How many times have you asked yourself why something was even designed in the first place? Or why some designs endure and others don’t? In this article the focus is one of the key dimensions of ‘sustainable design’: Durability.Note: from here on I will refer to “sustainable design” also as “good design” which can be defined as a well-thought out design that embraces an ethical and sustainable design philosophy. From a sustainability perspective, a design can be said to be durable when the product’s creation and its serviceable life span (a.k.a its performance) has absolve its Eco-impact. A simple and over used example relates to the cutting of trees to build homes. This would mean that the homes built from these cut trees would have to be built to last as long as it takes to replace the used trees.

Today

Just as we can measure whether or not a design is ‘usable’ or has a high ‘emotional appeal,’ we should begin to develop a framework to understand whether a design is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in a sustainable sense.  Durability is a key dimension of what it means to be sustainable and therefore is seen as a contributor to the “goodness” of the design. Consequently, any definition of good design must transcend the traditional ‘eye of the beholder,” definition, which is based only on a subjective aesthetic meter and define a more objective definition of good design. But where does a good meter of good design come from? Do we base this on its adherence to fundamental sustainability principles?

As UX practitioners the challenge is a more complex than can be imagined. First, many of us lack the skills to judge if a product is good or bad; second, we often lack the buy-in and insight into the production process to contribute to the creation of good design. Third, we are creatures of the aesthetic realm and often our aesthetic instincts controls our view of design. However, as UX evolves we face the challenge of defining new frameworks, processes and guidelines that embrace a more comprehensive definition of good product design.

Today it is simply not enough to focus just on functionality and aesthetics. As stakeholders of design production, our goals should be aligned with the direction of global thinking. To date, there are a number of well-defined dimensions of ‘good’ design that has its roots in ‘green’ thinking and that have had tremendous global impact. Key of these are energy efficiency,  the other being packaging which combined have impacted the way we shop as well as the overall cost of things based on combined impact of growing transportation costs.

In line with meeting new global mandates, many innovative companies are going the distance to involve UX designers in initiatives to move the companies to meet legislated guidelines to meet new design standards. The dimension of Durability as part of the ‘good design’ checklist is therefore not far behind.

How can we determine whether our products are durable or not?

Many companies have dedicated departments that test both software and hardware to ensure that their products are well built. But by who’s standards? And is durability a key measure of what it means to be well – designed? Clearly by the number of bad products that seem to flood the market place the answer is mostly no!

This article is a step to open discussion on new guidelines and frameworks to advance the state of practice and assume a better strategic placement of UX as a key driver for better designed products. As one of the many principles of good design, durability stands front and foremost at the moment because it strikes a chord with many consumers in the current economic climate. Today, consumers are ever more focused on getting value for their money – translated into “making things last.”

The connection between hardware and durability is evident but some of you may be thinking how can something as intangible as IxD designs be durable? Any good principle applies across the board in its applicability. In the context of IxD it can be interpreted as a design that is of its time and can transcend its time by remaining relevant, functional and aesthetically pleasing – in other words classic and timeless all in one. For this article the focus is targeted mostly at the physical aspects of design as it is the aspect that is most tangible and apparent.

In more recent years as the end user becomes more product savvy, companies have a lot to fear. Today all it takes is a motivated and frustrated consumer with one bad product experience, a blog and a few followers. Case in point Dooce vs. Maytag, which illustrates the case of broken product experience, a savvy blogger and a well-followed Twitter site,  which brought Maytag to its knees. And while some tweet their disappointments others use  the old fashion grapevine which also has an effect. Recently while speaking with a small group of friends on the overall topic of consumer products, one friend, relayed her frustration about poor product quality as follows:

You think you have the newest model and you don’t. How would you feel if you just bought a new car – you drive off the lot and all of a sudden you have the last year’s model because the company just came out with a new one while you were shopping? Just makes you feel so jipped

She was referring to a product she had just purchased where an improved model was immediately released because of bad product quality.

I began thinking of the growing issues that so many users face with products that simply miss the durability mark where follow up products have to be built to fix the previous release issues. It is definitely a feeling that many of us have experienced at least one time or another.

Another friend recalled a time when there was one product release a year and products were so well-built that you could “pour acid” on it and it still worked. Today in the same market space there are sometime 4 and 5 releases of the same product with minor hardware and software modifications at the expense of high product churn rate because of poor quality.

What gives!

Why can’t companies change the focus to durability and quality over quantity of what can only be called “junk”?

Planned obsolescence

Sadly and seemingly unnoticed by consumers many companies practice what is less commonly known as “planned obsolescence” or “built-in obsolescence.” Planned obsolescence is the process of product becoming obsolete or non-functional after a certain period of time or use. Obviously the benefit is for the manufacturer and not the consumer as there is the pressure to purchase a newer version of that same old thing.

Think back at a product you recently purchase that should have lasted closer to 5 years but only lasted a year for whatever reason. For me it’s my Sony video camera I purchased in 2003, which lasted up till the warrantee expired a year later. Today,  it R.I.P, still gleaming new and useless in my basement because the hassle of getting the right person to solve my problem on the phone at Sony had become a full time job. The same goes for my Canon s400 camera, which only three month after purchase, displays an everlasting e18 error.  It has now joined my Sony camera in a neighboring grave site of other junk products I have purchased over the years. I reasoned for the near $350 I spent on the Canon point-and-shoot, it simply was not worth the repair. I now regret not taking the advice of my professional photographer friend who swears by Nikons. Perhaps thrice would have been the charm but I am now jaded.

While the case of Sony and Canon may or may not be intentional planned obsolescence, it speaks to the deplorable lack of overall quality of almost any piece of electronics you buy these days.

Junk is the new black, the new status quo in product design and manufacturing. It is a case of short sighted thinking and a complete violation of Sustainable design at its core. Unfortunately the pervasive practice of planned obsolescence makes it not matter where you purchase as you may find yourself buying the same product type very soon again.

Junk is the new black

What then is the role of UX practitioners in tackling the issue of planned obsolescence and enabling the design of products with increased longevity?

It is a tricky rope to toe as we have little ties in most cases to the day-to-day operations of product marketing and manufacturing. However, we do have an ‘in’. The kinds of feedback that we get from our users about product quality should have a voice. It is one thing to report satisfaction and efficiency ratings alongside affective data. Beyond that we should create the opportunity to direct  these often unsolicited user feedback about such aspects as quality, battery life and durability of hardware etc… all elements of ‘good design’ to the appropriate people who can make a difference?  I will go so far as to say it should be part of our protocol of product inquiry and be a standard usability component of our reports as we move forward. Some of the barriers that make this difficult is that we are not always fortunate to have continuous contact with our end users over the lifespan of the products – purchase to grave cycle to determine how we are doing along the continuum of product use. But what if we did?

These problems, left unaddressed, often makes headlines and ruins a company’s reputation even for a cycle. Lest we forget the energy sucking iPhone of recent times. Though iPhone bounced back it certainly ruined my image of the product as an energy guzzler.

Who also decides how long a product should last based on its value? Is it the user? Is it the manufacturer? Do their ideas on durability map? Highly likely not. The motivations are mutually exclusive – one to save money – one to make money. I will end this post by providing a few questions for thought:

1. Why can’t companies spend more time making good products?
2. How can we strike a balance and have better accountability for the continuous influx of crappy goods?
   Whatever happened to quality?
3. At what point will consumers begin to push back and demand better from companies filling the market place with poor quality goods.
4. Most importantly, for our field of practice, how do we benchmarks products overall UX considering durability as a necessary element alongside functionality and aesthetics?

As we begin to feel a sense of relief that the Age of Aesthetic appeal (thank you iPhone) has finally arrived where touch, sight, and colour also mattered, we are being reminded that we cannot become too complacent. Ux is currently undergoing a silent rebirth that will see massive changes in our focus as practitioners. We have entered the Age of Sustainability and Eco-ethical Awareness – also loosely referred to as “Green.”

Is it a fad?

In my last post I was thrilled to see the visceral reaction of some of my industry colleagues on having a conviction about Usability being a commodity. As someone still practicing and who feels passionate about what I do I welcome a change in approach to UX – a rebirth. Usability, I uphold from the outside looking in, is commodified. The impression that anyone can do it is simply the reality. I again uphold: “No, not everyone can do it.” But sometimes our cues must be taken from impressions that others have of us and and not where we think we are.

The same holds true for the many overworked designers who are being asked to generate wireframes and proofs of concept as if there was no thought to the process. Moving into the age where Functionality and Aesthetics are now married, it is even more difficult to separate traditional usability from design and to say that one isn’t commoditize and the other is so.

The curve ball is now thrown when we now welcome yet another traveller on the road to UX journey. That traveller is Sustainable Design. Call it “green” or “eco ethical” but it is here to stay.

So what does this mean for the field of UX?

With this new paradigm shift, the need to understand how UX practitioners should support this evolution is critical. A more strategic positioning of UX and open dialog on the future of UX is critical. We need to become key drivers in the age of Sustainability and Eco-ethical Awareness,

Consumers have changed along with the global landscape. A recent US Forrester poll indicates that there are growing green concerns with about 25 million (approximately 12%) would pay more for green products with and growing 41%  who, while they are concerned can’t afford to pay more. Consider now – what if the cost of green products was more affordable? How then would design have to change to address a growing demand?

How can UX be roped into a “Cradle to Grave to Rebirth” approach of Product development? To first understand our many possibilities it is important that we have a good understanding of what it all means: “Green”, Sustainable, Eco-ethical awareness” and the fadish lingo that has us all clutching at air. I use the terms interchangeably and borrow from many existing definitions:

In the context of User Experience, “sustainable design” is the philosophy of designing products, space and or services, to comply with the principles of economic, ecological social, and cultural sustainability. In driving the ideas home in our respective companies we need however to think of it as:

strategy that ensures the UX field survives, thrives and evolves by following emerging trends that connects end user research to product design and overall user experience

The goal of sustainable design is to “eliminate negative environmental impact completely through skillful and sensitive design” – the idea that products must aim at being recyclable. A product designed with these new principles should work towards a model of cradle to grave to rebirth.

The applications of sustainable design philosophy range from the design on just about everything from small every day products to larger architecture structure to urban and planning, engineering, graphic, interaction and industrial design. Theses ideals of sustainable design principles also received a great thrust of attention from Janine Benyus’s theories on Biomimicry – a new discipline that studies nature and how we can use designs in nature to imitate and solve designs problems.

Why should we care as Ux practitioners?

In the future we need to be closely integrated across design and research teams to address the new challenges that we face as experience designers. There are many factors that will drive the need for tighter alliances across Ux:

1. Increasing consumer focus on sustainable practices is a trend that favours growth in sustainable customer experience management and the need for advisory and consulting services where User Research can play a role based on previous understanding of users in general.

2. Increasing compliance and regulatory requirements will create an opportunity for designers to drive insightful solutions based on informed research. Embracing this will provide tremendous advantage to those innovative companies that buy in early.

3. Significant opportunity to take share with a focus on sustainable customer experience services, integrated with managing brand perception and a focus on the bottom line.

It is expected in the next few years, as we all come to terms with understanding our role in the Green era, new methodologies, frameworks and ideas will come together to provide exciting possibilities. Currently many of us are in the stage of thought and processing of our new realities. We must collectively and openly discuss the scope of engagement as we forge ahead, with less pliability and more strategic approach. Ultimately our contribution must be tied into the bottom-line.

Top image by Micky

After 10 years in the field, I woke up one day to realise that my service as a UX practitioner had become a commodity. Usability had become the ‘in thing’ and everyone could do it and show that their products were better than the competition. Usability as a buzzword, populated Product Lifecycle processes in many organizations. So it comes as no suprise when the general attitude of stakeholders these days is one of a shopper saying: ‘One McUser Experience with usability fries please.’

Usability as Commodity

Usability, as a practice, has evolved over the years with the primary goal of understanding the product use by ‘representative users.’ Around the same time our field shed its more academic title of “Human Factors” to eventually become User Experience.  We started focusing on the overall experience a person had as a result of their interactions with a particular product or service.

The term User Experience for the most part has been adopted as the operational title for many firms and other in-house teams encapsulating interaction design, user research and visual design. In some organizations the groups evolved to include other peripheral groups such as audio-visual designers and in rare instances brand & marketing. Nonetheless what is evident is that field as practice has become a commodity.

We aren’t rare anymore

A working definition of commodity means “a good for which there is demand.” But these goods are produced without qualitative differentiation across a marketplace. I will take creative liberty to also add to the definition and include “service” as well.  Today across the board, it seems, that “anyone can do usability” – harkening to Chef Gusteau’s motto from the movie, Ratatouille, that “anyone can cook.”

Like usability, UX is also slowly becoming commoditized. As a practitioner the evidence is blatant and often disturbing. As companies add visual and interaction design to their stable less attention is being paid to the the quality of the designs. For proof of this only look at the mobile field where it seems that every mobile phone is slowly beginning to look the same in aesthetic appeal. The absurdity of this is more evident when seen in analogy to plastic surgery where the surgeons craft of redesigning body parts has evolved into a store front where someone can ask for a J-Lo behind and a Halle Berry nose. But perhaps this is the nature and end game of design as we know it. Or is it what happens when Right Brainers are thrust into a Left Brain environment with the only goal of design production.

And we wonder why Designers are often of a melancholic nature… I feel the sudden urge to scream back at Gasteau that in fact: “not everyone can do it!”

From Clicks to Sexy

Incidentally in the last year I have had four different job titles as my peers and I continued to remold and refocus to stay relevant in the technical space. This fluidity of titles signals the ever-present lack of comfort we feel, where we constantly have to justify our collective existence as necessary appendages to development teams. And if you are a UX professional who has never had your value questions, I stand corrected and ask: “How can I join you in this mystical world?”

Today UX is once again on the verge becoming as institutionalized commodity of the technological landscape. Earlier our focus shifted from purely functional to both functional and aesthetic. But is that the end? When the first iPhone was released in the US in 2007 – the technological design space was like “Whoa.” Apple brought sexy back in stroke of creative genius by turning a little box into the most desirable piece of metal and plastic on many minds. Time magazine even went on the name the iPhone “Invention of the Year” in 2007. With the debut of Apple’s iPhone just about everyone in the industry started wondering how they could also make technology sexy.

A friend of mine, then working at Microsoft, called me wondering if I knew any designers who would be interested in working on new server designs. They wanted to make the products more desirable. “Servers?” I asked, just completely puzzled and blown away by the impact one little sexy device was having. Designers had arrived. We had entered the age of Aesthetics in Technology. Usability and UX in all its sentience had come a long way…Baby!

What had happened was that UX morphed to understand, not only the functional aspects of product use, but also the more aesthetic and experiential parts of product design. A few years back the most critical aspect of user experience was lessening the number of steps in an interaction. “How can we be faster and more efficient?” was the prevailing question of the day. In the post iPhone launch CEOs everywhere were hushed up in boardrooms using the “S” word, asking questions like “How can we create a sexy solution?”

But now we have reached the point of aesthetics, and there’s already the feeling that it’s a commodity again. So we have to keep on evolving. Fortunately the next traveler on the way to design paradise has arrived, but more about that in my next column.