The comment about the marketing person saying users would feel like the lower-tech UX was archaic was interesting because of the insight it implied. The value

The comment about the marketing person saying users would feel like the lower-tech UX was archaic was interesting because of the insight it implied. The value a product expresses really is the product. The user has to feel something about it. A medical device in a hospital setting used by nurses on patients needs to express professional sophistication to the patient and reliability to the RN. The simple LCD display makes sense for expressing something purpose-built, e.g. for a doctor doing a test, but for the RN, who does most of the care and patient interaction, things like rapport, trust, and familiarity go a lot further, hence asking for a touch screen. Once as a PM on a security product, I entered into the UX development with the perspective of producing a consumer product that just told you the thing you needed to know, believing that the value we were providing was from our ML analytics back end we had invested so much in. What came back from enterprise sales was, "we want more widgets on the screen, can you just make it look like it's doing something?" My reaction was, "find smarter customers," which of course was the the most uniquely and profoundly wrong response in almost every way at once. After going out on some sales calls, what customers wanted was our data. They didn't care about our huge ML pipeline with a calm and decisive consumer oriented UX, because in their environment, having smooth products was not what made them express power to their own stakeholders - they expressed their own value by showing whizzing screens of data. What they really wanted in hindsight was a private telemetry and surveillance API for fleet devices, like a more featureful MDM, but scriptable so they could demonstrate their own value - and not an ML model that did that for them. A low tech command line or API was the real product they wanted. Customers who did like it were enterprise managers who wanted to show they were hip to silicon valley driven tech change. I'd wonder if we could make a radial web chart of the values a customer really has and the result would indicate the design language elements the UX of a product should have. You'd have to figure out what things like "powerful" mean to your customers, and what would equip them to become that through using your product. Other sub values are things like authoritative, safe, precision, virtuotic, calm, belonging, competent, inventive, hidden depth, compliant and aligned, elevated, the exception, etc. Based on these, I'd design a product UX around a stack ranked set of values like these. Makes me think there is a future in new kinds of input devices though.