Ruminations on Liminal UX
Over the past few years, I’ve been thinking a lot about liminal experiences in user experience. Liminality defines the transitional states between experiences.
A place where service design and user experience are falling short is thinking about the areas where experiences (both experiential and transactional) and interactions that were once human-to-human (like cashier purchases or customer help lines) are now being delegated to screens or chatbots.
I think of kiosks and chatbots as liminal, because the friction introduced through non-human interactions didn’t exist previously. (Yes, self-checkout lanes cut down on lines. But how many times have you seen long lines at self-checkout, just like we used to see on “express” lanes?)
There’s a whole range of UIs that pervade everyday life—from video games to transit kiosks—that lack the care, attention, and design detail we apply to slick apps on phones.
I’m convinced the design problems that pervade these frequently used, but poorly designed experiences aren’t entirely about neglect. It’s about a lack of attention and care. Whose job is it to care about these transition states?
Why should you spend “the company’s money” designing a more thoughtful user interface for, say, a video game settings screen?
Just because users will put up with something doesn’t make an experience worth ignoring. I’m going to spend some time next month thinking more on this subject. Is it liminality or something else? How do you create experiences that are repeatable and transferable across platforms?
Is there a way to build design systems for experiences inside the public domain (like transit)? Or agitate for better customer experiences in the realm of transactional UI?
I’ll keep noodling on this.