User Experience isn’t Everything

It seems the whole world has gone crazy for design lately. Engineers fancy themselves UXperts, Ad Sales is requesting PSDs to tweak, and Upper Management just doesn’t like that shade of blue.

Personally, I blame Pinterest.

Pinterest’s rapid ascent into mainstream lexicon* is enforcing the concept that the visual aspect is the only important piece of a product. Well, I’m here to tell you that that ain’t true.

Take the ‘To Do’ app Clear for example — it offers one of the most beautiful experiences available in the App Store. However, it’s also missing major features! It limits characters to an unusable minimum, there’s no indication of navigational hierarchy, the ‘down’ swipe intended to change screens constantly pulls down the iOS drop screen instead, and once you remove your completed tasks there’s no way to recover them (which is really annoying if you do it with an experimental swipe!!).

Path is another gorgeous app with insufficient use cases. The idea behind Path is that it’s the social network that limits your number of connections, thereby keeping your friend list to only your nearest and dearest. Well, that’s all well and good, but good luck trying to figure out how to post on another person’s Path! Instead of encouraging users to interact with one another, the featureset encourages them to fixate on their own Path. It quickly devolved into what Facebook began as — the pool into which Narcissus tumbled (complete with self-indulgent duckface photos to boot).

It’s been touted in the industry that 2013 is the ‘Year of Visual Web’ based on Pinterest’s continued success, redesigns by eBay that put imagery first, Facebook’s purchase of Instagram, and more. With the growing focus on aesthetics, let’s just hope people don’t forget about the features.

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*A bit of an aside, but according to the New York Times, young women are driving linguistic change more than any other demographic. And ~80% of Pinterest users in the US are female. Hmm…coincidence?