UX must push to see beyond quantification, beyond capitalism
A number of things are happening now around theme of data and it’s application to humanity:
- Social media’s algorithms are under fire for manipulating elections and polarising political discourse
- An unregulated, data driven gig economy is increasingly seen as inhumane and anti-labour
- Some feel that we are offloading our social and personal lives to ‘black boxes’ that make decisions for us
Data, nominally an invisible entity, is beginning to be felt by all. There’s always been dystopian, kafka-esque concerns about the reduction of humans to data points, but it’s only now that we are beginning to see these concerns be truly and harmfully reflected in nearly every action we take. This isn’t a dystopia, or a totalitarian regime bent on societal control, it’s simply the order of the day for capitalism.
Capitalism seeks capital. And capital can only understand itself through the quantified: it can only be represented by numbers, not by quality. Flattening ‘things-in-the-world’ such as quality, knowledge, concept or people into numbers is hugely advantageous for capitalism because it allows for their processing.
In tech, this is doubly true. Value is quantified, but so are all problems and solutions. The ability to measure, optimise and solutionise is unparalleled. Any any social ill can be ‘solved’ by clever enough application of of 1’s and 0’s, tech claims.
User Experience Specialists, the venerable advocates of the user, are forced to play by the rules of the quantified, the bottom line, data.
But the foundation of UX is not numerical data.
It is people. It is people being-in-the-word. It is their experience.
It user-centred, human-centred design. It is quality. An experience is not a quantity, it’s a quality. An experience is phenomenological, not mathematical.
Yes, we can try to put metrics next to experiences like happiness or frustration, but you don’t feel a “3” on a scale of frustration, you feel what you feel. Given an opening, you might talk about qualities of your experience which may or may not include happiness or frustration but may involve other emotions, themes or observations. How you construe and reflect on meaning from an experience is severely constricted by the quantified researcher-defined parameters.
In the academic world, this is exemplified in the replication crisis, which sees psychology and its various sub-fields harmed because of the difficulty and slipperiness of measuring people’s experiences(not too mention the ability to manipulate such ‘objective’ standards through means like p-hacking). There’s good-faith efforts to address this, but the problems are glaring and deep-rooted.
In business this is extraordinarily apparent as well. Again and again, when I do UX research and analyse themes or concepts, I’m asked for the “data” that supports my analysis. Of course, the person asking me this means “Show me numbers!”
But being emerged in a contextual inquiry, or conducting qualitative user testing allows you to notice trends and themes by carefully noting the meaning behind people’s actions, words and understandings. Analysis such as this doesn’t result in numbers — numbers may play a part — but the overall analysis looks to understand the depth, breadth, and relations of concepts. And these concepts might move between levels of granularity or rely on a number of variables (facial expressions, tone, distractedness, etc.). All of this means that there is no single number — or there shouldn’t be — in most forms qualitative UX research.
Yet the quantified underpinning of capitalism forms our frame of reference, as the realm of the quantified defines what we can and cannot do. In other words, our creativity and its resultant output are restricted. James Bridle refers to this as ‘computational thinking’. We think in terms of optimising local areas of systems. We think of increasing conversion. We think we can solve social ills with enough 0’s and 1’s.
It’s not, I would argue, a UXers remit to inhabit this ontology, this way of understanding the world.
UXers are ostensibly an advocate for the user, not the business. Indeed, that’s where they are most effective. Yes, UXers paid by the business to make the best possible experience for that product, but the best possible experience for a user and the best possible experience for a product are not the same thing.
Take an example: a user’s goal might not be to purchase a airline ticket, it might be to learn about how often planes leave to a particular location (good luck trying to find this info!), yet enormous UX resources are devoted to making that airline ticket more attractive— even to the detriment of other use needs (or feelings or states). In this way business needs and user needs often conflict. The UXer is the advocate for the user — that’s why they’re there.
But so what? You might say that this is all just definitional, that a UXers job is to make business and user needs together. That’s fine, but don’t mistake the ability to make money as a good user experience. A good user experience doesn’t require a company to make money.
But of course capitalism does. It demands money and it demands metrics to show how an user’s experience is improving their money-making. Money is quantity which only understands other measurable quantities. And a quantity is only measurable when it is becomes a variable that must be made (seemingly) objective and generalisable by defining a set of parameters which determine an instance of that variable. Yet experience is personal, subjective and continuous. It is unbounded.
This is why it can be difficult or inappropriate to think about a single product’s UX. A UXer must erect artificial boundaries around the context of investigation — conversion becomes the ultimate arbiter of an experience, not the actual quality of an experience. And to understand conversion, we have to measure. Our ability to examine someone’s experience of the world degrades because we can’t engage with the full range of experience because of the demands of quantification vis-à-vis capitalism.
For example, the web as a whole, and applications of it, are far more concerned with retrieving information than helping people to manage information, and facilitating the building of personal ecologies of relevant information. Bookmarks have barely changed in two and a half decades. Ideas such as transclusion and Stretchtext that would aid in building personal and global semantic relationships died before they were started — and they were imagined half a century ago.
This is because it’s simply far more profitable to facilitate the finding of content than to help create frameworks to support personalised ecologies of information. But any UXer worth her salt will tell you of the importance of personalisation, wayfinding and sensemaking — all qualities that could be engendered positively much more effectively if we focused on personal, curated informational ecologies. These concepts don’t exist in isolation amid the artificial boundaries of URLs. They cross channels, cross into our brains, and into our lives.
But we can’t look at experiences in this way, because in digital improvement (read: optimisation) only takes place at a hyper local level. Even from a quantitative perspective, this isn’t efficient. Geoffrey West has noted that when we look at the biological world, we sometimes see inefficiencies at the local level, but the picture starts to make a great deal more sense at the global level. Here we see the how local inefficiencies often make sense — in global efficiencies. Things become more optimised at a global level at the expense of local optimums. Of course, we don’t — we can’t — think like that in the quantity-capital paradigm.
Yet even this ‘global’ optimisation thinking is more about quantity rather than quality. Because understanding the human quotient isn’t about optimising globally either — optimising seeks quantification.
This isn’t it to say that understanding of quantity is useless. Such an assertion would be absurd. In tech, quantification can tell us, in dead tones, how much of things, like interactions , downloads or hits. It can tell us about routes taken, objects clicked. It cannot help us with vital issues of experience that exceed the parameters of measurable quantities, such as:
- How can we help you build your life in the way you want it to be built?
- What are ways that we aren’t supporting you in doings something that you need supporting with?
- How can your doing a particular activity in the world make life better for all?
- What meaning do you make out of your interactions and experiences with an activity you do?
- What do you understand from your interactions with a particular area of your life?
- What is the context of your experiences and interactions?
And simply, how can your life be better?
The answers to these questions can’t be bounded the variability of a single — or even multiple — measurable quantities, measured within the use of a single product. Indeed, qualitative answers to these questions may point to the fact that you shouldn’t use a product in question, or might even show that we should scrap certain digital products (given how damaging they can be to our mental well-being).
How can we focus more on these quality-based questions, on the totality of experiences?
How we consume, how we prioritise incentive-based structures overall all others, and how we build our economies needs to change for one. I don’t need to explain why there are millions of other reasons that this needs change as well.
I’m not particularly in favour of any other socio-economic framework, but we have to be able to imagine alternatives. It has to start somewhere, and imagining a quality-based world rather than a quantity based world is a start. It’s a place that UXers know well and are predisposed to.
When we begin to uncouple from the quantified, from capitalism, our horizons shift and our gaze follows, enabling us to see patterns, themes and causal structures that were otherwise invisible.
When we see qualities, we begin to see how things are connected, and how we form meaning in relations to other things, not just through a individualised subject-object dualities.
We see that experiences aren’t bounded to individual minds, they’re the result of series of subjective events in an undulating temporal, physical and socio-cultural environment. The artificial boundaries that quantification inserts tends to be reductive, removing meaning.
The content and meaning of relationships that you have with human, environmental and technological systems around you reveals the very qualities of your existence.
For example, on an individual level, we use the world to help us remember, think and be creative. Browser tabs are memories embodied. Emails are externalised lists of activities we have to do. How we formulate intent and use our world helps to define us, which can only be explored qualitatively. We can’t think of software and the web as individualised elements with defined parameters, but rather part of systems that are us, that contribute to forming and creating further needs, emotions and states of being.
On a global level, qualities and relationships are unbounded as well, defined through and between systems. Global warming, political polarisation, fake news — these are all issues that require qualitative and systems-based thinking to understand how best to solve.
This isn’t woolly thinking. It’s well researched, involving fields such as philosophy, cognitive science, archaeology, and human-computer interaction and systems theory.
Imagine if UXers and indeed workers of all stripes could work across digital and physical ecosystems to creative qualitatively impactful experiences, rather than increasing the quantifiable measurement of a small part of a single one.
What could we create?
