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I wish the author had provided more in the way of examples to ground his points. This is a broad topic that could manifest itself in different ways, some of whi
by the__alchemist 6y ago
I wish the author had provided more in the way of examples to ground his points. This is a broad topic that could manifest itself in different ways, some of which are more and less applicable. For example:
- Ads with claims like "This single mom makes $$$ working from home, you can too!"
- Clickbait news titles. (You could define "clickbait" here as the most egregious, or as the sensational nature of headlines across the industry.
- More subtle, but pervasive trends manipulation like $_.99 price tags, or arranging grocery stores not for customer convenience, but to encourage them to buy more things
- Even more subtle: The ubiquitous practice of advertising (Perhaps on a product webpage) the positive qualities upfront without mentioning the drawbacks or competition. Is that disrespectful, or just good business practice?
- Video games puzzles designed to be easy to solve. Eg I could paraphrase some of the Portal levels with dev commentary as "We wanted to make this more challenging, but our playtesters kept getting confused, so we made the solution obvious."
- Junk food manufacturers micromanaging the sugar etc content to keep the user hooked and get just the right amount of good-feelings flowing.
- Restaurants loading every dish with salt.
Does the article apply to all these? Maybe? They're on a spectrum, with some more clear-cut as disrespectful than others.
- TeMPOraL 6y agoThe article doesn't really apply to those, because it assumes UI/UX designers are only disrespectful of their users. Meanwhile, all your examples except the Portal one, are ones in which the vendor is openly malicious - they want to exploit other people, make money by making other people's life worse. There's another article to be written on those cases. One that points out these practices for what they are: immoral.