It’s rather ironic how a field that’s supposed to be human-centric and has “users” in the first position of its title is fraught with in-group bias and lack of accountability for design outcomes and the impacts on the people their designs serve.
How did we get here?
Let’s start with UI design, which has been around for decades. It focuses on the interface and people make design decisions based on assumptions about users’ needs and expectations.
The field of UX came along and switched the focus to experiences, added research to the process and included the people who use the product in the design process to learn their needs and expectations.
Notice the difference there? A core tenet of UX work is including users in the process to mitigate the risks that come with making assumptions. UX inherently comes with a responsibility to users’ experiences.
Nonetheless, we have bootcamps churning out UX designers in 6 weeks with little-to-no mention of how to design for people of various social identities. There are social media influencers thriving off of thirst-trap content promoting “designers are users too.” Organizations are adding “UX” onto job titles with no top-down commitment to user research, diversity, equity or inclusion.
What is performative UX?
These performances, no matter how benign the intent, are dangerous to the field. Sometimes called UX theatre, defined by Tanya Snook, performative UX is claiming to be teaching or doing UX work but actually just capitalizing off of UX as the latest trend with willful disregard for people and the actual experiences their designs inflict.
What does performative UX look like?
People are slapping “UX” on everything, making it the proverbial hot sauce of product design with no accountability.
Performers are dumbing down UX to cool after UX screenshots for likes, follows and shares, which simply serves their ego and misleads aspiring UX professionals into believing that good UX can be achieved without engaging with the people who will interact with the design. Including users in the design process is the crux of user experience design.
Performers are criticizing the fundamental principle of UX that “you are not the user” and whining that designers are users too. This rhetoric undermines the users’ role in the UX design process. By gaining an understanding of, and designing with, the people who will be impacted by the design, we avoid subjecting them to biased experiences. If you’re designing based on your own experiences, you’re a UI designer capitalizing off of the popularity of UX, periodt.
Performers are making racist, xenophobic tweets claiming they can’t be racist because they have an Indian first name and have been “working with people of all races worldwide.” By failing to hold UX professionals accountable to being design humanitarians, we end up with a field riddled with bigotry which insidiously manifests in product designs. Under the title of UX, people are designing experiences that are embedded with ableism, racism, and gender bias.
Performers are also companies that are highly sought places of employment by UX professionals, yet some of these companies lack concern about the harmful experiences they design/engineer. Facebook has ignored racial bias research that showed the rules for their automated system for disabling Instagram accounts was 50% more likely to disable Black people’s accounts than White people’s accounts. Amazon has defended their racial and gender biased facial recognition software. Google fired one of the heads of their ethical A.I. team who raised concerns about harmful biases in their AI software.
How can we get UX back on track?
I don’t have the answers, but this is a discussion that is overdue. Performative UX is destroying the field’s credibility and harming the users that rely on us to design their experiences.
What I do know is that apps are inaccessible, forms are not gender-neutral, algorithms are harming people of color, and older adults are practically ignored. Not to mention people advocating for users getting fired and other dirty secrets of UX.
I do believe that individuals need to check their egos, combat their privilege mentality, unlearn their supremacist beliefs, and address their biases. By not doing so, the field will progressively reflect the ills of the society we live in — perpetuating systemic and implicit biases, which are counter to the ideals of UX.
People and organizations who profess to be teaching and doing UX need to commit to a humanitarian mindset and recognize we cannot effectively design for people we don’t engage, understand, respect and genuinely care about.
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Note: This was originally published on Medium (Oct 24, 2021)
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