User Experience as Snake Oil

I read a posting on another blog* that seemed to me to present the concept of "user experience" as something new and different, a rival and superior to design and usability. My reaction was that the perspective was not only understating the value of user experience itself, but counterproductive to having the three disciplines work in unison toward a common goal.

The more I consider the matter, the more it seems to me that user experience isn't something "new and different," but something that's quite old and familiar, at least to companies that are driven by the belief that the their success as a business relies upon satisfying the needs of their customers.

This principle applies to any product or service, not merely to Web sites and digital services. The products that people genuinely love are designed to fill a need, completely and effortlessly, and seem to be engineered perfectly for that purpose. The products that people begrudgingly accept are those that provide only partial satisfaction, and are engineered to be manufactured in a cost-effective manner.

But between the two lies a dangerous area: the products that people hate. These are not products that are clearly bad, as consumers are indifferent to them (they don't buy them, and don't care), but products that seem attractive at first blush, but that are later discovered to have missed the mark. In the psychology of motivation, this is called cognitive dissonance. In common parlance, it's called being deceived, tricked, and lied to.

And that wraps me back around to the topic of user experience. The great danger in user experience today is to attempt to create a false sense of quality about a product that isn't really designed with the needs of the user in mind. The advertising is catchy, or there's some novel feature that seems keen at fist blush, but which loses its glamour in a very short time.

While this can be effective in generating short-term "success," it does not imbue the product with real quality, that will ensure a longevity of demand and, ultimately, the longevity of the company that produces it. Said another way, a snake-oil salesman should know better than to come back to the same town twice.

And so I wonder, with some degree of concern, if the hucksters of the user experience brand will eventually poison the profession for us all by using deceptive tactics to generate short-term rewards, then slink off before the users discover that they've been gypped - meanwhile, discrediting the profession, and those who seek to apply the principles of user experience to create lasting value, to the benefit of our employers and customers alike.

* I considered linking to that post, but have decided not to do so. The ideas I explore in the remainder of this entry have nothing to do with the original article (I don't think that it was the author's intention to position UX as snake oil), it just got me thinking in this direction, and by free-association, I ended up in a much darker place that has nothing to do with that blog, and I expect the author would (rightly) take exception to the implication that it might.