6 ms·

I have the same kind of website. I once showed it to an employer and he almost laughed. It's like the internet has been overtaken by an army of advertisers and

by jokoon 7y ago

I have the same kind of website. I once showed it to an employer and he almost laughed. It's like the internet has been overtaken by an army of advertisers and wannabees photoshop artists. I'm curious about UX, because sometimes it's aimed to make consumers feel good, and sometimes it's to be productive. I'm wondering if UX is backed by science/engineering.

doublerabbit 7y ago
There is a large amount of social engineering exploitation to UX and it comes down to how can I exploit the person viewing the content. The main question to UX design is how can I control the user to tap what I want? And it's all very simple. The main exploit you want is a reaction. Next time your commuting on public transport if you spot someone looking at social media on their phone watch their body language. As they scroll the endless pages of guff, you can start to learn their body language and how they react. With this you can start to psychoanalyze the user reactions and you can then use this to trigger a person to flip in to a emotional state; allowing you to socially engineer the person especially within a UX model. Media News does this all the time; you can easily cripple a person with just two sentences of text and a picture. It's why a good troll is so effective. If you spark a response, you've got their attention as exactly the downvote I received is. Another example of a human exploit in the world we live in. With that downvote it can flip the persons emotional state where the feeling is of "oh,no" because my "value of 69" is now "68". A pointless number, an pathos exploit which can be manipulated by bots.
gumby 7y ago
> I'm wondering if UX is backed by science/engineering. Yes it is and has been for a long time. Time and motion studies were taken throughout the 20th century and even in the 19th. (There was a recent HN posting about such a study in aircraft cockpits of the 40s or 50s and the need for adjustable seating, relaying to air crashes). Don Norman published one of the first great such books (Design of everyday things) — check out the nuclear plant photo! There was a deep study of the efficacy of design in print media which fascinatingly to be settled on different design points in different countries, though the most scientific such studies waited until computers were readily available. Early GUIs were controversial and UX studies going back to the early 70s by people like Stu Card and by Fitts have been both surprising and influential. Xerox PARC where Card worked even hired anthropologists. UX researchers are pretty important today. All the “big guys” (FAANG etc) and less well funded companies as well. Engineering? Well companies spend a lot on their sites and devices. You can decide on that part.
- loopz 7y ago
  Maybe you're thinking more of traditional GUI / UI's? UX is pretty much fad/consultancy/design-driven at this point, though companies also exploit big data analytics in order to annoy the users the most without making them hit "X" (and lately it's anecdotally failing).
  - gumby 7y ago
    That is true for some web sites (perhaps for FB, Youtube and the like Too — feels like it but I don’t know). Activity like you describe is really part of the advertising consultants. But there are a lot of other products beyond web sites out there. My GF did her PhD work in AI/learning (world looked different in the early 90s) and has been Sr Researcher at Microsoft, Google, LinkedIn, FB, Amazon and didn‘t work on Web sites for any of them. She also worked for some smaller companies, still big, and some of those were web sites but none ad-supported. The issues ranged from “how do people use this feature” to “how do we find a way for new, different kinds of people to use our product? How can it fit what they want?”
    - loopz 7y ago
      So, how does the AI/ML/whatever work for, the customer/end user?
      - gumby 7y ago
        She comes from an era that predates the simplistic approach called "AI" these days. Today it's basically quasi-automated generation of the 80s/90s's Expert Systems decision trees. A better way to think about it in this context I suppose is that it's all about thinking about the human's cognitive models and how you can 1 - get a handle on what works and 2 - figure out why to be able to reproduce it. A lot of her work for the past couple of years seems to be on the former; a few years ago I would have called her studies "anthropological". I'm not an expert in this area (though my AI work dates back to that era as well) so am just going on snippets of what she says about her work, none of course which can include anything confidential.
p_l 7y ago
A lot of science and engineering goes into UX. Unfortunately, the actual goals of the company might not be aligned with good UX for the end users, and other pressures (design team, marketing team, time/money etc) often drives important parts of UX away.
JackRabbitSlim 7y ago
Increasing user productivity and usability by any % doesn't directly translate to revenue. Steering users to premium features or ad click-throughs does directly translate to revenue. Revenue driven design will win every time.
dylan604 7y ago
Sometimes, I miss the simplicity of Web 1.0. That's until I remember how simplicity became quite ugly with the use of tables for layout. <shudder>

by jokoon 7y ago

doublerabbit 7y ago

There is a large amount of social engineering exploitation to UX and it comes down to how can I exploit the person viewing the content. The main question to UX design is how can I control the user to tap what I want? And it's all very simple. The main exploit you want is a reaction. Next time your commuting on public transport if you spot someone looking at social media on their phone watch their body language. As they scroll the endless pages of guff, you can start to learn their body language and how they react. With this you can start to psychoanalyze the user reactions and you can then use this to trigger a person to flip in to a emotional state; allowing you to socially engineer the person especially within a UX model. Media News does this all the time; you can easily cripple a person with just two sentences of text and a picture. It's why a good troll is so effective. If you spark a response, you've got their attention as exactly the downvote I received is. Another example of a human exploit in the world we live in. With that downvote it can flip the persons emotional state where the feeling is of "oh,no" because my "value of 69" is now "68". A pointless number, an pathos exploit which can be manipulated by bots.

gumby 7y ago

> I'm wondering if UX is backed by science/engineering. Yes it is and has been for a long time. Time and motion studies were taken throughout the 20th century and even in the 19th. (There was a recent HN posting about such a study in aircraft cockpits of the 40s or 50s and the need for adjustable seating, relaying to air crashes). Don Norman published one of the first great such books (Design of everyday things) — check out the nuclear plant photo! There was a deep study of the efficacy of design in print media which fascinatingly to be settled on different design points in different countries, though the most scientific such studies waited until computers were readily available. Early GUIs were controversial and UX studies going back to the early 70s by people like Stu Card and by Fitts have been both surprising and influential. Xerox PARC where Card worked even hired anthropologists. UX researchers are pretty important today. All the “big guys” (FAANG etc) and less well funded companies as well. Engineering? Well companies spend a lot on their sites and devices. You can decide on that part.

loopz 7y ago
Maybe you're thinking more of traditional GUI / UI's? UX is pretty much fad/consultancy/design-driven at this point, though companies also exploit big data analytics in order to annoy the users the most without making them hit "X" (and lately it's anecdotally failing).
- gumby 7y ago
  That is true for some web sites (perhaps for FB, Youtube and the like Too — feels like it but I don’t know). Activity like you describe is really part of the advertising consultants. But there are a lot of other products beyond web sites out there. My GF did her PhD work in AI/learning (world looked different in the early 90s) and has been Sr Researcher at Microsoft, Google, LinkedIn, FB, Amazon and didn‘t work on Web sites for any of them. She also worked for some smaller companies, still big, and some of those were web sites but none ad-supported. The issues ranged from “how do people use this feature” to “how do we find a way for new, different kinds of people to use our product? How can it fit what they want?”
  - loopz 7y ago
    So, how does the AI/ML/whatever work for, the customer/end user?
    - gumby 7y ago
      She comes from an era that predates the simplistic approach called "AI" these days. Today it's basically quasi-automated generation of the 80s/90s's Expert Systems decision trees. A better way to think about it in this context I suppose is that it's all about thinking about the human's cognitive models and how you can 1 - get a handle on what works and 2 - figure out why to be able to reproduce it. A lot of her work for the past couple of years seems to be on the former; a few years ago I would have called her studies "anthropological". I'm not an expert in this area (though my AI work dates back to that era as well) so am just going on snippets of what she says about her work, none of course which can include anything confidential.

p_l 7y ago

A lot of science and engineering goes into UX. Unfortunately, the actual goals of the company might not be aligned with good UX for the end users, and other pressures (design team, marketing team, time/money etc) often drives important parts of UX away.

JackRabbitSlim 7y ago

Increasing user productivity and usability by any % doesn't directly translate to revenue. Steering users to premium features or ad click-throughs does directly translate to revenue. Revenue driven design will win every time.

dylan604 7y ago

Sometimes, I miss the simplicity of Web 1.0. That's until I remember how simplicity became quite ugly with the use of tables for layout. <shudder>