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The UX Business

UX Design means User Experience Design. The user is meant to be at the  centre of attention of the design decisions. But, what does it mean to have the user at the center? It should be something like creating a pleasant and useful experience that fulfills the needs of the person (aka the human being) who is using a specific product. Creating happiness.

Then decisions start shifting the centre of attention towards somewhere else: business goals, clients, engagement, retention, downloads... MONEY! Why? In the end, everyone cares about themselves, and they need money to exchange for other resources. Happiness can’t buy you food or shelter. So, a design is human-centered until there is enough money at stake to make that shift (which usually is not a big amount).

Modern capitalism could be summarised as a trend through which humans are blinded by their yearning for wealth to the detriment of their own happiness. And the bigger the sample of people taken, the more true this statement becomes.

Work fast, too fast

Some money-making schools are nowadays providing short fast-paced education programs, in which students are given incalculable amounts of workload under surrealist deadlines. Why? Is that industry working at this pace? Is it a proven way for learning better? Is it a human shaping model which suits modern capitalism? Is it like a factory where the students are the products going out from a production chain?

It’s the global system. There is an idea that supports trying to increase productivity. That is to be able to produce the same thing in less time, so there is more time for... happiness. But, let’s put “more production” at the place of “happiness”.

There it is, the wheel of capitalism working properly, exactly how it was designed to work.

Activity: listen to this short tale about a fisherman

Final word

A wise man once said: 

“when talking about a design work, there are three factors involved, and you can only get two of them: low price, high quality and short time”. 

Society is moving towards short time & low price: the Era of Here & Now.

The battle for the market and world dominance has existed forever. These two giants of the digital industry are competing - among other things - for the smartphone software supremacy. They try to do the opposite than the other so they differentiate and polarise individuals. The further your smartphone usability is from the competition, the more difficult it will be for you to switch. So that’s the why. And we can find some evident examples of that behaviour in the last decade.

So this is iOS vs Android.

“If you place the navigation bar over there, I’ll place it on the very opposite side of the screen.”

“If you use a calendar to pick dates, I’ll just use a random scroller.”

“If you make a white phone, I’ll do mine black.”

“If you have a permanent navigation bar at the bottom, I won’t have it and instead I’ll have a universal button.” (which only goes home)

“If you organise your apps from top to bottom, I’ll organise them from bottom to top.”

“If you create a vertical scroll for that functionality, I’ll do it horizontal.”

Okay, come on. Kids, can you agree on something? A checkbox, for example. Easy-peasy right? They found the way.

But in the end it is the market and the users who have the decision power. Thanks to that, we have seen a progression towards homogeneisation by the different app developers on both platforms. See the example of Youtube:

That was Youtube app on Android in 2014 and 2015. And see on the next image how it went from there to meeting the “iOS standards” in 2019:

All that being said, I think common sense is starting to win over stupid kid fights between millionaires.

There were three creative individuals who were called to take action on a very important matter not long ago. Crazy enough, and naive enough. They accepted the callenging task of transforming what was an absorbing and time consuming activity for humanity into something useful for their lives.

They were facing a giant and they were so small. They knew they wanted to provide the future generations with meaningful education, which would give them freedom. The more we know, the less we can be fooled.

It’s well known how humans create distractions for other humans, so the formers can control the latters, in the way Noam Chomsky once said.

Well... what if the biggest digital entertainment platform was added just a small feature able to transform an entertaining experience into a revolutionary educating experience. David beats Goliath.

I guess you already know what I am referring to: Netflix Learning (2020).

The rest is just history.

Apple Inc. is well known for its products designs and aesthetics. They make complex things look simple. They stand out on their own. They are different.

It’s like Messi. He makes people feel the most difficult things are so simple and easy. It’s magic. It is as if he was seeing the action in slow motion.

In the same way, the best designers can create so many different designs in just a few minutes, pouring lots of ideas and making hard decisions on which one is the best; to finally bring a simple, beautiful and frictionless design to you. And it looks so easy!

The difference between somebody who is excellent at what they do, and somebody who is a genius, is called talent. And that talent is what allows them to think different.

Those who will be remembered for changing the world we live in are those who challenged the status quo and who did things the way they were told not to. That is creativity, and it is present in every aspect of everyday life.

Beauty and functionality combined are (good) Design. When something does not work as expected, we agree it is not well designed. When something is less beautiful... it is probably less well designed. But

what is “beautiful”?

The more symmetrical a face is, the more beautiful it is, as in appealing to the viewer’s perception. However, 100% symmetrical faces are not the most beautiful because they are “perfect”, so the eye perceives something is “wrong”. Thus,  is beauty  uniqueness? Well, ugly is unique. There are not two identical ugly things. Maybe it is something which is close to an ideal but still feels real. But

what is “ideal”?

It is obvious to everyone what the beauty canons are. Slim, minimal, rounded corners, you name it. Nonetheless, it seems to be a different idea of ideal from one epoch to an other. During the Baroque, lots of details and charged interfaces where considered the ideal. In the Ancient Greece, fat people were considered more attractive (because it was a sign of wealth. Even today, different cultures have different ideals. For instance, in South East Asia having a tanned skin is a sign of working in the fields, thus poverty; whereas in Europe it is exactly the opposite, because it is a sign of free time, thus wealth.

Also, not so long ago, squared edges were appealing, they looked futuristic. Now, rounded edges! Why? Because when something becomes a commodity, it cannot be innovative and unique anymore. So ideals and beauty are always in constant swinging back and forth just to be different from what is established. It is unique and new.

So it looks like as if beautiful was something that says “I am wealthy and special”. It probably has a lot to do with the human primitive brain. The unconscious and animal instinct which is fighting for survival and species continuation.

It is said humans can find super-energy when they face extreme situations. Do not think this is one of those. My mind just gets lost in the mire of the project... Last week I lost track of time. Special relativity. It was like if I had burned essential connections within my brain. And yet, that was just week 2. We are crying babies. The same way a baby does not know how to survive when it arrives to this world, we have no clue on how to survive in this bootcamp.

It is a race and a fight against one self. I still wonder things about time. Is 7 minutes more than 6? Or it depends on the perception of the observer?

When we travel faster than light, the time squeezes. Am I travelling fast, or I am just a little slow?

When someone is creating, they need freedom; thus, the famous neutral questions. 

Then the 3 minutes rules.

I feel excited because I’m learning many new methodologies which are and will be very useful both for learning better and for working professionally.

What gets a big part of my attention is the training on time constraints. Does that make us more competitive for the market? Or it makes us learn better?

I will sleep on that and see if tomorrow I have a clearer view.

We are in that part of the year when days are the longest and nights are the shortest. Add to that a bit of Ironhack’s bootcamp and you’ll enter a parallel dimension where space and time just vanish and become something superfluous and imperceptible.

Fortunatelly, I was sleeping every night so I was able to notice the transition from one day to another. But, days were so full of work, learnings and interesting activities that each of them felt like a week. Specially after this pandemic, where they were exactly the opposite, but felt also like a week. I don’t understand it yet.

In just 4 days, we went from not knowing anything about UX to developing a cheap prototype for a pretty interesting app. What are we gonna do in 4 weeks? I hope the learning curve doesn’t flatten too soon and also the workload one doesn’t start growing exponentially without limits.

20 of the crazy ones. Those who once thought the best way to spend a summer in Barcelona (or not) was to work 24/7 non-stop for 9 weeks in a row.

Then they became awesome. They just didn’t know, yet.

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To the tumblrs. I am a minimalist UX student from Barcelona. I have an engineering academic background and a diverse professional journey.