Methodology
Focus Group & Participatory Design: Participants were prompted to analyze existing popular interfaces – namely Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Wikipedia – and identify the purposes, agents, and qualities of their user experiences. Participants worked in groups to produce user interface mockups that inverted the qualities and values of the user experiences that they analyzed.
Findings
Through this workshop, participants learned new ways to interrogate interfaces and new vocabularies with which to expose hidden design aspects. Together we discussed three main design dimensions: 1) Design paradigms, 2) navigational cues, and 3) enunciative design. Using these dimensions helped us focus our attention on interface elements that represented specific aesthetics, functionality, narrative, intention, and meaning. It then became easier to locate the constituent aspects of each dimension and invert them.
In the end, participants were asked to design their own user interfaces in light of their findings and their personal, professional, and academic backgrounds. Through this process, participants found that they were interrogating themselves as much as they were interrogating the different interfaces, as one of them mentioned that “we are manipulated and have been engineered by the corporate machine.”
Theoretical implications
As a group, we examined how the inverted interfaces reveal inconspicuous qualities of existing user experiences, how inverting these qualities challenges their normativity, and how speculative interfaces can formulate alternatives to expert approaches to UX. The commercialization of interfaces quickly became blatantly apparent, as shown by well-articulated, precise interface examples. Ultimately, the workshop session served as a proof of concept for a promising hermeneutical approach to critical interface design. *The session received the 2018 R&I Conference Award.