I've started the Google UX Course and find it's a pretty decent start. I'm filling in some jargon that I wasn't entirely sure about. That's helpful. But what I can't stand from the course are two things: equitable and empathy.
I've designed websites and experiences for local clients for over three years. For instance, my tax accounting client wanted a website to serve his clients. It was a really simple design starting off, only having the common "home", "about", and "contact" pages.
Let's talk about being equitable. Google, it seems, would rather I show the business to be black-owned and represent more black Americans needing their taxes done. Or perhaps Google would want me to add a translation option to the sight to represent Spanish speakers. Heck, I should even make a tab to flip the site from left-to-right to right-to-left for language speakers of languages like Arabic to feel more comfortable on the site. Perhaps I've gone too far, but the Google course drones on and on about making a design equitable and diverse for various cultures, languages, and colors. To push the biased design of making everything about what is normal and adding, say, avatars that don't represent a majority of the users.
So if you're getting into design and think, "Oh no, my designs are bad because I'm not serving everyone in the world," forget about it. Google has over one billion users. They are in almost every country and their goal is to serve all their users, no matter how diverse the user base is. If you work for a smaller company, more than likely, your job will not be to serve users all over the world. Google design and simply that, the way Google designs. We don't have to do the exact same. (I've never had to add personal pronouns to any of the sites I've built, Google would say this is bad design.)
Now, let's talk about empathy. Google acts as if we must experience what the user experiences to be better designers. Wrong. Most UX designers use sympathy. The different is, while you may not experience the pain points yourself, you can definitely see and understand them. In fact, Don Norman doesn't agree with the empathic design entirely. He feels there's too much of an obsession around it. He's right. When I design a fix for, say, a website, I don't always have the same experience other users may have. I may not be able to feel what they feel. But if they describe their feelings, experiences, and issues with the site, then I can see and understand what the issue is and go about finding out how to fix it. Empathy not required. So if you are wondering if being a designer is for you because you don't empathize enough, don't worry, just remember: Google is woke and focusing on the next billion users, waiting to control the narrative and push whatever they want those users to see/believe.
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