content
Thu, 14 May 2015
user experience
User experience, or UX as it's commonly shortened to, is not as neutral a quality as one might think. Everyone wants to provide a good experience for their users, it's just that often it seems to be the means that justifies the end.
The most recent example of this is Facebook Instant, where, in order to improve the user experience, Facebook publishes content from websites directly. You never need to leave the app to view it and it loads much faster. The UX is, by the standards of speed and uniformity, better. And in those narrow terms it is.
It's the narrowness of those terms that bothers me. I worry that UX is becoming something of a trump card in these discussions that partly shuts down consideration of the wider context. By encouraging people to prefer things published by Facebook Instant, which you assume is the idea of it, the experience gets slicker but, almost certainly, less diverse.
This is not to say that I think we should not care about ease of use, just that before praising it we should ask if we had to give up something worthwhile in its service.
posted at: 21:47 #