There is a tendency in the design industry that designers would choose a consumer mobile app project over, for example, desktop software project for business. The reason is not hard to understand – they want to work on something popular your mom and friends can know and constantly talk about.
Your mom and friends, and ourselves, are all consumers. Consumers tend to consume, not create.
They are the characters described in Amusing Ourselves to Death.
Easy-to-use apps are sugar coated, so consumers feel drawn to it. The more users are addictive to your app, the more gainful your app business will be.
Similarly, designing those easy-to-use apps are arguably easier (e.g. non-complex workflows and use cases). As a result, some designers, like consumers, could easily indulge themselves to become weaker in problem solving.
There’s a “Bible” in User Experience area – Don’t Make Me Think. Ever since, UX professionals unconditionally follow “ease of use” as one of the most important principles to guide their works.
But humans are creatives. We need tools to help us create stuff, hard sophisticated stuff.
We should create more, not consume more.
We should enable, not indulge.
We should encourage the beauty of complexity, not just the simplicity.
This is a fight against Soylents not to take over our world full of cooked gourmet foods.
Zewen Liang 