Skip to main content

Having Hope

I work with a lot of UX people and that is probably the best part of my job. It was interesting to read this article on the role of hope in UX. The connection was not obvious to me immediately but it brought to mind some conversations where the UX designer was frustrated with the rest of us and it was hard come up with a compromise that would satisfy everyone's interests. One of the themes felt relatable:

Belonging: You’re designing the onboarding experience to a product that helps people understand their fitness lifestyles by customizing a program to help them become healthier. When the experience requires the user to identify their current fitness routines, you ensure that the options consider folks coming from all economic demographics and not just those who can afford attending Pure Barre or CrossFit classes.

A person's current fitness routine might be just a dream given their life circumstances, lack of discretionary time or money to indulge in such a routine. Catering to this user persona would require the UX designer to believe passionately that there is a path for this individual to achieving better health and fitness. 

That is about hope and not optimal route to monetization. If the constraints of product development are such that the Fitness Pipedream persona does not get prioritized or is not the part of the core addressable audience, then having hope for them will not materialize into an offering that will actually change their lives.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...