunk
independently.

16. T. ROWE PRICE
Done well, proximity is a big “no-duh.”
The chunking on this screen works even
without labeling.

17. AUSTRALIA.GOV.AU
The chunking on this screen, by contrast, seems arbitrary
and without labels, the user would be lost.

18. SKYPE APP
Similarity is another principle
of design unaffected by the
evolution of our digital
products. Successful smaller
screens rely heavily on the
same principles that designers
have used for generations.
Here, four actions are
clustered by the use of similar
shapes.

19. SKYPE APP
And then the
similarity of video
messaging and
voice calling binds
them together and
sets up the
independence of
IM and Send
Photo actions.
1
2 3

20. BALD APE ON THE STREET
Digital hasn’t changed bald apes. Vision, for example, still trumps all other
senses for the sighted.

21. PUPPY DOG
We collect visual information faster, it is more likely to spark emotional
responses and those emotions bond with information and make the
experience more easily remembered. Digital hasn’t changed anything about
that.
(Photo by Nikkorz, http://www.flickr.com/photos/nikkorz/5272343726/)

22. “A CUTE PUPPY”
The words offer just a small subset of the information the photo provides.

23. “WAR”
And a chunk of text like this offers so much less than this ...

24. VIETNAM EXECUTION
[Photo by Eddie Adams. See
http://iconicphotos.wordpress.com/2009/04/22/the-execution-of-a-
vietcong-guerilla/ for details]

25. LOVE POTIONS & UX SNAKE OIL
Lies don’t get all the credit for our success. We’ve counted heavily on shams as well.

26. MOBILE IS A SHAM
Mobile is a sham, a fad, an artificial description, and it always has been. We see this in
our inability to define it. “Mobile is obvious in it’s mobility, duh,” you might say. But
laptops have outsold desktops for years and we generally don’t include them as part of
mobile unless they fold up funny or their screen size shrinks drastically.
How about that then, screen size. So a phone is mobile as is a tablet. But if the tablet
screen is close to a laptop screen does it lose its mobile citizenship

27. TARGET IPAD SCREEN
Is mobile design really a unique category? Interaction design has a greater impact
on smaller screens, certainly, but that’s because of the role of touch gestures
more than anything else.
I need some tighty-whiteys, but the only way to find them on this iPad app is to
plow through 212 items. That’s not a mobile design problem and it won’t be solved
with any false “mobile” conventions.
This is an interaction design challenge.

28. SOCIAL IS A SHAM
Social is a sham, too. Or at least the idea of a social media campaign is a
sham because it treats social as a thing unto itself.

29. TRIBUTE WALL SLIDE
Social is at a best a loose confederation of interaction patterns, but those patterns
only have significance as a part of a larger experience. Here a funeral home
provides the tools and venue for a tribute wall for the recently departed. It’s
integrated with more traditional memorial elements and carries its own weight
helping loved ones deal with grief.
This doesn’t seem like something that came about by the funeral directors sitting
around watching Old Spice campaigns or exploring all the places they could jam
Twitter and Pinterest bugs.

30. LOVE POTIONS & UX SNAKE OIL
The third, and least impressive UX pillar is idiocy.

31. ‘WE MUST BALANCE THE NEEDS OF BUSINESSES AND USERS
It’s hard to believe, but well-paid people still talk about balancing
business and user needs without cracking up.
“We must balance the
needs of businesses and
users.”

32. ROBERT DeNIRO
SCREEN
… and the result is
crap like this:
Every possible
tactic to increase
page views and so
very few to
actually provide
value for the user.

33. NETFLIX
Here’s a model that’s almost the exact opposite. Netflix succeeds when their
customers watch more movies. They are doing everything they can to help
people discover things they will want to watch.
The commercial web is driven more every year by organizations who have
found ways to profit from satisfying the goals of users. It has taken restructuring
their business processes and lowering their expectations, but the emergent
model has proven to be sustainable and has nothing to do with balance.

34. “DATA BEATS OPINION”
A smart tool used badly can become a dumb tool.
That’s the case with Google’s heavily imitated mantra: “Data beats opinion.”
Its original intent was to dismantle the influence of dominating stakeholders.
In the wrong hands, it becomes an excuse to treat half-assed user research
as credible information.
Opinion-killing data has become intercept interviews conducted by eager, but
under-trained team members and “analyzed” by the group. How many user
opinions does it take to trump the opinion of a stakeholder? Is it 10? Is it 20?

35. MISALIGNMENT CHART
There is an inverse relationship in user research between structure and expertise.
The less expertise available, the more structure needs to be in place. Intercept
interviews have little structure and therefore need the highest level of expertise to
run them effectively. Unfortunately more and more, we’re letting untrained
designers and other team members loose on unsuspecting test subjects out there
in the wild. All in the misconception that it will bring us more data. It will, but left
unchecked, it will be really bad data.

36. LOVE POTIONS & UX SNAKE OIL
I’ve probably gone a little overboard here. The fact is, we’re a pretty earnest
community. We’re not out to rip anybody off or mislead our clients or our peers.
The biggest lies we told, we told to ours.
I’ve been arguing this morning that the lies, shams and idiocy of our past aren’t
holding up very well.

37. “I DESIGN EXPERIENCES”
The things we were missing in the early days? Something significant has changed.

38. SCREENS PHOTO
There are now digital touch points for just about everything people do. User
experience work now is about supporting users who begin a task on one device
and blithely stumble across platforms and devices.
Mobile devices now stitch together segments that used to be unconnected. As
the number of devices involved increases, the significance of devices
decreases.
What’s left over is the user’s personal data, the stuff running through all those
devices. User experience work is more and more about that information and less
and less about screens.

39. CHUBE
Wireframes have limited value now; designing individual screens is the easy part.
Just to address what a user might consider a simple task, we have come up with
new kinds of maps. Maybe something like this …

40. SERVICE BLUEPRINT
Or more like this …

41. JOURNEY MAP
… or this. The complexity of multi-device, cross-channel experiences can
seem pretty intimidating. How the hell are we going to pull this next rabbit
out of our hats???

42. GAS MASKS
First: remain calm.

43. COOKS IN THE KITCHEN
Expanding the scope of design means we have to change how we do our work.
For one thing, we used to bitch that everybody thinks they’re a designer. Well
now, in a way, they are. We have to invite the whole team into the kitchen. We
have to figure out how to do that while still protecting expertise. It’s a work in
progress, just like those intercept interviews I complained about earlier, and we
should expect both successes and failures for some time.
But for all the new things we have to consider, our effectiveness comes back to
something old. Something 200,000 years old.

44. HOMER SIMPSON
This is our greatest hope for success.
Use whatever tools you can think of and consider every technological advance,
but ultimately it will come down to a bunch of bald apes with their opposable
thumbs and their brains’ baked-in evolutionary attributes.
In the mid-1990s, the user took control of context and that disrupted everything.
Now that simple, but significant shift has evolved into experiences defined not by
devices or individual digital products, but by the user’s data. Not just their
personal stuff, but also their opinions, stated desires, implied interests, and
proclivities.
The complexity can be overwhelming, the pressure to figure out this stuff on the
fly is intense.
But we’ve got this. We know these guys and we know how they think.
Now let’s get to work.

45. Dan Willis dan@dswillis.com
@uxcrank