Overwrought Design

The intelligence of people who don't read has been derided regularly enough - maybe not enough that there's a cultural shift, but enough that I don't feel the need to remark upon it before considering the situation from the other side: designers who seem to accept that most people are voluntarily, perhaps even functionally, illiterate. I don't have much respect for them, either.

Having some modicum of respect for the user is necessary to user experience design. If you're disdainful of your customers, cajole them with pretty pictures, and take away their choices on the premise that they are too simple to decide for themselves, you're likely in the wrong line of work. Being served by a snotty clerk or waiter is not a good user experience, and neither is using a site or device that was clearly designed by someone who considers you to be unintelligent.

Nanny design may be driven by narcissism: the designer who feels the need to dumb down an experience regards users with contempt. His ego won't allow him to admit that they can understand without his assistance. How much more clever he is because he designs down to the stupid, sheepish mass of humanity. An what a magnanimous individual he is if he has designed something so simple a child can use it. Unless he is actually designing for children, that isn't a mark of distinction.

Or possibly it is driven by lack of competence or confidence: the designer who does not understand his users is incapable of differentiating instances in which facilitation is necessary from those in which it is not, and as such over-designs everything to be as facile as possible to avoid the potential that anything might go awry. That is, he doesn't know what his users know, and presumes them to know nothing. It's the safest thing to do if you can't trust your own judgment.

The principle of minimalism is claimed as justification, in a mangled and misinterpreted way, by nanny designers to mean that things should be dead simple - an "on" button and nothing else, strip away all the options, features, and decisions that might render an experience confusing to the users whom he holds in contempt, and prevents them from using it in ways the designer was incapable of imagining or accommodating.

It really doesn't wash: some things can be pared down to a single task, done a single way, with no options or features - take it or leave it. This is generally more true of physical tools and devices that it is of digital services, whose benefit is to provide capabilities and flexibility. And while I have to concede that a single service or piece of software that attempts to do too many things generally does each of them poorly, it's not an excuse to go to the opposite extreme.

Perhaps that's what it boils down to - the constant pendulum swing from one extreme to the other that, in the wake of the last swing to the do-everything extreme, the design profession has swung too far in the opposite direction and that a few years down the road, we'll go from oversimplified to overly complex yet again.