Thinking of design manifestos of my own turned out to be a bit more difficult than I anticipated. At first, everything I thought of ended up feeling like bland, cliche statements that has already been said before, such as “be innovative” or “be people-centered”, but I feel like interaction design has more potential than that. As designers, we can design good things or bad things, focus on or refuse to design things for a certain cause, this is especially true for a UX designer since we are all about influencing the way that people behave.
Making The World Suck Less
In my opinion, the power of UX design exceeds far beyond having beautiful interfaces that are easy to navigate.To my understanding, in a professional setting, a UX designer would also play an integral role in defining the product strategy of a project, which gives a UX designer the opportunity to add even more value to the user’s experience with a product, or their lives in general. If a UX designer puts in the effort to make an office software a bit more easier to navigate, a person might be less frustrated with their job and have more energy for other important things in their life, such as self-care, friends and families; if we design the process of scheduling a doctor’s appointment more convenient and accessible, someone out there could get their health issues check in a more timely manner… the list could go on and on. To me, since we as designers have the ability to actively make decisions in our job that has the opportunity to shape people’s behavior, we are the ones with power to make the world better or worse with the things we do, and it wouldn’t be fair to complain about the way people behave when we more or less made designs that give them the nudge to have such behaviors. As a beginner, I might not be able to design something revolutionary, but I can consistently put in my best effort to make the world suck less.
