Why are we caught in momentary design?
While I write this I clearly do understand the limitations that drive us to design and develop things for specific moments. Firstly the challenge is to imagine a longer period of time for our users, the world is uncertain and may not always showcase results as we plan them to, we all know that systemically its not just one thing that impacts the reactions of our users or societies.
Secondly, it's more about validation, how am I supposed to validate something that changes over a year-long when my user will be available to test the design only for short period of time, are there solutions beyond time travel that can help solve this?
Thirdly our tools and controls as we see today are mostly based on slices of instances, be it programming languages or design tools, they are all focussed around instances of time. As we delve into animation and prototyping, we do move beyond these instances, but it's more like moving from a single dialog in a film to the complete scene. We are still bounded by our relative static-ness in designing and developing things.
The question then arrives at why is this important? why do we need to move from this instantaneous approach of design and development? After all, we have delivered millions of amazing experiences across the world and perhaps changed lives.
The answer to that question lies two-fold. Firstly with the rise of new technology like artificial intelligence or internet of things fluidity of experiences has become common knowledge. We have started designing conversations over interfaces, trends over absolutes or behavior change over delight. The way we are looking at experiences is becoming more temporal than instantaneous.
Secondly, as we move beyond the screens and get into multiple touch points the role of distributed time becomes very critical. Time is not just about a user coming to a screen and engaging in it due to the addiction your interface has created in his mind, but rather how often during his whole day and the whole life journey that he will connect with the various facets of the experience to build a totality of the experience.
We can expect many tools, methods, and controls of that cater to this aspect coming up in the years to come. It's no more an area which we can choose to ignore as we go beyond just crafting corner radiuses of screens to behavior changes of individuals.
Our existing methods of design can also be modified to help gain these aspects. Like currently we do create artifacts like user journey maps to understand how our user journeys through the usage of our product, or the "day in a life", where we look at a stereotypical day of the person. But perhaps we can also start looking at the Life journey maps of our users, perhaps also look at the amalgamation of product journey maps with life journey maps. Some domains like healthcare have clearly mastered such thinking since its not just about designing for delight and aha that matters there but also how we transform patient lives.
Another tool that can help transform the way we think of our users is the tool of persona, as many articles out there have spotted we need to move beyond static personas and roles and move towards persona spectrums or even looking at personas as characters.
Inclusivity is another aspect that is critical as we look beyond specific moments. Our users are humans and they go through various phases of their own lives which challenges them to use the very own design that helped them before becomes useless for certain situations or life long aberrations. We cant any more just be done by designing beautiful screens that make the user go wow and end the world there.
Its time we go beyond the first and second moments of truth of engaging the user to feel good about our experiences, its time we go beyond designing for the first run experiences and not think about how users would use our designs the third or fourth time.
Because in the end, reality doesn't start or end in a moment, neither do experiences.
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