Is UX still viable? The unintended consequences of user-centered design
Failing to look beyond primary users can have significant impact on our communities, our cities and our planet
Focusing design choices around the experience of the user has become the dominant paradigm for interaction design — you could even say the whole profession of UX design has risen to meet this challenge. It seems a noble quest, and has helped create many great new products and services that have gone on to become household names that dominate in their markets.
Many startup businesses cast themselves as ‘disruptors’, challenging incumbent businesses with nimble approaches that are laser-focused on meeting user needs and improving the customer experience. But as these startups become established and grow in scale, this disruption often goes far beyond the realm of their competitors.
A relentless focus by companies on serving the wants and needs of their users can have dramatic unintended consequences for other people and things — our communities, our places, and the environment.
In this article, I challenge whether user-centered design (UCD) is still a viable approach, and how we must extend our reach as designers beyond meeting the needs of direct users.
The drive to disrupt
Let’s begin by considering how Airbnb went from being a website to rent an airbed in a San Francisco apartment to being banned in Berlin.
Starting out as Airbed and Breakfast, it was positioned as a cheap way for young people to stay somewhere as long as they were willing to rough it. Renamed Airbnb, as it became popular it started to morph into a short-term holiday rental business, offering not just a way for people to generate some extra income by renting out a spare room, but also for property owners and businesses to market their apartments and houses. Now it has grown to a global short-term rental platform where homeowners and landlords can let their properties to a market of globe-trotting millennials. Many listings now come from large-scale property agencies with hundreds of properties to let, with cases of some gaming the system and exploiting the platform.
Airbnb set out to disrupt the hotel industry, and it was certainly ripe for a shake-up. But an unintended consequence is how Airbnb has impacted the long-term rental market in popular destinations, such as Barcelona, Amsterdam and Paris. A property landlord in a popular city can now choose to continue to receive a steady, lower-income rental for a long-term letting, or ride the rollercoaster of high-income short-term rental through Airbnb and its copycats. Many landlords have seen that they can massively increase their income through the short-term market, driven by the low-friction marketplace that Airbnb offers to connect travellers with accommodation.
In popular destinations, the subsequent squeeze of the long-term rental market drives prices up and forces people out. Who is being driven out, and where do they go? Airbnb’s user-centred approach has neglected people affected by this seismic shift in the property market.
The impact affects the city at every scale. Apartment dwellers in a block may no longer have neighbours they know, replaced by a stream of strangers turning up at all hours of the day. Neighbourhoods may no longer have the same vital mix of residents using local services — the Airbnb crowd have their own service needs. Tourists want to do touristy things, they have little to no need for schools, doctors, repair shops, or any of the myriad business and services that cater predominantly for residents. Boroughs have seen changes to their demographics, change in service demand, and erosion of their tax base.
Amsterdam tried to ban Airbnb across three central areas, but this has recently been overturned by a court ruling. Instead, property owners will now have to apply for a holiday rental permit, which restricts rentals to a maximum of 30 nights and 4 people per rental. Many other cities have restrictions on how many nights a property may be let out a year, but monitoring this creates its own problems.
Measures in Berlin have gone further, with the Zweckentfremdungsverbot (“law against misappropriation of housing space”) effectively banning Airbnb, and where landlords renting out a whole flat can be fined up to €100,000 per violation.
Users above all?
Another demonstration of the unintended consequences of UCD comes by looking at Uber. As a ride-hailing platform it leverages brilliantly the power or the smartphone to connect private car owner-drivers to passengers. It not only disrupts taxi services, its closest competitors, but also impacts public transport usage too. But one of the effects of all these Uber cars zipping around, is that a significant percentage of the traffic on the road in a city is from Uber cars, often not carrying passengers but circling around, waiting for their next job, often unable to stop because there is nowhere to do so. Where do drivers go for a rest, to use the bathroom?
The impact on traffic levels, public transport, street activity, and the knock-on effect upon non-users, are things that Uber’s user-centred approach doesn’t address and doesn’t care about. These are design decisions.
Uber vehicles are a new piece in the city jigsaw, a new element of urban infrastructure, that has been dropped into a city with no consideration for all of these side effects, not by Uber or the cities that allow them. Uber is exploiting the established road network of the city, in which free road space, kerbsides and circulation can be seen as commodities.
A new tragedy of the commons
“When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane you also invent the plane crash… and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution… Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress.” — Paul Virilio
Airbnb and Uber exhibit a similar tragedy of the commons of our urban infrastructure. In the UK, for the price of a vehicle tax you have unlimited access to the nation’s roadways and kerbsides. For the price of the council tax your apartment is now a pop-up hotel, plugged in to all the sights and sounds a city has to offer.
Are these effects inevitable? When we create the kerbside pickup as a competitive marketplace do we also create the traffic jam of circling vehicles? Does the frictionless weekend house-rental inevitably lead to the noisy arrival of late-night strangers on your staircase, or the loss of vitality of the neighbourhood?
These are the consequences of design decisions that only consider the experience of the user. And they are not accidents, they are deliberate abdications of responsibility. After all, it is called user-centered design, not user-only design. To fail to consider the wider impact of our design choices is a dereliction of duty. The irony is especially poignant with Airbnb, which is simultaneously eroding the fabric of the communities that provide the ‘authentic’ experience that it promises.
New design centers
User-centered design has been declared dead or obsolete, numerous times before. One of the biggest criticisms of UCD is that it views people only in terms of what they do, ie as ‘users’. Human-Centered Design has emerged to offer a more holistic view of what motivates and influences people, in order to create more empathetic designs that incorporate emotional and psychological drivers.
But as designers, we have to do better than just focus on the direct users of a service, the providers and the consumers. We have to consider what else might be affected by that service, and engage with our clients to consider the implications of what we build. This is sometimes referred to as Stakeholder-centered design.
UX titan Jared Spool’s mantra regarding successful UX outcomes is that if “we do a fantastic job delivering this product, how will we improve someone’s life” — success in UX isn’t just about making the user’s life better, but to think about all the people affected by the outcome.
In his article on the shortcomings of Human Centred Design in international development, Rathi Mani-Kandt describes how a HCD approach often focused on short term measures of usability, which often deflect from more valuable measures of long-term social impact.
“Complex, large-scale systemic problems such as poverty, income inequality and restrictive social norms are difficult to address with HCD. Having emerged from the private sector, HCD focuses heavily on outcomes like uptake, usage, retention and conversion rates as early signals of demand, which is equated with success. But these indicators are more suited to measuring short-term performance.” — Rathi Mani-Kandt
Environmental Centered Design
We’ve realised that, as a species, putting ourselves at the centre of the world isn’t working particularly well. The climate crisis we are currently in is a direct result of only thinking about ourselves. Accelerating rates of extinctions of flora and fauna are also the direct result of thinking the planet belongs only to humans.
As Monika Sznel argues, the time for Environmental Centred Design has come. Sznel argues powerfully that environmental considerations are also stakeholders in your product or service. Taken further, to Sznel ECD even means considering Covid as a stakeholder that must be considered in your designs. To me this is a fascinating approach. Interrogating what the virus ‘wants’ is a good way of devising strategies to limit its effects.
The agency Space10 sees the move away from a HCD approach to a People-planet approach that aims to achieve a balance between human wants and environmental needs.
Towards systems design
My growing sense as I mature as a designer is that we shouldn’t put anything at the ‘center’ of our process, but recognise that there are systems and networks, all of which must be given consideration and focus at points within the design process.
All design creates an ecosystem — networks of interactions and relations, knock-on effects and unintended consequences. It’s a theme that Yolanda Martin from Farfetch highlights in a talk at UXDX, “Why User Centered Design doesn’t work”. However, despite talking about the need to consider the wider infrastructure and the environment, the ecosystem that Martin details at Farfetch is really only the internal platform and processes within her own company, interesting though that is.
Thinking beyond the screen and apps and into the wider realm of services, organisation and ecosystem design might not feel like UX anymore, but it’s a continuum where many of the same skills and processes still apply. Jared Spool considers it an issue of resolution — using Charles and Ray Eames’ pioneering Powers of Ten film as a wonderful metaphor — zooming out then in to give a different point of view at every scale.
A systems-based view of design is needed to give consideration to not just users, but everyone and everything else impacted by it — especially the social and environmental consequences. Instead of keeping any one thing at the center, we move in and out, changing resolution and bringing into focus users, other groups of people, societies, organisations, and the environment, on all scales from local to global.
