Last night, Rafael and I were marveling again at
how little human interaction a business trip actually takes as we picked up our rental car at
BWI. Everything was going smoothly - flight landed on time, bags arrived, the Hertz Gold Club had us listed on the billboard, and we were just talking about how an interaction-less culture means a higher bottom line for a company, when we discovered that they had given us a hybrid.
Being the office treehugger, I of course was thrilled. I've driven a hybrid once before (the HS250, and while it's not perfect and there are some
peculiar styling details in the center console that I don't adore, it's still a great first stab at a luxury hybrid). Rafael, on the other hand, was not so excited. On normal days, he drives a C280 that was made in Germany and imported into the United States. He loves the feel of the road and the paradigm of driving for him is driven by lots of sounds and textures. It's much harder for someone like that to get used to a car that is silent upon starting up. In fact, it took him three tries of pushing the On button to realize that the car was actually on, and in fact we were in a hybrid vehicle.
While we laughed about it on our drive to dinner (with Rafael nicknaming our
Nissan Altima as "the sewing machine"), we started talking about how generational differences make for different user experiences. Like traveling for business without interacting with a single customer service representative, driving a hybrid is an experience tailored for a specific generation. My paradigm of driving has been developed over eight years, and has always involved one
primary vehicle. My boss, on the other hand, has been driving for almost 30 years, and those layers of memories and thoughts toward the experience of being on the road shape his product preferences very strongly. Those paradigms are different; the
things we value are different.
Back to business travel - I'm part of a generation that has always valued time as its most precious resource. Unlike baby boomers, who chase money after growing up in a relatively less well-off setting as their parents were still handicapped by the economic climate of the 30s when they were starting careers, and unlike Generation Xers, who chase family time after growing up never seeing their parents as they strived to fulfill their American Dream, we grew up overscheduled with ball games and tutoring and soccer practice and flute lessons.
So now, we don't chase money. We want time. We want all of our time to count for something. We recognize that once it's gone, we can't make more. And that says something about why we flock to things like climate change and public health. We have a defined amount of time on earth to tackle these problems.
The culture of business travel is ok for
Generation Y, because things that are designed to automate the process also take us less time to accomplish. The culture of business travel is also ok for the
Baby Boomers, because they value money. But
Generation X traditionally values interaction.
So what does that mean for a user experience designer? How do you design for people who have very different paradigms of how the world should be? The user preferences aren't always the same. In some cases, the end goals aren't even the same. It's not always practical to design different experiences for each of those groups. How do you make sure you've identified with one without alienating the others?
One man's dream car is another man's sewing machine.
