BeReal. The UX of ennui? Merde!

If you’ve watched too many UX design YouTube videos or been to enough UX design meetups you’ll have come across this notion of “exciting or delighting” your users with your design. That’s the emotional state of mind you always want users to experience when using your app.

Or is it?

DALL-E 2: “painting of bored men and women in Paris done in the style of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec French painter” — Ultan Ó Broin

Could user experience be more profound than figuring out that machine-gunning 🔥 (fire) emojis under each others’ social media comments indicate, and demand, the validation of our very existence? Our lives aren’t that interesting all the time. I call it 5–95–95. 5% of what 95% of people do 95% of the time is slightly interesting. Maybe.

“Grounded in the empathy of boredom”

There are photo management apps (a speciality study of mine) that accommodate the 5–95–95 reality. For example, there is Minutiae, the “anti-social media” app that enables users to take one photo per day to document life over the years. And then, there is BeReal, the French “anti-insta”, that prompts you daily to take a selfie within a small time window while automatically capturing what’s going on around you.

BeReal notifies you to capture your day. You’ve got a couple of minutes to do so.

I’ve been trying the BeReal app since I read about it in the Financial Times. The digital documenting of user banality that the app offers is becoming very popular indeed. Yes, a design grounded in the empathy of boredom. So far, I have discovered I spend a lot of time in Starbucks on my own with the same type of coffee (Venti, Americano, Whole Milk).

BeReal documents the reality, some say banality, of day-to-day existence. — Ultan Ó Broin

Perhaps the app’s adoption rate reflects an awareness that a lot of people are profoundly aware of how enslaved we have become to photographing ourselves, others, and everything else for no reason. Or maybe the lack of authenticity of the digital world and the disengaged plastic horror of the metaverse don’t fit well with what makes us human and the need to feel “real”.

“Rediscovery offers tremendous pleasure”

Perhaps the problem statement here is how we remind people of their humanity and place in the world so that some personal emotions might resonate when they have time to reflect. Why assume we prefer to be “excited and delighted” by the immediate fantastical self-absorption of people we have never met, and never will, or our delusions of being interesting? Research tells us how looking back at life’s banality, or “rediscovering” the mundane of the past, offers tremendous pleasure. Could it be that Minutiae and BeReal are ahead of the curve, somehow future-proofing user experience, a kind of DePop for vintage memories?

All this fascination in the user experience of ennui. It sounds so earnest, yet delightfully, French in a way. L’enfer, c’est les autres on Instagram, and all that.

It would be great to see the rediscovery concept expand into the capture of conversations as well as images (the research study above covers this). I hope BeReal doesn’t end up like the rest. Merde.

Ultan Ó Broin is a UX design type and photographer from Dublin, Ireland.