Bored designers, AI ideation, going off the rails

Morning! Welcome to this week’s Whiteboard Roundup.

I’ve continued my run of exploring videos as a way to communicate some of the stuff we’re doing this week, by introducing our newspaper (The Daily Experience) with a nice glass of Chardonnay.

I hope you’re enjoying these videos, because I’m not going to stop. Sorry about that.

Cheers.

Tom HaczewskiDirector, The User Story

News

The design industry has become boring

I have been struggling to articulate how I feel about the industry over the last few months but this article by Michel Buckley has very neatly explained my thoughts.

UX, UI, AI and the continued homogenisation of standards and processes and methodologies has led to a point where designers are feeling uninspired, typecast, and frankly bored with their jobs and creations.

For me, it’s a balance. Best practices and tried-and-tested design patterns are important for businesses because of Jakob’s Law - internet users spend most of their time on other apps - but it doesn’t mean we can never do anything experimental, new, or dare I say it, fun.

Often, novel and interesting UX is pushed away because it doesn’t conform to convention and is unlikely to succeed. But one of the core tenets of design is iteration - we should research, create, evaluate and repeat - and in this little process it’s still possible to create wonderful, different, innovating experiences that are fun and engaging, and even solve a problem for a user, despite being unusual.

It’s an interesting thought though and I’d love to see what others think too.

Here’s the article.

Get AI to generate ideas for you

If you can’t find the time to run an ideation workshop with some design/stakeholder/product pals, then you could get AI to do it with you.

Edward Chechique has a nice little prompt for idea generation here, which is great if you’re in a pinch. I’ve always found AI’s idea generation to be a little restrictive though. By definition, AI is only using things it already knows to create new things, so it’s always better to run an ideation session with humans if you can.

Check out the prompts here.

A story of a very bad experience

It’s sometimes worth remembering why we do what we do, but also explore what happens when it does go wrong. Reminding ourselves that there are actual humans that are trying to accomplish things in the world is important, and that our designs can make all the difference between whether they are able to succeed or fail, and whether they day is ruined by a genuinely confusing or terrible experience.

That’s what happens to Reda Attarça on a regular basis and he demonstrates this beautifully in his article about Deutsche Bahn’s new ticketing options. Interestingly, the experiences are actually more about what happens when things do go wrong, and having to navigate the difficult systems put in place by DB to get compensation.

We often design the processes that lead to conversion or reduce chain within an application, but we regularly miss how to turn things around when things go wrong. even though these experiences can be the ones that actually lead to amplifying our worst parts out to the rest of the world, especially when we aren't prepared for it.

I'm constantly baffled as to why businesses do not spend time working on their complaints procedures, and making sure that customer service agents are empowered to actually fix problems for customers instantly. Why, at the biggest point of failure and frustration for a user, do we then make the problem even worse by not providing the best experience possible?

Give it a read here.

What we’re up to.

🖥️ Creating Sticky Experiences webinar30 Jan, 4pmI’ll be going through the basics of how you can start creating more sticky experiences for users of your product.Sign up here

🖥️ Usability testing for agencies webinar6 Feb, 4pmUsability testing is awesome for everyone, but especially agencies. If you’ve never done it before, come and see why selling this service to your clients could be the best thing you ever did.Sign up here

Other stuff

• 💬 ProductTank Meetup30 Jan, 7pmIf you like product stuff as much as we do, come along to ProductTank on 30 Jan for a nice chat with other product folks.Sign up here

Thanks for reading.

Well done, you capable & brilliant human. You’ve almost made it to the end of January intact, despite it being 3 months long.

As you’re here to the end, here’s my thought for the week to leave you on:

See you next time, friends!

Brought to you by Tom Haczewski, director of The User Story. We’re a product strategy, research and UX agency based in Norwich, working with SaaS teams and startups.