If you only read the cover of Thich Nhat Hanh’s The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching, you’ll know that the aim of his practice is to “transform suffering into peace, joy, and liberation”.
That’s a good way to approach User Experience design:
Work to transform noise to signal, ambiguity to clarity, frustration to passion.
Sometimes I think, “UX design only solves silly first world problems.” Then I remember:
- The suffering caused by bad user experiences is real. How much pain have automated phone menus caused? How does it feel when your company buys the Big Expensive Enterprise System and everybody hates it?
- Fixing the user experience SCALES. It might take hours to smooth out some user interface friction, but if that work saves many users a few seconds of pain for the life of a product, it’s a big win.