The Window You're Trying to Open

I sat across from Brenda Laurel on a video call last fall, and within the first twenty minutes she said something I haven't been able to put down since.

She was describing a poster that used to hang at Interval Research in 1992. Three letters, all caps: NFI. It stood for No Fucking Interface. The idea behind it, shared quietly among a small group of researchers who were already thinking decades ahead, was this: the interface was never supposed to be the thing. You should be dealing with whatever you're actually trying to do. The surface between you and the world should disappear.

Then she gave me the metaphor that cracked everything open.

"It's like washing the window instead of opening the window and reaching through."

I've been designing digital experiences for fifteen years. I've sat in rooms where we debated button radius and icon weight and whether the blue was warm enough or too corporate. I've written design principles and led research sprints and delivered presentations about the user journey. And in all of that time, I don't think I ever found a cleaner way to say what's wrong with so much of what we call UX than those twelve words.

We're still washing the window.

The reason I was talking to Brenda at all is a story worth telling.

If you ask any language model, any search engine, any textbook who invented user experience design, the answer comes back the same: Don Norman. The term. The discipline. The godfather. Then I interviewed Don, and he told me something else. He got it from a woman. He had edited her chapter in a book years before he took the title of User Experience Architect at Apple. He wrote about it on his own website in 2023 and almost no one noticed.

That woman was Brenda Laurel. Theater director, researcher, writer, one of the most quietly important thinkers in the history of computing. She came to interaction design not from engineering but from the stage. She had directed interactive theater. She understood, before most people were asking the question, that when a person sits down with a computer they're not operating a machine. They're having an experience. They're in a relationship, however brief, with tone and content and feeling and environment. All of it together.

She told me she probably just pulled the phrase out of the air. "Direct rectal extraction," she said with a laugh. But the idea behind it had been living in her work for years. The experience was always the point. The interface was just the membrane you had to pass through to get there.

Don Norman, in one of his more provocative recent moments, told me that UX should die.

I asked Brenda what she thought of that.

She paused, then reframed it the way only someone who's been thinking about this for forty years can. She doesn't disagree with the goal. She disagrees with the misreading. UX doesn't go away when interfaces become invisible. It takes more work, not less, to build something that disappears. The effort moves. It moves from the surface into the experience itself, into the relationship, into the felt quality of the thing.

What dies, or what should die, is the idea that the window is the work.

Brenda also told me she became allergic to the word "user."

This hit differently than I expected. I've used that word thousands of times. We all have. User flows. User needs. User testing. But she pointed at something real when she said it carries power relations inside it. A user is someone who consumes, who takes, who receives. It's not a rich word. It doesn't describe a reader, a player, a searcher, a parent looking for information about their kid's school, a farmer in rural Colombia checking prices on a five-year-old phone with two bars of signal.

If we can't be specific about who we're designing for, we've already lost something.

The people I find most inspiring in this field right now, designers and researchers working outside of large institutions, working in communities and underserved contexts and on problems that don't scale tidily into a roadmap, these people know who they're designing for. They know their names. They know what the morning looks like.

That's where UX was always pointing.

I came away from my conversation with Brenda with a feeling I can only describe as grief and gratitude at the same time.

Grief because so much of what we've built in this industry, the workflows, the frameworks, the endless debates about process and tools and titles, has kept us occupied with the window. With making the window cleaner and smoother and more responsive. With optimizing the washing.

Gratitude because the original idea is still there, waiting. The idea that design is not about surfaces. That the person on the other side is not a user but a human being in a specific moment, with a specific need, inside a specific life. That if we do our job well, they won't notice us at all. They'll only feel the thing they were reaching for.

Open the window.

That's still the whole job.