The debate has been raging for decades now over what to call the practice currently known as “UX.” It’s been called at times (and sometimes all at once) Web Design, UI Design, Interaction Design, Information Architecture, Product Design, User Experience, Customer Experience, and everything in between.
But now I have definitively come up with a name that everyone will be happy with.
That name is “Screllvus.”
You can’t truly design a user’s experience when you’re designing a product or service. If your user just landed the big Jacobson account at work and won a Jeep in a radio sweepstakes, it’s unlikely that bad button placement on your app is going to have a big impact on their overall experience that day. And by the same token, if the user just found out that their favorite aunt is dying of a rare case of Murderer’s Lung and their wife is leaving them for a 28-year-old Pilates instructor, their experience is not going to be super great no matter how streamlined your checkout workflow is.
Which is why we need to throw the term “User Experience Design” in the fucking trash and start using Screllvus.
“Customer Experience Design” is in vogue right now because of design’s increasing integration into all elements of a business and a growing understanding that direct end users aren’t the only people whose interactions with a business are important. But at the same time, it reduces people to merely economic entities. It’s just as dehumanizing as referring to people as “users” and also has a disturbingly capitalistic bent.
CX is garbage. Try Screllvus.
Information Architecture has a certain nobility and old world charm and gets around the tricky problem of how to refer to people who you design for, by just not referring to them at all. It focuses instead on the content you’re working with (information) and what you’re doing (architecting). But where is the user? I don’t know, theoretically looking at your good, good information, I guess.
“IA?” More like “Goodbye A.” Let’s talk about Screllvus.
What is Screllvus? Well, it’s everything. It’s all the stuff that designers do, packaged into a word that has no previous meaning or messy connotations. You don’t have to worry about forgetting about the user with Screllvus. The user’s in there. And the business too. It encompasses strategy and architecture and visual design. Wireframing? Screllvus has that. Skeuomorphism? That’s part of Screllvus. What about qualitative and quantitative research? They’re in there too. Screllvus means everything you want it to and nothing you don’t.
I can hear your skepticism now.
How did I even come up with Screllvus?
Well, I went through a long and laborious research and ideation process. Here are some other words I considered and discarded before arriving at Screllvus:
- Kemblim
- Brondrite
- Evastimus Simax
- Dendenlius
- Eblastin
- Cimallambum
- Visomia
- Eanordinus
- Compabla
- Salavanzer
- Engenia
- Coolvastim
- Krimbo
As you can easily tell, Screllvus was the right answer. So I encourage you to start using Screllvus to describe yourself, your team, and the work that you do today.
For example:
“Hello, Francis. What do you do for a living?”
“I am a Screllvus.”
“What does that entail?”
“Mostly Screllvus.”
Soon we will all be Screllvus and we can finally stop fighting.