Design challenges for the current digital reconversion
“Crises don’t just change behaviors; they reshape how we understand experience, value, and design.”
Introduction
In everyday situations, user experience tends to be shaped by personal preferences and context-specific needs. But in times of crisis, such as pandemics, natural disasters, or economic upheavals, experience becomes social. Behaviours shift, not just individually but collectively.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, this shift was evident. Prevention campaigns emphasized communal responsibility. Collective volunteering efforts surged. Design was no longer just about pleasing users; it became a tool to foster solidarity, resilience, and shared meaning.
This blog explores how moments of crisis redefine our roles as designers and why it’s time to move beyond individualistic UX models toward more community-centred and socially attuned approaches.
The Legacy of User-Centred Design
As designers, we are deeply familiar with the terminology of User-Centred Design (UCD) and User Experience (UX), concepts made prominent by Donald Norman in the late 1980s (Norman, 1988). Yet their philosophical roots stretch further back; Henry Dreyfuss’s The Art of Designing for People (1955) laid early groundwork for designing with human needs in mind.
These frameworks were revolutionary in their time. They shifted the focus from technical efficiency to human usability and emotion. However, by centring the individual user, they have also limited our field’s capacity to address collective needs and systems-level challenges.
In response, Participatory Design (PD) emerged in the 1970s, advocating for co-creation with users rather than for them (Schuler & Namioka, 1993). More recently, Community-Centered Design (CCD) has begun to surface, though timidly, in UX practice. This approach aligns more closely with the values and complexities of social technologies.
The Pandemic as a Design Inflection Point
COVID-19 acted as a global stress test, pushing digital transformation forward at unprecedented speeds. The idea of a digital economy, once confined to certain sectors, spread across industries. Companies, institutions, and entrepreneurs alike were forced to reconsider how they create and deliver value.
And here lies a tension.
While business models continue to depend on satisfying individual needs, user behaviour has shifted to be more collective in nature. From group chats supporting mental health to community-based delivery apps, users have adopted technologies in ways that reflect shared goals and vulnerabilities.
As MIT Technology Review’s David Rotman (2020) noted, there’s a growing need to shift from growth-centric economics to models prioritizing socially sustainable products and services.
Where UX Falls Short
Despite this shift, UX practices still largely rely on Design Thinking methods that emphasize the individual persona, the empathy map, the journey map, the personal pain point. These tools remain essential, but they are no longer sufficient.
When we design only for the individual, we risk ignoring how technologies affect the collective fabric of society, its trust, cohesion, and well-being.
The challenge is not technical; it’s methodological. Designing for communities means addressing wicked problems (Rittel & Webber, 1973), complex, interdependent issues with no single solution. It means engaging with multiple stakeholders, diverging values, and power dynamics.
From Customer Delight to Social Delight
There’s a growing call within the UX field to redefine what we mean by “delight.” Traditionally, customer delight has referred to small moments of surprise or ease, beautiful animations, quick loading times, a seamless checkout.
But in a post-crisis world, these seem insufficient.
We need to aim for social delight technological experiences that generate shared meaning, enable collective action, and support emotional resilience across groups, not just individuals. This approach aligns closely with the principles of Positive Technology (Riva, Baños, Botella, Wiederhold, & Gaggioli, 2012), which focuses on designing interactive technologies to enhance personal and societal well-being.
Rethinking UX Research and Design
Moving from UCD to CCD invites a profound transformation in how we approach research and design:
| From | To |
|---|---|
| Individual personas | Community profiles |
| Empathy maps | Social insight frameworks |
| Product adoption | Collective engagement |
| Delightful UI | Meaningful, shared experiences |
It also requires cross-disciplinary thinking, collaborating with sociologists, public health experts, urban planners, and educators, to understand how technology can mediate complex human needs.
Closing Reflection
The pandemic has revealed something we can no longer ignore: Human experience is not just personal; it’s communal.
As designers and researchers, this is our opportunity and our responsibility. To shift from designing for optimized individuals to designing for thriving communities.
What would UX look like if we treated the community as the primary user?
References
Dreyfuss, H. (1955). Designing for People. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Norman, D. A. (1988). The Psychology of Everyday Things. New York: Basic Books.
Rotman, D. (2020). Why tech didn’t save us from covid-19. MIT Technology Review. https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/06/17/1003312/why-tech-didnt-save-us-from-covid-19/
Rittel, H.W.J., Webber, M.M. Dilemmas in a general theory of planning. Policy Sci 4, 155–169 (1973). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01405730
Schuler, D., & Namioka, A. (Eds.). (1993). Participatory Design: Principles and Practices (1st ed.). CRC Press. https://doi.org/10.1201/9780203744338
Riva, G., Baños, R. M., Botella, C., Wiederhold, B. K., & Gaggioli, A. (2012). Positive technology: using interactive technologies to promote positive functioning. Cyberpsychology, behavior and social networking, 15(2), 69–77. https://doi.org/10.1089/cyber.2011.0139