Design of the times

About 80 of the US’s top Web designers who specialise in what they call “experience design” will gather shortly in Las Vegas.

Up for discussion is the idea of measuring what they term the return on investment (ROI) of on-screen experience. They will discuss the “findability” of things on the Web. And because the thing people mostly experience through the Web is organisations, the experience designers will ask if they should also help to design these structures, as well as focussing on human-computer interactions.

I am sympathetic to their cause. America’s engineers of senses at the PC have come a long way. Twenty or more years ago, Stu Card at IBM, John Seeley Brown at Xerox, Brian Shackel at Loughborough University, and Bill Moggridge, founder of design firm Ideo, pioneered the idea of interaction design. Now the Internet has spread word of their feats, and helped people like them to create a new discipline. Delegates might well agree with the Vegas blurb, which says that the experience designer’s job is to make things on the Web understandable, accessible, useful, usable and desirable. But for me, experience designers need to ask which of these is most important. I believe they have an opportunity to uphold usefulness, for a change.

I was an advocate of intelligibility and information design during the VCR 1980s. But in our much-vaunted knowledge economy, it’s time to stop condescending to users by coming on as the ever-so-humble high priests of simplification. There is a kind of self-loathing elitism here. Instead, we need to credit users with some intelligence.

It is the same tale with accessibility. Way before today’s whingeing about the digital divide, I used to observe that IT was not accessible to millions of non-users. But now I learn that Tim Berners-Lee and the Royal National Institute for the Blind – sponsored by Standard Life – award logos for accessibility to the right kind of Web sites. I have no quarrel with institutions as august as these. But I wonder whether certificates for corporate social responsibility on the Web distract society from the larger tasks of speech recognition and synthesis.

Of course IT should be usable. It may sometimes, indeed, inspire desire. But between the possibility of use and the reputedly emotional experience that accompanies use, the purpose and content of each operation on the Web deserves appraisal.

Professionally, the role of the experience designer is to give visual and structural form to content. But experience designers should not squander resources to achieve ends that are not useful. They can’t, for example, hope seriously to be able to redesign the corporate hierarchies that make intranets so difficult to put together. But they can work with other disciplines to suggest that the human resources department is no guide to improving the utility of organisations.

Years after the feel-good Clinton era, many hope that chief information officers will now give way to chief experience officers, or CXOs. Far too few want to rise above the chaotic, subjective flux that experience provides. Experience designers forget what Wilde wrote in The Picture of Dorian Gray – that experience is of no ethical value, it is simply the name we give our mistakes.