When I Grow up I Want to Be a UX Designer, Dad

By Adolfo Ramírez Corona

Once upon a time, we woke up and a new field had emerged and risen at work, in design, apps and product development, psychology, and marketing, altering our daily language with new terms and acronyms: user experience. Before we could do something about it, just below the CEO of the company, there was the CXO or chief experience officer. How did this happen? What has changed? What to think about it?
In these essays, Adolfo Ramírez Corona, brings his experience and knowledge in media, audiences, marketing, analog technology, psychology, and philosophy, to transit reflections and stories on this new realm that is here to stay.
Some of the intriguing and make-you-think titles in this collection are: What was before the user?, The interface is the message and good design is invisible, The best type of user you want for your app, Neumorphism will not kill the skeuomorphism star, Writing design in a French style, What does a smartphone smell like?, and The future of the smartphone is not the smartphone.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Adolfo Ramírez Corona
• Release date: Aug 17, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215358689

Adolfo Ramírez Corona

Adolfo Ramírez Corona is a writer, thinker, psychotherapist, coach, media and audience specialist, but more than anything, husband, father, and lover of the present.He has worked on several projects and works, from Philosophy and Photography teacher, to be a consultant in areas about systems and informatics, education, audiences and media, from very operative jobs, to executive and directive ones.As a psychotherapist and coach, he attends to different needs, but always pointing to the practice and development of meditative and hypnotherapeutic techniques as a way of change and transformation.He writes for different publications in a wide range of subjects. To receive updates on his work, writings and books, subscribe to https://adolforismos.substack.com or follow him on https://medium.com/@adolforismos.

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Adolfo Ramírez Corona

When I Grow up I Want to Be a UX Designer, Dad

Stories and reflections on a newly born profession

Copyright © 2023 by Adolfo Ramírez Corona

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

Adolfo Ramírez Corona asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

Adolfo Ramírez Corona has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet Websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book and on its cover are trade names, service marks, trademarks and registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publishers and the book are not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. None of the companies referenced within the book have endorsed the book.

First edition

This book was professionally typeset on Reedsy

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To Ale, Fénix, and Luciana,

for the best and most important human experience

—a family

Contents

Foreword

Preface

I. ON UX ORIGINS AND FOUNDATIONS

1. When I grow up I want to be a UX designer, dad

2. UX is about the X, not the U

3. What was before the user?

4. 3 variables you must know to understand your users better

5. The interface is the message and good design is invisible

6. You know Norman doors, but what about Norman washer-dryers?

7. How to use the Norman door as a conceptual framework

II. ON UX DESIGNING AND THINKING

8. The best type of user you want for your app

9. Designers propose, users dispose

10. To surprise or not to surprise your users

11. Frictionless experiences make us fragile

12. Why information alone won’t help you improve your game anymore?

13. Neumorphism will not kill the skeuomorphism star

14. Two dark experiences with dark mode

15. New research on digital addiction (and what to think about it)

III. ON UX WRITING AND OTHER SKILLS

16. What if UX writing was more like screenwriting than copywriting?

17. All writing is UX writing

18. Writing design in a French style

19. Is this story real?

20. A horrid UI in the best OS of all time

21. The 3 most important skills at work

IV. ON OBJECTS AND PRODUCTS

22. Paper: the unavoidable interface

23. The best second display you may ever find as a designer

24. What does a smartphone smell like?

25. If your product was a song, could you hum its hook?

26. All products have unintended side effects: which have yours?

27. You must start seeing content as a product: see these 3 cases

28. The role of the designer in the era of smart speakers

29. The best app on your smartphone nobody is talking about

30. The future of the smartphone is not the smartphone

About the Author

Also by Adolfo Ramírez Corona

Foreword

I want to thank Fabricio Teixeira from UX Collective and Yenson Lau from Toward Data Science as the editors of the first published version of these works—as indicated in each piece.

The rest were published on Medium and Concepts Against Reality.

All the articles were updated in the external URLs, obsolete references, and little corrections.

Preface

What does a smartphone smell like?

What is the difference between users, customers, and audiences?

How complex is a profession like UX that is not easy to explain to a 5-year-old, like explaining what a firefighter or an architect does?

What is the difference between designing app experiences and writing for TV or movies?

How can a product or brand have the thing that makes a song so memorable?

How much do you have to surprise your users versus how much do you need to make them comfortable and secure?

These questions are part of the journey documented in this book, a journey through the world of UX, UI, apps, and digital design. It is narrated by someone whose first choice after high school was Philosophy. Later, after discovering a passion for art through photography, he decided to become an artist. However, it was the fields of math and technology that paid the bills, leading him to delve into statistics, TV ratings, media, engineering, app development, and software development. Alongside these technical pursuits, he also pursued a humanistic side of life and work, becoming a psychotherapist.

But, most importantly, he was someone who encountered the world of UX, embarking on a journey of learning and self-discovery. This journey coincided with life-altering experiences, such as starting new relationships, becoming a stepparent, and becoming a parent.

Expect to encounter technical aspects of UX, infused with colloquial and conversational philosophy, as well as personal and family anecdotes. For this writer, it is impossible to discuss the dark mode on UI without recalling the experiences of using a cell phone while putting his daughter to sleep. Or to consider the different smells of a smartphone used in a hospital versus a restaurant. Or to write interfaces while reflecting on French semiotics. Or to choose between a figurative or minimalist design while contemplating people’s preferences for nonfiction or fiction stories.

* * *

I, the author, began writing and publishing in English on Medium in March 2018. Initially, my focus was on philosophical and psychotherapeutic topics. However, as had often been the case in my life, I couldn’t resist commenting on technology-related matters. Unsurprisingly, people found my thoughts on technology more enticing than mindfulness or emotions (at least until personal problems arose, leading them to seek my help).

The articles on UX received the most positive responses. Fabricio Teixeira, the editor of UX Collective, read one of their articles—The Future of the Smartphone Is Not the Smartphone—and invited me to publish with the publication. During this collaboration, I penned and published more articles on UX than any other subject.

Looking back at all the articles published during these years, I realized that some had become outdated quickly—those pertaining to Twitter, for example. Yet others withstood the test of time and became personal references for my ideas, stories, and reflections on the subject.

In this book, you will find a curated and updated selection of those articles, organized by topic: UX origins and foundations, UX designing and thinking, UX writing and other skills, and objects and products.

Lastly, I wrote and published the article that gives the book its title, When I Grow Up I Want to Be a UX Designer, Dad, when my youngest daughter was four years old. Today, she is seven and aspires to be a teacher like her mom. I’m still unsure how to convince her how great, interesting, enriching, and cool working in the field of UX can be.

It is my hope that this book will successfully convey the idea to you.

August 2023

I

On UX origins and foundations

1

When I grow up I want to be a UX designer, dad

On emerging professions and their place in society

It’s hard to imagine a child saying that s/he wants to be a UX designer when s/he grows up. Why?

Let’s try to explain to a five-year-old what a UX designer does.

You can talk just about some aspects of the profession, like, a UX designer researches like a scientific, or, a UX designer makes things easy to use.

Or you can talk about the product of the process, like, A UX designer designs apps. But UX design is more than research or designing apps, right?

Is this a problem of overgeneralization or overspecialization¹ of the profession? Does a UX designer make too specific things or make too many?

…when it comes to design, there’s no such thing as ultimate guides, magic formulas, or UX unicorns. There’s a lot of discipline and hard work, that’s what there is.— Fabricio Teixeira²

You can use a lot of analogies to explain what a UX designer does but you can’t resume it with a simple description.

It’s like building things with Lego…, doesn’t differentiate a UX designer from the architect.

Or, it’s like inventing games for the computer, is something you can say for a software engineer or a game designer.

The easy solution can be to forget about the UX factor and explain what a designer is. But the design is too general!

We can explain what a UI designer does, and I can perfectly imagine a kid playing to be one.

Or, we can explain what a UX writer does, and I can also imagine someone playing doing that.

But UX design is a career you think about later in your life. Maybe after beginning another career.

UX design isn’t a job like that of a firefighter, mechanic, lawyer, doctor, engineer, software programmer, gardener, scientist, architect, lawyer, manager, marketer, baker, mathematician, barber, teacher… or even philosopher.

Or, what did a UX designer play when s/he was a child? I can’t imagine a kid saying, I’ll be the UX designer, after another one choosing nurse or accountant.

A kid can play a lot of jobs and professions. In fact, role-playing is a great form of learning by doing. What does a UX designer do that can’t be role-played?

If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough. — Albert Einstein

Two emerging professions from the immediate past

In the 1980s, there was a career fair at my high school. There were stands and talks. One of the most popular careers was Communication. In those years, the big companies were the media companies. Politicians feared the press, radio, and TV as today they fear Facebook, Google, or Twitter.

One of the talks was hosted by Communication students. It was full. Everybody wanted to know about the career of the future.

You could tell that the expositor was very proud of his profession because he did a very comprehensive description of it.

But as the talk went on, the description of what a Communication specialist does started to be confusing. Writing, designing, filming, photographing, presenting, showing… for radio, TV, movies, books, magazines, newspapers, talks, illustration, manuals, training, signaling, music, architecture, art, government…

Most of the assistants were thinking the same, I guess. A communicator knows about writing but there are writers that actually write. Or a communicator knows about designing but there are designers that actually design. And so on.

At some moment, one of my high schoolmates raised his hand, expressed his confusion, and asked the expositor: Could you define to us what communication is?.

The expositor, still proud, answered, Communication is everything, with the special emphasis you put in the word everything when saying We are everything or God is everything.

That day was my last interest in the career of Communication. It seemed too pretentious. We started to call the communicologists, allologists, specialists in all. And no kid said in those years, When I grow up I want to be a communicologist, for sure.

I liked some of the things that were part of the Communication field— I already loved to write — but why would I study design or TV if I wanted to be a writer? (Oh, if I had known… )

The truth is that Communication stopped being a trend. It was, at that moment, an emerging profession, a consequence of the necessities of the industry. Media companies were growing and they needed personnel. Not specialized personnel but general personnel. A communicologist that could specialize once s/he was on the job.

Today young people prefer to study filming, photography, creative writing, design (in any of its multiple specialties, including UX), publishing…

The opposite happened with System Engineers. The position in a company for a Systems Engineer (or similar, like Engineering Informatics) was restricted to what the few computers of a company could accomplish, which, in those years, was only some accounting.

During the 1990s and 2000s, the position of Systems Engineer went from accounting support to became what today we call the CTO or CIO, just under — and sometimes next to — the CEO.

And I remember children saying, "When I grow up I want