Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
made a blender, customers might wonder why a machine that made milkshakes and purees
couldn't do other things. What about grinding meat or coffee beans? Or maybe it could mix
up raw dough, and then form it into pasta. When management received these requests from
consumers, they passed the ideas on to the design department. The designers knew what to
do, and the food processor was born.
Digital products rely on information. They gather, record and use information to do al-
most anything. They were first developed in the technical world. Here, the products were
tested in labs because, well, they were used in labs, or by people who worked in technical
and/or academic areas. This created an insular culture that allowed Artistic Ego to flourish.
We learned a lot that way, but our isolation kept us from learning one vital thing: how
to please consumers who valued a product's function above all. Though we could always
design more fascinating digital products, we paid little attention to what happened to them
in the consumer's world. We seldom even asked whether our target audience would find it
worth the effort to learn how to use them. This continued through the late '90s.
User experience made some early inroads into digital design around the turn of the cen-
tury. This was no accident; it was the result of everyday consumers invading the digital
marketplace en masse. The number of online users grew from under a million worldwide
in the early '90s to 45 million in 1996. In 2005 it passed a billion.
Whether we knew it or not, our field of digital design was moving from the specialized
environment of techno-savvy users, into the world of mass marketing. Our clients were
asking for products anyone could use. Web-based commerce boomed as the public gained
a huge appetite for digital products. At first, consumers regarded many of these items,
services and apps with wonder and awe. But as digital commerce became a part of
everyday life, these new users began looking for the same qualities they'd treasured in oth-
er products: convenience, efficiency and ease. To many consumers, the most important cri-
teria wasn't beauty, power or intricacy; these people simply wanted something they could
understand quickly, set up easily, and use without fear of complications. In many cases,
they weren't getting anything close to that.
This is still true today. In June 2012, Nathan Shedroff wrote on the website Boxes and
Arrows: “There has been a reluctance for designers to embrace the idea of experience and
I'm not sure why.” Mr. Shedroff goes on to describe the debate over whether an experience
could be set up to give all users the same experience. He describes this debate as “ridicu-
lous.” He's right. Though a designer might be able to do this when creating a product for
a small, familiar audience, in the consumer market users will find new applications the de-
signer never even considered. The designer's job is to design an item whose operation is
