What’s wrong with UX (Part 1)

Against Performative Positivity

Designer, researcher and educator Danah Abdulla’s article on consumer capitalism, complacent convenience, political ‘wokeness’ writes:

Optimism is a cognitive stance, a conscious expectation, which presumably anyone can develop through practice. And I refuse to practice it, because optimism in design is not always constructive. In fact, it hinders the politicization of designers. If design is going to contribute to tools that can change the world positively, it must begin to embrace pessimism.

An eye-opener piece on why we should all become design dissenters.

🔗 Read the article (on Futuress)

What does “after UX” even mean?

UX Designer Yichen He writes:

The rising popularity of before and after UX shots is slightly worrying. I am not trying to call out anyone in particular, but my main concern […] is the focus of these posts can’t possibly be about the user experience without any CONTEXT of the goals that informed the “after” design.

Spot on, this kind of social media posts does more harm than good to the UX profession.

🔗 Read the article (on Medium)

Design Thinking Isn’t User Experience

Debbie Levitt, CEO of Delta CX, CX and UX strategist, designer, and trainer since the 1990s writes:

Many believe it is the process that customer experience (CX) and user experience (UX) practitioners use to do their work, and by harnessing their approach, anybody can do CX or UX work. […] If nothing else, it’s a cottage industry offering endless training, workshops and certifications.

CX (Customer Experience) and UX (User Experience) professionals already use the User-Centred Design process (UCD): evangelising Design Thinking over-simplifies complex professions and leads to poorly designed products.

🔗 Read the article (on CMS Wire)