Mar 10th, 2020

40. User Experience Design

Jay Eckert

Old Fashioned

• Overall, the world doesn't do a great job separating artists from designers. Artists, you can express yourself till the cows come home. Designers, when you're talking about experience design it's not about expression. It's about what the end user is going to want to use.
• You don't have to use a painting. You don't have to use a piece of music. You don't have to use an artist's output. You can choose to use it, and when you do it's up to you to figure out what the artist was trying to convey. For us designers, that onus falls on us. If the user doesn’t intuitively know how to interact with whatever we're creating then it's not the user's fault. It's never the user's fault. It's ours.
• Everyone is a de facto designer, because at the end of the day everything that everyone creates is something that someone has to interacts with.
• Depending on the user we're targeting, what are that user's expectations? Sometimes they're the same as ours but more often than not they're not. So, it's our responsibility to empathize and the best way to empathize is to pound pavement. Talk to them. Get as many diverse opinions as possible, and then look at the data.
• Even if you don't think you are, you're a designer. And you're obligated to own up to that.