Architecture & UX: drawing parallels and identifying opportunities
By: Reem Najjar
Tags: User Experience, Architecture, User Experience Design, Design, UX

Architecture is a field that is over 10,000 years old, while User Experience Design only emerged as a discipline in the last 100 years. Regardless, both have the same core focus: us.

“Technology may change rapidly, but people change slowly. The principals [of design] come from understanding of people. They remain true forever.” — Donald A. Norman, User Experience Architect

Architecture is the art and science of designing and constructing buildings. For thousands of years architecture was only experienced in the physical “real world,” but with technological development we can now experience digitally built environments. This new world has endless real estate, creating many new and exciting opportunities for designers.

User Experience (UX) Design is a modern discipline that aims to study and enhance the interactions between a user and a product or service. With good integration of UX research and design, we can enhance how users experience built environments.

Design Thinking:

There are many similarities between the design approaches of these human-centric disciplines. Architects design for the people who will inhabit the physical spaces, while user experience and product designers are focused on the users who will interact with the digital world. Both designers go through a process or framework of Design Thinking. The 3 Essential Pillars of Design Thinking as IDEO defines it are:

1. Empathy

You need to be able to put yourself in someone else’s shoes in order to design for them. If you are an architect designing elementary school classrooms, you must study teachers, as well as 4 to 11 year olds, in order to design for their needs, and at an appropriate scale. This empathy towards teachers and students is also required for UX designers who may be creating an internal mobile application for the elementary schools.

2. Ideation

The first solution that comes to mind is never usually the best one. Architectural and UX designers both go through an intensive iterative process in the pre-design phase where multiple sketches, ideas, and solutions are created.

3. Experimentation

As an architectural designer you may test out your ideas through sketching, clay models, or computer-aided 3D modeling. In UX design this is known as prototyping. This process needs to be quick and rough, ready to be disregarded in order to move on to the next idea.

The feasibility parameters are also similar. Architectural and UX designers need to create economically and financially viable designs, that comply with accesibilty guidelines, and can be constructed, or developed, by the construction, or software development teams.

Phases of Design:

Pre-Design:

In the preliminary phase, the architect needs to determine the programming. This helps define the scope by assessing the needs of those who will live, work or play in the space. Similarly, UX researchers aim to understand the users needs, behaviors, and motivations. This can be done through the study of precedents, interviews, and surveys. UX dives deeper with this, incorporating tools such as personas, journey maps, card sorting, usability testing, etc.

This phase is very important as both designers know that the cost of change exponentially increases as time goes on.

Design:

What is the main space — the foyer/lobby/living room — the home page? While aesthetics is important, does the design address functionality — usability? Is the way-finding and navigation clear? What experience do we want to create? What have we learned from past projects?

Architects move into the Schematic Design phase with questions like these in mind, creating initial illustrations incorporating the programming, schedule, and budget. Similarly, UX designers ask the same questions, moving into the prototyping phase in order to create wireframes that give an outline and structure for the content, layout, and direction of the product.

UX wireframes, and architectural blueprints known as construction documents, aim to serve the same purpose. However, the design process in architecture is much longer, as architects move on to the Design Development and Construction Document phases, the number of drawings increase, becoming more refined, detailed, and technical.

Coordination is very important for both disciplines, both internally and externally, amongst team members and consultants, in order to create the best, most efficient, and seamless designs.

Construction and Development:

Construction documents are handed off to the contractor to create the buildings and structure, as wireframes are given to the developers to create the interfaces and framework.

Launch:

Images from: Fabrick Design and Mendix

The life cycle of most architectural design processes are long, linear, and usually measured in years; while the cycles in product design are shorter, reiterative, and measured in months.

The design of digital products are relatively more flexible, with success metrics more easily obtained and evaluated. While architecture is trying to become more adaptable through modular design, open-flexible floor plans, and dynamic transformable spaces, technology is the key driver of speed and flexibility. The post analyzes phase is less prevalent in architectural design as it is more difficult for buildings to be refined and “re-launched.” With products, you can deliver the Minimum Viable Product (MVP), then go back and refine it, but once a structure is built, it is much more difficult to go back and make changes.

Architecture Integrates UX and Product Design:

Not only are the processes similar, but there are many opportunities for cross-disciplinary learning. Gensler, a leading architecture firm, has created the Gensler Experience Index used to “identify and quantify the factors of design that impact the human experience.” Similarly, architecture firm Perkins + Will started a research department, that has a Human Experience (Hx) Lab, and as their Director of Research, John Haymaker, explains “We’re creators and curators of intelligence. By constantly asking questions — by pushing the boundaries to know more — we stay on the cutting edge … understanding how built environments affect the human experience … allows us to design smarter, more competitive built environments — for you.”

Virtual reality (VR) is a fully immersive platform where architectural design can completely take place in the digital environment. VR can act as a tool to help draw insights and better study the human experience within the design before it is built. It can also help clients understand and experience the space while changes to design can still be made at lower costs. VR can help in understanding how a person navigates around a building, identifying pain points, and even testing design issues such as the efficiency of emergency exit routes.

Augmented Reality (AR) allows virtual objects to be overlaid into the physical world. Like VR, AR can also be used as a design tool to simulate the architectural experience. For example, to better analyze the scale of your designs you can overlay a 3D model of a building on to a physical site, or an interior architectural form into an existing building. This allows opportunities for iterative design seen in the agile product design process to exist within the architectural design process as well. “MVP’s” can be tested before they are launched to build. Experimentation can be more efficient and incorporate user experience research with increased testing opportunities, as the contractor can now be temporarily substituted with the software developer.

AR also presents an opportunity for architects to focus on the spatial design of “the shell,” and allow technology to take over the functional design process within the space. Many things can be augmented, from the signs and way-finding in an airport, the tools used in an office, to the color palette of the walls in your home. Technology can allow architects to meet users ever-changing preferences over time, no longer predefining them by the initial built design. This creates spaces that are more equitable, personalized, flexible, and arguably timeless.

The possibilities seem endless and the opportunities to enhance user experience in the field of architecture is ever growing and evolving. Designers are not only similar, but they can share and create tools for one another to use within their own design processeses. So what can these fields keep learning from one other? How far can they integrate? Can they be one and the same?

At the end of the day, designers share the same the goal: