Interface, Interrupted
Artwork by Polish artist Pawel Kuczynski
On the first day of the only UX class I took in college, the professor opened with a line that immediately had me intrigued.
Life is a user experience, she said.
What may be a metaphor to some is a literal description of how we move through the world. Every object, system, and interface we encounter is either supporting or interrupting our ability to navigate life as it unfolds. When something is well designed, it disappears, slipping right by our consciousness. When the design is bad, it produces discomfort and annoyance, and often it fails at the exact moment we need it to function properly. This is especially pronounced in digital environments because in physical space, a poorly designed door handle might frustrate you, but you can probably find another way through. Online, there is no alternative. The interface is the path, and when the path is a maze, the user becomes disoriented because their sense of control weakens, their attention is corrupted, and what should have been a simple action becomes a problem to solve.
This is why tiny interface patterns carry disproportionate emotional weight. The moment a website loads and immediately presents a “Subscribe for 15% off” prompt or an “Accept Cookies” banner, the user is pulled out of their own intention and into someone else’s invasive agenda. These prompts appear before any relationship has been established, which negatively impacts user trust. The system asks for something before it has given anything, which is bad hospitality. In reality, this strategy is counterproductive because every time a user opens their inbox and sees promotional content from some brand they randomly shared their email with that one time, the excess of junk reinforces their increasingly negative opinion of the brand. Not to mention that the brands using these strategies seem to be unaware that when the user encounters anything preventing them from visiting a site, they leave.
What is framed as strategy can actually be, in practice, a breach of natural sequence. Instead of guiding the user through an intuitive environment, a hungry platform consumes them, leading to damage in the neural pathways. So if life is a user experience, then design choices that support cognitive health must be priority. I am composing a letter on this topic for Meta that will most certainly not be read.
