6 ms·

UX Bloat Nonsense

82 points by fookyong 16y ago

adamjernst 16y ago
Every piece of "bloat" has two consequences: it annoys some users -- possibly to the point of scaring them away from the service -- and it convinces some other users to do something profitable. The fact is, savvy users are much more likely to stick with a bloated system than we like to imagine. I still buy tickets from Orbitz, despite the pages of upsells I have to click through, because I have an account there and I know their quality of customer service.
al_james 16y ago
Quote of the day: "This is where you stop looking at your startup as a self-masturbatory piece of UX genius and start looking at it as a business" There was an article on HN the other day about expedia increasing revenue by removing a confusing form field on their booking process. I think the lesson is that users find different things confusing / annoying than UX experts (or web designers). UX experts ramble on about 'clutter' and simplification, however, in my experience, everyday people have a high tolerance to clutter as long as its the right clutter and that clutter is easy to understand (or is a really great deal). At the end of the day, put your faith in data driven split testing, not UX zealots.
- jasonlotito 16y ago
  And anecdote about my first experience with the intricacies of design. A company I worked for about 10 years ago was building an application that had lots of graphic elements to it. One of the colours they were using was red. It was being used throughout the application in bold ways. It looked really nice and slick. However, when we went to show it off to the partners, they were taken aback. See, they were from Taiwan (or some other nation in that region, I forget which), and they were almost insulted by the colour red. Using red was frowned upon for reasons I can't remember, but I believe it had to do with poor luck. Basically, it was bad to use the red. It was at that moment that I realised that UX is not as easy as making it simple to use. UX isn't build around rules, but reason built on testing.
  - asolove 16y ago
    Do you perhaps have this backwards? In the West, the common association green-good, red-bad is pretty common. In Asia it is usually reversed: green-bad, red-good.
    - jasonlotito 16y ago
      Maybe. There was a lot of green in the application as well, so that could very well have been it. It was 10 years ago, and I wasn't involved in the design. Whatever the color, it looked good design wise, but we had to change the color because of the culture.
  - deleted 16y ago
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  - Nekojoe 16y ago
    I've come across things like this before. I’d say it’s part of localisation as well as UX design. We were making a flash sales page, it had red stars on as part of the key GUI design. The sales and marketing team loved it, it worked well, was straightforward to use. However some of the representatives in some Easter European Countries objected to the red stars, and associated with communist regime, for those regions we changed them to green stars so not to be insensitive. We never even considered the red stars being bad, but to some of the Eastern European users it would have been offensive.
- raganwald 16y ago
  I take issue with the expression "UX Experts" as you use it. In fact, I deliberately invoke the "No True Scotsman" argument: If someone is an actual expert in the field, they know that what they find confusing is different than what a user finds confusing, and that what they find aesthetically offensive is irrelevant to what works or doesn't work for the target audience/user. What you are speaking of is the "UX Zealot," exactly as you say at the end of your argument.
  - al_james 16y ago
    Yes true. Apologies to any true UX experts (who are not UX zealots) I may have offended.
    - raganwald 16y ago
      Note that I am not claiming that "The set of all UX professionals who are also experts is non-empty," just that if someone is an expert, then certain things apply. So you may not need to apologise :-)
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- Nekojoe 16y ago
  Here's the article - Expedia on how one extra data field can cost $12m (silicon.com) - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1859871 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1859871
danilocampos 16y ago
> This is where you stop looking at your startup as a self-masturbatory piece of UX genius and start looking at it as a business. What crap. User experience and business aren't mutually exclusive. You have a choice: make money as a result of making your users happy or make money at the expense of their happiness. It's as simple as that. As your decisions compound on one side of that balance or the other, the shape of your brand begins to emerge. My preference, continually, is to work with companies who optimize their business on the side of making me happy. They are playing a long term game that I respect, and which respects me. On the other side, that's the kind of user experience I want to create myself. It's a bit like arguing that you can be a successful organism by being an asshole. Its definitely true that you can. But I posit you can be a successful organism by being good to people, and that the upshot is that it's a lot more fun. Edit: And, of course, this is an exhausting trope, but do I need to mention that one of the largest companies in America makes great user experience the acid test for their business decisions?
- revorad 16y ago
  What crap. "When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."" http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html </meta>
- al_james 16y ago
  It depends what makes you happy. I get happy when I get a great deal more than when its a nice shiny UI. Of course, both a great deal and a great UI is best, but if I had to choose one, I know which it would be.
  - danilocampos 16y ago
    Shiny is an aesthetic description. The importance of this discussion goes much deeper — simplicity versus complexity, and who benefits from each. Upsells are an obstacle to completing your purchase. They're annoying. They are added compexity that has a nominal chance of benefiting the user. In contrast, they are guaranteed to benefit the company, since as a numbers game, you'll end up pitching enough upsells to convert n additional sales. When considering the impact of adding complexity, imagine a toilet. Or, rather, your access to a toilet. Some toilets are a door knob away. Others require you to hunt down a coin and drop it into a slot before providing access. Which toilet are you more proud to have in your business?
JoelSutherland 16y ago
To counter his disclaimer, Japanese and American web sites are very different: http://www.zeldman.com/2010/07/25/the-puzzle-of-japanese-web-design/ http://www.zeldman.com/2010/07/25/the-puzzle-of-japanese-web... This doesn't address his core point. I've always believed that users will tolerate a surprising amount of crap to get what they want. Godaddy isn't exactly suffering.
- fookyong 16y ago
  To give some context, we certainly don't prescribe to the cluttered aesthetic of some other Japanese ecommerce sites. We are much more about letting the product do the talking: Screenshot: http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1205/5145308747_25d89aa4e5_o.png http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1205/5145308747_25d89aa4e5_o....
  - aikinai 16y ago
    I was going to say the exact same thing as JoelSutherland, so I'm glad you posted a screenshot of your site. And now I want to say thank you so much for bringing some taste to the Japanese internet, especially the Japanese fashion/shopping internet.
- falldowngoboom 16y ago
  True. And speaking of GoDaddy a client recently mentioned that they registered two new domains with godaddy. Total cost (with all the ridiculous, unneeded extras): $138 Misleading and intentionally confusing UX can be very good for business.
paraschopra 16y ago
There is no right answer to this. As hinted in the article, you can have a good business with a cluttered UX (hello Ebay) and you can have a good UX with a bad business model (hello thousands of web2.0 companies). Or, you can have the best of both worlds: good UX + good business (hello Apple). I don't see UX and Business as mutually exclusive.
- deleted 16y ago
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weego 16y ago
I'm not really sure where this is coming from, but really any sensible UX person will say "good UX is requiring the least out of users to allow them to achieve their goals while having enough to deliver your business objectives" and not "less is better". Obviously there is no perfect balance for any market and bloat is a completely subjective value to tag on to anything. Bloated in relation to what? In what context? For a site that sold £1000 shoes Amazon's UX principles would be a crazy strategy to implement, but if you apply the same idea visa-versa I imagine that Amazon would be able to measure lost revenue in the tens of millions. But there will be an underlying essential UX requirement because both sites are based on the principle that people have actively chosen to look for an item, and by making that decision they are, more than likely, willing to put up with more than, say, someone looking around a support site for help with their printer drivers.
raganwald 16y ago
There's good stuff here, but one worry... The stuff about fading customer acquisition and needing to upsell existing customers more... This sounds an awful lot like the trap that many "mature" companies get into where growth levels off and they switch their focus to squeezing the maximum amount of revenue out of existing customers. There's a tradeoff, and all of the business practices involved in squeezing more out of the "captive audience"--pricing, UX, everything--drive some customers away and alienate other prospective customers. This drives the need to squeeze even more out of captive customers, and the business and their most entrenched customers begin to circle each other in a deadly embrace. The author isn't advocating any of this, of course, it's a post about UX. But I did get that feeling like the argument was part and parcel of this dilemma facing businesses as they mature.
Pewpewarrows 16y ago
You can certainly have a successful business without a proper UI/UX. Don't think for a second, though, that a good UX won't significantly improve your company. Facebook itself started as being the clean, user-friendly alternative to competitors like Friendster and Myspace.
DanielBMarkham 16y ago
I hate to be terse and snarky, but I think the entire counter-argument boils down to "GoDaddy.com" Go try to buy a domain from GoDaddy. See where all of this up-selling gets you. This is a simple issue, he is correct. The marketplace will decide. Strange that this would show up today, I blogged about this trade-off between user annoyance and profit just yesterday: http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2010/11/good-and-evil-i.php http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2010/11/good-and-evil...
goodside 16y ago
The trick to being nice is that you have to do it even when it seems like a bad idea. This isn't because suffering losses is virtuous, it's because you lack the ability to tell when it's safe to be mean. If you have an extraordinary ability to predict user backlash, which you may well have, by all means go ahead and piss some people off. But don't scold people for having the humility to know that they personally can't get away with it.
pornel 16y ago
Sometimes opposite of good UX brings (at least short-term) revenue: http://wiki.darkpatterns.org/wiki/Home http://wiki.darkpatterns.org/wiki/Home
ThomPete 16y ago
The major problem with UX is that many people from the UX industry are academics not designers. This creates an unhealthy focus on users and too little focus on customers. For anyone interested I wrote a lengthy essay speaking of some of the same things. http://000fff.org/getting-to-the-customer-why-everything-you-think-about-user-centred-design-is-wrong/ http://000fff.org/getting-to-the-customer-why-everything-you...
SimonPStevens 16y ago
It's possible to both up sell and have a good UX. Provided the upsell UI is sensibly restricted, unobtrusive and actually related. Sometimes up selling can actually helpful. I brought a camera recently because I dropped my last one and smashed the screen. After adding it the basket the site listed a few related accessories which included a leather case. Following my recent breakage it's exactly what I needed, but for some reason I had totally forgotten. As it happens I searched a bit a got a different case, but it was their upsell prompt that reminded me I needed one.
kls 16y ago
I'm a director of one of Japan's largest online fashion flash-sales sites. I have a vague idea of what I'm talking about when it comes to e-commerce. Ahh that familiar smell of insecurity fills the air once again.
trustfundbaby 16y ago
I don't think upselling has to be a negative thing ... if you put a bit of thought into it and are actually trying to help the user, it definitely could be a big plus. I love when I put a book or some Music in my cart at Amazon and it shows me related items I could be interested in ... I think almost 25-50% of the stuff I've bought from there has been as a result of this. What I do find rather retch-inducing is this idea that you as a business are 'leaving money on the table' by not trying to upsell me, it shows that you see me as a wallet and could care less whether I find some awesome book or new music that makes my week. I would never want any business I run/start to end up like that. ever.
lubujackson 16y ago
Thank god someone finally says something about this. If I see another one of those "73 Beautiful Web Designs" with all the same layout and content type (simple blog) I'm going to go nuts.
Abid 16y ago
What's with the disagreements? His argument is against the claim that "'simple' is unilaterally better for your business." He's entirely correct. At some point, you'll have to go out and get new customers if you want continued growth. Public companies - the commerce variety he mentions specially - are implicitly required by shareholders to show such growth if they are to remain relevant. And so, you'll have to find ways to make that happen. Upselling seems to be one such source.
shalmanese 16y ago
http://www.quora.com/What-should-you-do-if-your-business-goals-and-product-goals-are-in-conflict http://www.quora.com/What-should-you-do-if-your-business-goa...
lukestevens 16y ago
Great post, simple explanation: UX people don't measure profit. That's a huge disconnect that leads to these weird professional silos between UX and marketing/ecommerce. The sooner UX people start measuring profit -- like they should -- the better.

82 points by fookyong 16y ago

Every piece of "bloat" has two consequences: it annoys some users -- possibly to the point of scaring them away from the service -- and it convinces some other users to do something profitable. The fact is, savvy users are much more likely to stick with a bloated system than we like to imagine. I still buy tickets from Orbitz, despite the pages of upsells I have to click through, because I have an account there and I know their quality of customer service.

al_james 16y ago

Quote of the day: "This is where you stop looking at your startup as a self-masturbatory piece of UX genius and start looking at it as a business" There was an article on HN the other day about expedia increasing revenue by removing a confusing form field on their booking process. I think the lesson is that users find different things confusing / annoying than UX experts (or web designers). UX experts ramble on about 'clutter' and simplification, however, in my experience, everyday people have a high tolerance to clutter as long as its the right clutter and that clutter is easy to understand (or is a really great deal). At the end of the day, put your faith in data driven split testing, not UX zealots.

jasonlotito 16y ago
And anecdote about my first experience with the intricacies of design. A company I worked for about 10 years ago was building an application that had lots of graphic elements to it. One of the colours they were using was red. It was being used throughout the application in bold ways. It looked really nice and slick. However, when we went to show it off to the partners, they were taken aback. See, they were from Taiwan (or some other nation in that region, I forget which), and they were almost insulted by the colour red. Using red was frowned upon for reasons I can't remember, but I believe it had to do with poor luck. Basically, it was bad to use the red. It was at that moment that I realised that UX is not as easy as making it simple to use. UX isn't build around rules, but reason built on testing.
- asolove 16y ago
  Do you perhaps have this backwards? In the West, the common association green-good, red-bad is pretty common. In Asia it is usually reversed: green-bad, red-good.
  - jasonlotito 16y ago
    Maybe. There was a lot of green in the application as well, so that could very well have been it. It was 10 years ago, and I wasn't involved in the design. Whatever the color, it looked good design wise, but we had to change the color because of the culture.
- deleted 16y ago
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- deleted 16y ago
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- Nekojoe 16y ago
  I've come across things like this before. I’d say it’s part of localisation as well as UX design. We were making a flash sales page, it had red stars on as part of the key GUI design. The sales and marketing team loved it, it worked well, was straightforward to use. However some of the representatives in some Easter European Countries objected to the red stars, and associated with communist regime, for those regions we changed them to green stars so not to be insensitive. We never even considered the red stars being bad, but to some of the Eastern European users it would have been offensive.
raganwald 16y ago
I take issue with the expression "UX Experts" as you use it. In fact, I deliberately invoke the "No True Scotsman" argument: If someone is an actual expert in the field, they know that what they find confusing is different than what a user finds confusing, and that what they find aesthetically offensive is irrelevant to what works or doesn't work for the target audience/user. What you are speaking of is the "UX Zealot," exactly as you say at the end of your argument.
- al_james 16y ago
  Yes true. Apologies to any true UX experts (who are not UX zealots) I may have offended.
  - raganwald 16y ago
    Note that I am not claiming that "The set of all UX professionals who are also experts is non-empty," just that if someone is an expert, then certain things apply. So you may not need to apologise :-)
deleted 16y ago
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Nekojoe 16y ago
Here's the article - Expedia on how one extra data field can cost $12m (silicon.com) - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1859871 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1859871

danilocampos 16y ago

> This is where you stop looking at your startup as a self-masturbatory piece of UX genius and start looking at it as a business. What crap. User experience and business aren't mutually exclusive. You have a choice: make money as a result of making your users happy or make money at the expense of their happiness. It's as simple as that. As your decisions compound on one side of that balance or the other, the shape of your brand begins to emerge. My preference, continually, is to work with companies who optimize their business on the side of making me happy. They are playing a long term game that I respect, and which respects me. On the other side, that's the kind of user experience I want to create myself. It's a bit like arguing that you can be a successful organism by being an asshole. Its definitely true that you can. But I posit you can be a successful organism by being good to people, and that the upshot is that it's a lot more fun. Edit: And, of course, this is an exhausting trope, but do I need to mention that one of the largest companies in America makes great user experience the acid test for their business decisions?

revorad 16y ago
What crap. "When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."" http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html </meta>
al_james 16y ago
It depends what makes you happy. I get happy when I get a great deal more than when its a nice shiny UI. Of course, both a great deal and a great UI is best, but if I had to choose one, I know which it would be.
- danilocampos 16y ago
  Shiny is an aesthetic description. The importance of this discussion goes much deeper — simplicity versus complexity, and who benefits from each. Upsells are an obstacle to completing your purchase. They're annoying. They are added compexity that has a nominal chance of benefiting the user. In contrast, they are guaranteed to benefit the company, since as a numbers game, you'll end up pitching enough upsells to convert n additional sales. When considering the impact of adding complexity, imagine a toilet. Or, rather, your access to a toilet. Some toilets are a door knob away. Others require you to hunt down a coin and drop it into a slot before providing access. Which toilet are you more proud to have in your business?

JoelSutherland 16y ago

To counter his disclaimer, Japanese and American web sites are very different: http://www.zeldman.com/2010/07/25/the-puzzle-of-japanese-web-design/ http://www.zeldman.com/2010/07/25/the-puzzle-of-japanese-web... This doesn't address his core point. I've always believed that users will tolerate a surprising amount of crap to get what they want. Godaddy isn't exactly suffering.

fookyong 16y ago
To give some context, we certainly don't prescribe to the cluttered aesthetic of some other Japanese ecommerce sites. We are much more about letting the product do the talking: Screenshot: http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1205/5145308747_25d89aa4e5_o.png http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1205/5145308747_25d89aa4e5_o....
- aikinai 16y ago
  I was going to say the exact same thing as JoelSutherland, so I'm glad you posted a screenshot of your site. And now I want to say thank you so much for bringing some taste to the Japanese internet, especially the Japanese fashion/shopping internet.
falldowngoboom 16y ago
True. And speaking of GoDaddy a client recently mentioned that they registered two new domains with godaddy. Total cost (with all the ridiculous, unneeded extras): $138 Misleading and intentionally confusing UX can be very good for business.

paraschopra 16y ago

There is no right answer to this. As hinted in the article, you can have a good business with a cluttered UX (hello Ebay) and you can have a good UX with a bad business model (hello thousands of web2.0 companies). Or, you can have the best of both worlds: good UX + good business (hello Apple). I don't see UX and Business as mutually exclusive.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

weego 16y ago

I'm not really sure where this is coming from, but really any sensible UX person will say "good UX is requiring the least out of users to allow them to achieve their goals while having enough to deliver your business objectives" and not "less is better". Obviously there is no perfect balance for any market and bloat is a completely subjective value to tag on to anything. Bloated in relation to what? In what context? For a site that sold £1000 shoes Amazon's UX principles would be a crazy strategy to implement, but if you apply the same idea visa-versa I imagine that Amazon would be able to measure lost revenue in the tens of millions. But there will be an underlying essential UX requirement because both sites are based on the principle that people have actively chosen to look for an item, and by making that decision they are, more than likely, willing to put up with more than, say, someone looking around a support site for help with their printer drivers.

raganwald 16y ago

There's good stuff here, but one worry... The stuff about fading customer acquisition and needing to upsell existing customers more... This sounds an awful lot like the trap that many "mature" companies get into where growth levels off and they switch their focus to squeezing the maximum amount of revenue out of existing customers. There's a tradeoff, and all of the business practices involved in squeezing more out of the "captive audience"--pricing, UX, everything--drive some customers away and alienate other prospective customers. This drives the need to squeeze even more out of captive customers, and the business and their most entrenched customers begin to circle each other in a deadly embrace. The author isn't advocating any of this, of course, it's a post about UX. But I did get that feeling like the argument was part and parcel of this dilemma facing businesses as they mature.

Pewpewarrows 16y ago

You can certainly have a successful business without a proper UI/UX. Don't think for a second, though, that a good UX won't significantly improve your company. Facebook itself started as being the clean, user-friendly alternative to competitors like Friendster and Myspace.

DanielBMarkham 16y ago

I hate to be terse and snarky, but I think the entire counter-argument boils down to "GoDaddy.com" Go try to buy a domain from GoDaddy. See where all of this up-selling gets you. This is a simple issue, he is correct. The marketplace will decide. Strange that this would show up today, I blogged about this trade-off between user annoyance and profit just yesterday: http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2010/11/good-and-evil-i.php http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2010/11/good-and-evil...

goodside 16y ago

The trick to being nice is that you have to do it even when it seems like a bad idea. This isn't because suffering losses is virtuous, it's because you lack the ability to tell when it's safe to be mean. If you have an extraordinary ability to predict user backlash, which you may well have, by all means go ahead and piss some people off. But don't scold people for having the humility to know that they personally can't get away with it.

pornel 16y ago

Sometimes opposite of good UX brings (at least short-term) revenue: http://wiki.darkpatterns.org/wiki/Home http://wiki.darkpatterns.org/wiki/Home

ThomPete 16y ago

The major problem with UX is that many people from the UX industry are academics not designers. This creates an unhealthy focus on users and too little focus on customers. For anyone interested I wrote a lengthy essay speaking of some of the same things. http://000fff.org/getting-to-the-customer-why-everything-you-think-about-user-centred-design-is-wrong/ http://000fff.org/getting-to-the-customer-why-everything-you...

SimonPStevens 16y ago

It's possible to both up sell and have a good UX. Provided the upsell UI is sensibly restricted, unobtrusive and actually related. Sometimes up selling can actually helpful. I brought a camera recently because I dropped my last one and smashed the screen. After adding it the basket the site listed a few related accessories which included a leather case. Following my recent breakage it's exactly what I needed, but for some reason I had totally forgotten. As it happens I searched a bit a got a different case, but it was their upsell prompt that reminded me I needed one.

kls 16y ago

I'm a director of one of Japan's largest online fashion flash-sales sites. I have a vague idea of what I'm talking about when it comes to e-commerce. Ahh that familiar smell of insecurity fills the air once again.

trustfundbaby 16y ago

I don't think upselling has to be a negative thing ... if you put a bit of thought into it and are actually trying to help the user, it definitely could be a big plus. I love when I put a book or some Music in my cart at Amazon and it shows me related items I could be interested in ... I think almost 25-50% of the stuff I've bought from there has been as a result of this. What I do find rather retch-inducing is this idea that you as a business are 'leaving money on the table' by not trying to upsell me, it shows that you see me as a wallet and could care less whether I find some awesome book or new music that makes my week. I would never want any business I run/start to end up like that. ever.

lubujackson 16y ago

Thank god someone finally says something about this. If I see another one of those "73 Beautiful Web Designs" with all the same layout and content type (simple blog) I'm going to go nuts.

Abid 16y ago

What's with the disagreements? His argument is against the claim that "'simple' is unilaterally better for your business." He's entirely correct. At some point, you'll have to go out and get new customers if you want continued growth. Public companies - the commerce variety he mentions specially - are implicitly required by shareholders to show such growth if they are to remain relevant. And so, you'll have to find ways to make that happen. Upselling seems to be one such source.

shalmanese 16y ago

http://www.quora.com/What-should-you-do-if-your-business-goals-and-product-goals-are-in-conflict http://www.quora.com/What-should-you-do-if-your-business-goa...

lukestevens 16y ago

Great post, simple explanation: UX people don't measure profit. That's a huge disconnect that leads to these weird professional silos between UX and marketing/ecommerce. The sooner UX people start measuring profit -- like they should -- the better.