The occasional light expression

It recently struck me that part of the problem in digital User Experience Design is the paltry vocabularies often used to describe the end state of a design.

Consider the following conversation between a digital designer and his or her CEO:

Designer: Ok, here are the 3 best options i could come up with over the weekend

CEO: Nice, nice, very nice. But dont you think they’re missing something, a little something

Designer: How do you mean? Are the designs not solving the problem well? I’ve used a very different navigation model in all the designs. Plus i think the purple-gray and red-black color options have a lot of potential.

CEO: Oh, of course. This is great effort. I’m just saying that it could have a little more, you know, like pizzaz, a little more oomph, a little more flash & sizzle, some more spice.

Designer: Ok, how about if i do a little more 3D, and maybe more drop shadows everywhere?

CEO: Yeah, Maybe. But u know what i mean. Like a little more futuristic, a sleek smooth experience.

Designer: You’re saying you want something that sizzles, has spice, and looks like its from the future.

CEO: Yeah, and makes you want to BUY our product online, like, RIGHT NOW

Designer: Oh well.

I think the problem is with the VOCABULARY here.

User Experience Design has started employing words like desire, delight, and awesomeness to describe a certain state of user happiness, but each of these words is a 100 layers deep in terms of what it means and what it can mean.

Think about delight. How do you define delight. Can you capture delight simply through buttons, colors, and layouts, or is delight a function of the underlying value proposition of a product? Can an interface delight the way an ice cream does? Or is delight simply not specific enough as a word to describe the end state of a User Experience.
Or consider “path-breaking”. What path? Breaking what? What does that even mean?

I think Design Processes need better frameworks to define rich vocabularies. I’ll cover this in Part II