A sign of maturation for any emergent field of media is that, eventually, the audience develops a literacy and discernment that demands higher quality and nuanced engagement with the tropes of the culture. The problem is that said audience subsequently also becomes convinced that their black box engagement with the material gives them the ability to make good media themselves, with little to no experience of having done so. In fandom, this is the beginning of commerce, and in the case of the internet, the beginning of UX as a field.
Look across the great swathes of internet land, and you’ll see a mind-numbingly repetitious pattern of layouts, formats, styles, and functions; every platform cribbing from another like they’re high schoolers taking their finals in a gymnasium. If you take off your glasses, you could imagine that each and every site is the same, with a fresh, or maybe not so fresh, coat of paint over different pages. The rare interesting touch of deviation, hidden under piles of regurgitated Figma templates, only exists because a UX designer was able to convince a needy computer science intern to build their soulless Behance knockoff to ‘show off their skills’.
To be fair, I doubt anything posted on Behance was ever made by something with a soul. The last time any human posting to that platform was in contact with the core of their own humanity was when they were active on DeviantArt – and I respected them more when they posted heartfelt sonic fanart than I do their ‘product agnostic’ UI animations; designs so breathtakingly contextless you could adapt them to any product under the sun with the bare minimum finagling. It’s almost an artform how devoid of meaning the designs can be, their only function to serve as shells for their creators’ professional egos.
I dread the day when some ‘enterprising entrepreneur’ decides to launch a “full feature” MVP allowing “UX/UI” designers to sell min-mod low-code front-end shells to startups seeking a “professional look” for their brand; if such a thing doesn’t already exist, and has been evaluated at millions while at the same time producing no value for humanity.
AI has only made things worse. Prior to the Vercels of the world cobbling together parts of other people’s mockups, designers would have to put in the effort of filtering other people’s work through their own brand of wetware, where, one can hope, some aspect of their perspective or positionality rubbed off on the designs before they were splattered onto the keyboard.
Now, your genius designers get to “maximize their efficiency” by copy-pasting a hodge-podge slurry of design elements thrown together with no rhyme or reason by a glorified auto-completion platform – Platforms that provide results like undergrads who think “Uber but let’s replace post offices” is an innovative idea for a project on usability testing. To software like that, ‘context’ is just an interesting buzz word that can be slotted into a script, to be ignored later by human readers; not a meaningful concept that determines if your solution is fundamentally appropriate for the problem at hand.
But the project manager has used the internet before, you see, and read a couple books about the rise and fall of Facebook and Twitter, so they must be Michelangelo reborn for the digital age; their tastes impeccable and their vision impeachable – simply make what they demand, and the world will no doubt kneel at their feet. Meanwhile, their Frankenstein’s monster of an application sends users into catatonic fits of confusion tastefully tinged with a hint of suicidal ideation. But the designers made sure Dr. F got his MD in plastic surgery, so leadership decides the issue could never be with their misbegotten user experience; the problem must therefore lie with the poor users left flopping helplessly on the floor like harpooned whales. In all honestly, the company might have gotten a better result if they had gotten toddlers to draw pictures down on little pieces of paper, and asked a parrot to read them out from a hat. Call it ‘methodology’.
The result of this delectable combination of inadequacy and false confidence is a digital landscape that has all the complexity and flavor of a bar of soap. In the pursuit of absolute palatability, to “streamline” the “onboarding” of “emerging markets”, every platform, application, and interface looks like it could be dredged up out of the nightmares of a particularly bored CPU after it first visited the products catalogue on the Apple website. The experience for any human in the vicinity is akin to standing between two mirrors in a shopping mall dressing room and wondering, maybe hoping, that the reflection of yourself far off into the receding darkness will do something more interesting than mimicking their silent farts.
For god sakes, you’re boring us! Every element the result of aesthetic inbreeding, every animation both excruciatingly predictable and completely unhinged; even when you try to trick us into accepting cookies or staying on your mailing list, we’re bored. I could burn the patterns on one website into my monitor’s pixels, and still navigate every other part of the internet just fine. There is a reason the word ‘engaging’ causes an almost Pavlovic reaction of resigned despair in UX designers everywhere; everyone with a wallet asks them to ‘make their product unique’, but only approves designs that are so boring as to make a puppy beg for the eclectic chair in haiku.
The internet has become an experiment in convergent evolution seeking the most uninteresting and inoffensive forms of design and it is killing us. If you’re so committed to hindering innovation, grow a pair of pincers and crawl back into the sea; at least you’ll make a good meal for something worth the oxygen it takes up.