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After reading this design critique, I looked up the author's bio and I'm unsurprised to see he's not a designer, but a long-time developer/dev manager. As a mid

After reading this design critique, I looked up the author's bio and I'm unsurprised to see he's not a designer, but a long-time developer/dev manager. As a mid-career developer and art school trained designer, I encounter a lot of exclusively technical people who think they completely understand the product design process because technical pursuits themselves involve some amount of design, and they help implement the decisions and plans made by the design team. Sometimes I encounter well-reasoned external input that helps break down echo chambers and challenge group think; I don't think this article falls into that category. Within the single example given— infinite scroll traps, specifically citing Facebook— the author did not present any real evidence that those designs were even partially driven by contempt for users' intelligence. It's a pretty controversial assertion that he treated as self-evident. Also, the author citing Facebook as a prime example of low-agency infinite scroll traps when services like TikTok and Instagram are far better examples hints he might not be very familiar with the current design landscape which he is critiquing. Lots of people— mostly designers— have presented very valid critiques of infinite scroll. Generally, the goal of infinite scroll is to reduce the cognitive barriers to staying engaged with a product by having content just appear as soon as users look for it. It's incredibly effective. Too effective. Removing these natural pause points removes one of the ways users subconsciously gauge how much time they've spent on an activity, and removes the places that users tend to insert natural stopping points. For example, when reading a book, flipping pages and passing chapters both gives us a general sense of how long we've spent reading without having to manually track it, and gives us a nice place to hit the pause button and put the book down. I agree that infinite scroll is disrespectful to the user and poor design because it favors business needs over many users' need to not get sucked into scrolling through TikTok for a few hours without even realizing it. Overall, this article seems to argue against a design perspective I've never once seen a designer present. (Support? Maybe.) I've not once seen anybody justify infinite scroll by saying users are too dumb to use something more complicated. Either this guy has worked for some companies with seriously bad design departments, or he's a bit overconfident in his layman's interpretation of designers' perspective and intent.

Ozzie_osman 6y ago
I'm sorry you seemed to have interpreted this article as a critique of designers from an "exclusively technical" person. I'm sure this wasn't your intention, but some of your choice of words supports what I think is a pretty harmful idea in software development: that technical people aren't qualified to critique or discuss product design. Ultimately, you are right that I am not a designer, but I've actually worn product management and business hats in the past. Still I don't claim to think I "completely understand the product design process". Ultimately, this was an article I wrote and posted to a primarily technical website. It was primarily intended for technical people, but would hopefully be relevant to anyone involved in building software products. > the author citing Facebook as a prime example of low-agency infinite scroll traps when services like TikTok and Instagram are far better examples hints he might not be very familiar with the current design landscape which he is critiquing. This felt a bit presumptuous. I am familiar with Instagram and TikTok, but I chose Facebook as the prime example because they were the _first_ massively popular site to implement this type of interface. > Overall, this article seems to argue against a design perspective I've never once seen a designer present. I'm somewhat envious of you, then. I've unfortunately worked with product managers, designers, and engineers who have said that users are stupid. Sometimes, it's well-meaning and in a sort of abstract form, meaning "we should make it so simple that even an idiot could use it". But often, it's unfortunately quite literal. > he's a bit overconfident in his layman's interpretation of designers' perspective and intent Again, this was more of a critique of software development than of designers' intent in particular.
- chefandy 6y ago
  > I'm sorry you seemed to have interpreted this article as a critique of designers from an "exclusively technical" person. I'm sure this wasn't your intention, but some of your choice of words supports what I think is a pretty harmful idea in software development: that technical people aren't qualified to critique or discuss product design. I think that developers have just as much right to critique the the design process as designers have to critique the development process, and I think it's just as likely to be useful. Sometimes it is, sometimes it's born from assumptions or misunderstandings. I specifically highlighted the benefits that arguments from outside the field can bring, and I said that I didn't think your article, specifically, was beneficial in that way. Frankly, I think you said this because you wanted to try and refute my comment on principle rather than refuting the argument that I made, which is that you didn't actually present any evidence of what you were asserting. > This felt a bit presumptuous. I am familiar with Instagram and TikTok, but I chose Facebook as the prime example because they were the _first_ massively popular site to implement this type of interface. Sorry if I was being presumptuous. It wasn't clear from your article that you were attempting to show a progression or highlight the history of these sorts of design decisions so your example, completely out of context, seemed outdated and non-representative. Personally, I didn't associate infinite scroll with Facebook more than Twitter or Myspace or Instagram, but maybe that's me. >I'm somewhat envious of you, then. I've unfortunately worked with product managers, designers, and engineers who have said that users are stupid. Sometimes, it's well-meaning and in a sort of abstract form, meaning "we should make it so simple that even an idiot could use it". But often, it's unfortunately quite literal. I have 23 years or so of experience working in technology in maybe half-a-dozen industries and I too have heard, among the people who actually make this stuff, say that users tend to behave stupidly as a metaphor for them not being patient or attentive enough to interact with things that aren't immediately apparent— the sort of well-meaning, abstract form that you allude to. How did you know that in your particular situation it was intended to be literal? How do you know that bad design decisions were made based on that? How even could you know? Did they say they ran their copy through a language analyzer to make sure it was at a first-grade level language when they knew they were targeting an adult demographic without diagnosed intellectual disabilities? With what specific criteria do you differentiate beneficially simplified designs— which you note are touted in Don't Make Me Think— and designs that are simplified out of disdain for users' intelligence? How does that difference negatively impact users? How did you come to the conclusion that this is pervasive throughout the industry? So in this article I did not see a) that product designers, in general, actually disdain their users' intelligence, b) what concrete effects that has on design, and c) how those things negatively affect users. > Again, this was more of a critique of software development than of designers' intent in particular. In what way? You mention product design, highlight a design trend, talk about designers, and the only external work you cite is product design tome. I did not once see one single reference made to software development, coding, or programmers.

Ozzie_osman 6y ago

I'm sorry you seemed to have interpreted this article as a critique of designers from an "exclusively technical" person. I'm sure this wasn't your intention, but some of your choice of words supports what I think is a pretty harmful idea in software development: that technical people aren't qualified to critique or discuss product design. Ultimately, you are right that I am not a designer, but I've actually worn product management and business hats in the past. Still I don't claim to think I "completely understand the product design process". Ultimately, this was an article I wrote and posted to a primarily technical website. It was primarily intended for technical people, but would hopefully be relevant to anyone involved in building software products. > the author citing Facebook as a prime example of low-agency infinite scroll traps when services like TikTok and Instagram are far better examples hints he might not be very familiar with the current design landscape which he is critiquing. This felt a bit presumptuous. I am familiar with Instagram and TikTok, but I chose Facebook as the prime example because they were the _first_ massively popular site to implement this type of interface. > Overall, this article seems to argue against a design perspective I've never once seen a designer present. I'm somewhat envious of you, then. I've unfortunately worked with product managers, designers, and engineers who have said that users are stupid. Sometimes, it's well-meaning and in a sort of abstract form, meaning "we should make it so simple that even an idiot could use it". But often, it's unfortunately quite literal. > he's a bit overconfident in his layman's interpretation of designers' perspective and intent Again, this was more of a critique of software development than of designers' intent in particular.

chefandy 6y ago
> I'm sorry you seemed to have interpreted this article as a critique of designers from an "exclusively technical" person. I'm sure this wasn't your intention, but some of your choice of words supports what I think is a pretty harmful idea in software development: that technical people aren't qualified to critique or discuss product design. I think that developers have just as much right to critique the the design process as designers have to critique the development process, and I think it's just as likely to be useful. Sometimes it is, sometimes it's born from assumptions or misunderstandings. I specifically highlighted the benefits that arguments from outside the field can bring, and I said that I didn't think your article, specifically, was beneficial in that way. Frankly, I think you said this because you wanted to try and refute my comment on principle rather than refuting the argument that I made, which is that you didn't actually present any evidence of what you were asserting. > This felt a bit presumptuous. I am familiar with Instagram and TikTok, but I chose Facebook as the prime example because they were the _first_ massively popular site to implement this type of interface. Sorry if I was being presumptuous. It wasn't clear from your article that you were attempting to show a progression or highlight the history of these sorts of design decisions so your example, completely out of context, seemed outdated and non-representative. Personally, I didn't associate infinite scroll with Facebook more than Twitter or Myspace or Instagram, but maybe that's me. >I'm somewhat envious of you, then. I've unfortunately worked with product managers, designers, and engineers who have said that users are stupid. Sometimes, it's well-meaning and in a sort of abstract form, meaning "we should make it so simple that even an idiot could use it". But often, it's unfortunately quite literal. I have 23 years or so of experience working in technology in maybe half-a-dozen industries and I too have heard, among the people who actually make this stuff, say that users tend to behave stupidly as a metaphor for them not being patient or attentive enough to interact with things that aren't immediately apparent— the sort of well-meaning, abstract form that you allude to. How did you know that in your particular situation it was intended to be literal? How do you know that bad design decisions were made based on that? How even could you know? Did they say they ran their copy through a language analyzer to make sure it was at a first-grade level language when they knew they were targeting an adult demographic without diagnosed intellectual disabilities? With what specific criteria do you differentiate beneficially simplified designs— which you note are touted in Don't Make Me Think— and designs that are simplified out of disdain for users' intelligence? How does that difference negatively impact users? How did you come to the conclusion that this is pervasive throughout the industry? So in this article I did not see a) that product designers, in general, actually disdain their users' intelligence, b) what concrete effects that has on design, and c) how those things negatively affect users. > Again, this was more of a critique of software development than of designers' intent in particular. In what way? You mention product design, highlight a design trend, talk about designers, and the only external work you cite is product design tome. I did not once see one single reference made to software development, coding, or programmers.