UX Deserts: The Cult and Culture of Complexity
The UX Desert
One of the best things to come of working with my colleagues Nick and Love at our new startup has been the long dialogue we’ve had about the academic market.
Academia is UX’s wild west — a dusty no-man’s land full of isolated towns, local sheriffs, and haphazard structures that totter under their own weight. If you love elegant (or even functional) software it is a dusty, lonely place, populated by cacti and errant tumbleweeds.
But it is also wide open, and full of adventure, which is why we love it.
So we’ve decided to publish a series of articles on the “UX Desert” problem. In a nutshell: UX in academia is really, really bad. Well designed user interfaces are rare. If you have been through college you’re doubtless familiar with it already. Course management programs like Blackboard or Canvas are painful to use, as are lab programs, digital textbook materials, and even parking apps.
The “UX desert” problem runs deep, degrading everything in academia. But there is nowhere the UX problem is more evident than in the software academics use for research. This is our company’s specialty, so we have spent a lot of time speculating about the…