User experience, as tool designers imagine themselves to become the user, asks how one might be assisted in expressing inner ideas with the external tool in hand. Experience excites the body to release dopamine, to stir the sensation of purposeful control with which the user can summon satisfying artefacts (satisfying in its aesthetics, expressiveness, and quality). Therefore the process, to some degree universal, can be well defined and then commercialised. Corporations would like to propagate the term, user.
Before slaughtering the dragon, a player should fight through multiple, milder mini-bosses. Designing the arc of difficulty is part of the user experience considerations. The generative tool makes you maximally armed at the very beginning; the immediate results ruin the playfulness of learning. The outputs of such great mimicry feel unnaturally estranged from what should reflect our signature.
The designer contemplates an image of user. It defines a pure human-object relationship: using and being used. Pure as it is a manipulation by the tool-maker, and as it is an abstraction by academia. Attention narrows to the act of using the tool. If care is not taken (magnetised by dynamics of computation, the tool pulls the human towards its core), the usage feels as though a shroud covers the duo, which blocks surroundings and cuts off the human condition.
ref.
Samuel Rhys Cox, Helena Bøjer Djernæs, and Niels van Berkel. 2025. Beyond Productivity: Rethinking the Impact of Creativity Support Tools. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Creativity and Cognition (C&C '25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 735–749. https://doi.org/10.1145/3698061.3726924