Designing Deliberate Experiences

Part 2: How do we design in a way that helps our users choose an intentional digital experience?

This is part 2 of 2 in a series about deliberate digital experiences. In the first part I talked about my dilemma as a user in using digital apps and how we might confront our digital lives so that we can work to live digitally, deliberately. In part 2, I will explore the question that — as a designer of digital products — immediately followed: was I designing for others to live digitally deliberately, too?

Shifting from user to designer

As a user, I had resolved to readjust my perspective toward digital products. I’d decided to see them strictly as tools for specific purposes with a clear benefit to myself. Rather than reaching for my phone at any moment, I needed to be deliberate in my decisions and actions for navigating digital products.

However, in shifting from the user’s perspective to the designer of digital products, an immediate conflict emerged: Because a product’s success metrics often rely on users’ time spent within an app, designers and product owners often steer our design goals toward keeping people’s attention by whatever means necessary. There are clearly compromises we must negotiate between the business value of our products and the lived value of the experiences we design. So how can we, as designers, start to think about designing deliberate digital experiences?

Connect to your user and the device

Try the object diary exercise. In part 1, I described this user research method, which I tried for myself to find out more about my relationship with my phone. The exercise is simple and can be completed throughout a day: Either every hour or every time you pick up your phone (whichever comes first) you write down a journal entry from the perspective of your phone. What would your phone be thinking? How are they reacting to you using (or not using) them in that time? What kind of attitude does your phone have? The exercise was helpful in pulling apart my perspective on the phone as a needy object and starting to be conscious of my attitude toward the device so that I started to understand how something like a phone can affect people.

Complement lived experiences

Design digital to complement real experiences. Nearly every digital project has a connection to the actual world around us and our products should encourage “being with” instead of “in place of” so that digital tools enhance the world around us instead of trying to replace it. We can question our design intentions by asking “how are both digital and reality affecting each other?” This starts to prioritize experiences that actually provide value digitally and the thinking on how digital / physical touchpoints can interact with each other.

Reduce UX paralysis

Help users focus on their goals by showing only what is necessary. This helps them stick to tasks and makes for a more seamless experience — which also tends to correlate towards higher utilization. Similar to analysis paralysis when too many options overwhelm someone from making a decision, every element on a screen is an option for the user to act on and can be overwhelming. When thinking of digital experiences, consider how information architecture can help define just one or two goals for the user to complete. This allows you to design screens that help people complete those goals.

Prioritize user-friendly metrics

Create metrics that reflect your user’s reasons for using your product, as well as your business goals. As I mentioned earlier, when key metrics for evaluating digital experiences are focused towards things like time spent instead of goals accomplished, it can sometimes push teams to inadvertently design addictive experiences. If we want users to spend more time in an app, then why wouldn’t we throw in everything possible to catch and keep a person’s attention for as long as possible? However, our metrics should reflect how successful the UX/UI are in guiding users to complete tasks they benefit from. Instead of designing for addictive screens, we can start to design the best flows to complete tasks by prioritizing completion rates over users’ time spent on the app.

Taking the next step

There are many considerations which will certainly be barriers to acting on the principles above including the designer’s role and influence on a product and the inherent messiness in the design process which usually requires quick decision-making. Aligning on specific user goals and values to base design decisions around in the beginning of a project can help focus the product that anyone can point to along the design process. In the end, designing digitally deliberately is about taking the business goal and delivering a digital product that considers the impact on lived experiences.

Today’s digital tools are just the beginning for what we will be designing in the near future so the precedents we set today will only be carried further into new technologies. As designers we have a hand in how these tools affect people and society and should question if we are designing to live deliberately.

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