28 ms·

Losing faith in UX

• recursivedoubts 6y ago
  The bean counters are to blame for a lot of stuff. But they didn't give us flat UI.
• TheAceOfHearts 6y ago
  I find it a bit ironic that the author of this post references a New York Times article on how difficult it is to cancel your Amazon Prime subscription without any mention of how difficult the New York Times makes it so cancel a subscription to their own service. If you have a New York Times subscription you can only cancel it by calling them on the phone during working hours or using their support chat which is only available during working hours (for everyone except Californians, kinda odd how they won't make that available to the whole country, huh?). Why not just have a simple cancel subscription button on your account page?
  • voodootrucker 6y ago
    I had such a hard time cancelling The Economist last time, I joined their web chat to ask them if cancelling was as easy as signing up and if it was I would subscribe. Unfortunately my place in the queue kept _incrementing_, so I ended up buying myself a gift subscription so I knew I wouldn't have to go through that again. Didn't California pass a law saying you got to cancel as easily as you signed up?
    • LordAtlas 6y ago
      Yes, which is why a hack at some of these websites is to set your address as being in California, at which point one-click cancellation buttons magically seem to appear.
      • voodootrucker 6y ago
        Wow, having different pages based on state seems to be such an amount of effort that it's basically an admission of fraud to have the other version: you must make enough money of not-cancelling to justify having two.
  • svachalek 6y ago
    It's very annoying. They want to be able to negotiate if you are leaving because of price, and you can get it for quite cheap. But I wish they just had a more attractive list price and a cancel button.
    • justaguy88 6y ago
      I've had to use apple's subscription to nytimes as an indirection so that it's easy to cancel
  • Leherenn 6y ago
    Well at least you can cancel by phone. I was moving out and wanted to cancel my internet subscription last year. Months in advance, I went to their website and located (with difficulty!) their cancellation page. There was either a form online you could fill where they would call you back, or you could call them. I did the former, waited for a couple of weeks, never had an answer. So I called them, got someone who told me it would be cancelled in 3 months as requested and forgot about it. I even received a survey about how my cancellation process went. 4 months later, I received a bill for the first month after it was supposed to be cancelled. So I called support, which told me that cancellations could only be processed by registered letter, and that they had sent me a mail regarding this (which I never received). She then told me that the service would be cancelled in 2 months since it's the minimum delay, but it would be shortened to 1 month since I was moving to a place which already had a subscription with them, provided I gave the name/address/customer number of the place I was moving to. I asked if she was sure about the details and she said yes. Now, 2 months later, of course I still received a bill. Called them again, turns out you actually need the signature of the person holding the other contract for the 1 month thing to be valid... Apparently, they sent me another mail, which again I did not receive. (I did, however, receive a late payment notice with massive fees to my new address...) I sent a letter complaining about the whole situation, and just got told to "read the contract attentively next time". Fuck you UPC Cablecom.
    • hansvm 6y ago
      Piling onto your post because of recent bad experiences: Did you know that literally anyone can email Comcast and complain about alleged DMCA violations on your residential internet? Comcast has no mechanism for submitting a counter-notice, and if you get too many such complaints they will ban you for up to 6 months. It's shocking that an ISP can be so bad that they're the impetus for moving all by themselves. In your case though, if you're interested you might be able to get a lawyer involved? Lying is generally legal, but they might have some civil liability for fraud or something. It probably wouldn't be profitable for you, but if you won it might make you feel better.
      • jessaustin 6y ago
  • remir 6y ago
    The worst I've seen is cancelling a subscription to the French newspaper Le Monde. You have to print and fill a form and send it to them by snail mail. Totally unbelievable.
  • bscphil 6y ago
    > a New York Times article on how difficult it is to cancel your Amazon Prime subscription without any mention of how difficult the New York Times makes it so cancel a subscription to their own service Well, not only that, but things have gotten so bad that Amazon Prime is really not the best example. I actually just went through this process: I accepted a 30 day Amazon Prime free trial just before Christmas because I was going to be doing a lot of ordering. Of course I forgot to cancel it until a few days after the trial was up. So I went to go cancel it and try to get any money they had charged me back. And... it wasn't really that bad? From the main page, you click one link to manage your account / Prime subscription. Another one link takes you to cancel the subscription. There are like three or so pages that explain the benefits you'll be losing and allow you to back out, or choose options like "cancel my subscription at the end of the month", or "cancel it now and refund the money". I wouldn't describe any of this as dark-patterns because even if it's manipulative it was at least very clear how to do what I wanted to do. That the other thing, too. I was able to get $14 of the $15 monthly fee back when canceling - they didn't try to pull any bullshit with that. A couple of qualifiers: (a) yes, it could (and should) be better, and (b) I'm a California resident, so it's possible they presented a different flow to me than to most other people.
    • tryptophan 6y ago
      Same, the amazon cancel experience is not bad. They even offer a check-box to remind you 7 days before renewal.
  • allenu 6y ago
    I don't normally subscribe or unsubscribe to services and so the NYTimes unsubscribe process really surprised me at the time. In the end, having to go through a chat system wasn't as bad as I thought, but it did annoy me at the time that I couldn't just hit a button to cancel. Since then, I've been wary of signing up for anything new, knowing that there is likely a painful process on the other end to cancel my account.
  • m463 6y ago
    What's funny, is that I cancelled amazon prime back in april or so. I had to contact them. I said "look, I have amazon prime for the shipping speed, and ALL shipping is taking 1-2 weeks." The support folks couldn't figure out how to cancel prime for a partial year, so they gave me a full refund.
• cosmotic 6y ago
  In addition to use exploitation, there's a lot of shallow visual-appeal hooks but no interest in making things useful or better for accomplishing tasks/goals.
• polote 6y ago
  I bet this guy started his career in a small companies and is now working with big companies. Why it is important? 1. The bigger the company, means also the older the company means also a lot of design and tech debt and results in bad UX 2. The smaller the company the more you work on your UX to attract customers, the bigger the more you care about your profitability 3. The bigger the companies the more your customers are also bigger companies and then UX is not important in their choice [1] 4. In my opinion we are at a rare time in which UI will you raise a lot of money (Stripe, Notion,...) [1] https://blog.luap.info/product-management-in-saas-b2b-enterprise-is-easy.html https://blog.luap.info/product-management-in-saas-b2b-enterp...
• msencenb 6y ago
  In defense of the d.school, what they teach are techniques and tools - not ethics. UX broadly is in the same boat. UX is a tool. We can use it for good or for evil. At the end of the day UX is only as valuable as how well individuals (or companies) can align their personal definition of 'good' with 'good' that the underlying company cares for.
  • frenchy 6y ago
    > In defense of the d.school, what they teach are techniques and tools - not ethics. Is that a defence? That sounds like trying to explain your friend's rudeness away by saying "In Bob's defence, he's an asshole". I guess this is partly a philisophical question about whether the job of schools is to raise effective citizens, or effective market manipulators.
    • msencenb 6y ago
      I put it poorly in my first comment. I think it would be correct to say that receiving an education should teach you about ethics. Whether that should be strategic from the top down (you take specific classes about ethics) or embedded in each class is a question I don’t know the answer to. In an individual class the amount of ethics varies. When I took d.school classes there certainly wasn’t a “market mover” mentality. We were genuinely interested in understanding people better so we could improve lives. But ethics certainly wasn’t explicitly on the agenda. We just didn’t have any assholes taking the course at that time. This is part of the argument within the university for loosening credit requirements. When I was there, I took the HCI track. That track had the smallest credit requirement and also let you take a broader base of classes that counted towards the major, such as philosophy. That was a more rounded experience than some of my peers who took harder cs tracks like networking and systems.
  • asoneth 6y ago
    At least when I was teaching intro HCI courses at Carnegie Mellon we did have lectures and discussions on dark patterns and the ethics of UX. Taking advantage of human psychology to manipulate people has been a problem in the field for a long time (e.g. gambling machines, advertising, dark patterns, screen addiction) so IMO it's a bit irresponsible not to at least warn students that they're likely going to be asked to do some morally questionable things.
• kodah 6y ago
  > In Juul's case, fraudulent proclamations of "empathy" served as a smokescreen for the true aim of the company, which was to use d.school-inflected product design to addict, capture, and monetize an entire generation of young nicotine users. People try to make everything about "empathy" these days. The term has been on the rise since September 2008 [0] and I've seen it routinely used and abused. Who can refute empathy or a lack thereof? I recently took a corporate training about personalities. The whole seminar was supposed to show you strengths of the various personality type, what their opposites are, and how to interface with them better. Make better teams through understanding; nothing new. One measurement went from what's basically Extremely Empathetic => Data Driven (neither being bad, explicitly stated.) Routinely people that I worked with recategorized people in "data driven" to "non-empathetic" in casual conversation. Reading this article made me realize the real deceiving UX isn't unique to code or processes, it's just human inclination for things they don't like; whether that be the "cancel" button or personality traits. [0] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=empathy https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=e...
  • stretchcat 6y ago
    Quibble over the word 'empathy' if you like, but those peddling addictive substances to teenagers are still scum.
    • valuearb 6y ago
      Game developers? Smartphone manufacturers? Social media developers? Chocolate makers?
      • morlockabove 6y ago
        Yes!
      • stretchcat 6y ago
        Did I stutter? Leave the kids alone. Adults who market harmful products to kids are predatory assholes. I'd hope there is a special place in hell for whoever dreamed up count chocola and all the other bullshit used to sell candied cereal to kids. Just because it's legal doesn't mean it was ethical. And in the case of Juul, going into highschools with their marketting material, I doubt it was even legal.
• fastball 6y ago
  This is a weird way to couch this. UX is the "user experience". An experience can be good or an experience can be bad. An experience can reduce friction, or it can intentionally create it. UX as a term on its own is neither positive nor negative. The title should just be "I dislike UX anti-patterns", because good UX, i.e. low-friction/high-reward (for your customer) UX is still the nice thing it's always been.
• anderspitman 6y ago
  For basically everyone of an age to being reading HN, we've essentially never known anything other than technology (and life in general) improving over time, often exponentially. If you've never seen this talk by Jonathan Blow, he's makes a rather compelling argument that we don't necessarily have any reason to believe this will continue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko
  • fallous 6y ago
    I'm not sure I'd use the term "improving" but would instead say "changing." The perception of those changes has certainly been weighted towards "improvement" but some of that perception is a hangover from the popular mid-century views that most people held regarding science and technology (others held such views prior to that time but I wouldn't say they were the majority).
    • hntrader 6y ago
      Read Steven Pinker's works. Things have been improving according to any meaningful definition of that word.
      • hollandheese 6y ago
        And then read his critics who blow his whiggish history out of the water.
        • hntrader 6y ago
          Which one should I read first? I read Taleb's critique, who comes off as a raving lunatic in this context, and Gladwell who must have some axe to grind since he doesn't actually address the concrete metrics that Pinker brings up. Lower childhood mortality, less poverty, longer life expectancy, less violent crime, less disease, more equality, less war. Things are getting better, along almost every metric we can think of. It's not just "different". It's also not just Pinker's work confirming that, OurWorldInData is good on this topic too. The only sensible argument I've heard to the contrary is that our systemic tail risks have gotten bigger. Which is accurate but doesn't change the fact that things are much better for almost everyone presuming that such risks can be mitigated.
• agd 6y ago
  The article writer spends a lot of time blaming 'leadership' however it is up to all of us to act within our own moral framework. > While the best-trained (and highest-paid) UX professionals are put to work optimizing the exploitation and deception of online users UX workers at Amazon are not 'put to work' like some automotons, they have agency and the ability to find highly paid work elsewhere.
  • simplemen 6y ago
    Where are they going to go? Every company is using dark patterns. Maybe there are a few small ethical companies but that is very small number.
    • agd 6y ago
      There are plenty of tech companies not using dark patterns (I used to work for one). Granted Amazon employees might not be able to get paid as much elsewhere, but that's the choice you make.
      • simplemen 6y ago
        I have worked for 5 companies in my 15 years career. One of that company was ecommerce consulting firm which dealt with a lot of mom-n-pop ecommerce stores. Let me tell you not a single one of them was willing to give up any dark patterns if that meant losing revenues. Unless you are working on non-revenue generating product like internal dashboard, it is all about get sales anyway possible. I am sure there are ethical companies, I see many of them mentioned here, started by readers of this forum, but what percentage are those. Imo, they are less than 1%.
  • almostdeadguy 6y ago
    The "you can always go work somewhere else" argument will never stop being a cop out. Your employer controls access to your salary, healthcare benefits, and potentially more. Leaving your job is never a completely safe move and there's an abundance of reasons why it's simply not an option to most people, and it doesn't matter what tier of middle class occupation you have for that to be true. Moreso this argument isn't one to be taken seriously because it assumes every collective failure is a failure of millions of individual choices rather than any of the cultural inertia or environmental influences that steer our choices.
• myth2018 6y ago
  It's also worth mentioning that the misconception of thinking UX as being solely related to aesthetics is getting dangerously more and more common, even among professionals referring to themselves as UX designers. Aesthetics is important, but, in some sorts of systems, it has much lower priority than other non-functional requirements, like overall speed, maintainability, testability and so on. I don't know if my experience is the same of most of you, but I've seen more and more systems getting aesthetic pleasant but painfully slow and/or buggy these days. It's easy when you can simply quit using the software, but when your bank, your broker, your airline, your accountant, the company that operates the subway ticket machines, when those sorts of businesses start to embrace such vision, things start to get complicated. And, unfortunately, all those examples I mention here are real and this is not an exhaustive list. Besides, I'm not sure those companies (at least the ones in my examples) do that as an attempt to exploit users. I believe they do that due to plain lack of competence.
  • loceng 6y ago
    The biggest issue to me is the dumbing down of an experience and design, treating your users as incompetent vs. treating them as intelligent and being able to figure out things; there's still bad design that can occur when complex, but good UX of presenting information appropriately and contextually can create a rich but easy, intuitive flow. The slowness of certain platforms is also an equally big issue, Reddit for example who seems to purposefully ignore and allow their website via browser experience to suffer - in an attempt to drive people to their app for ad tracking purposes - which I think is shooting themselves in the foot with the trend towards eliminating shallow-manipulative advertising from existence.
    • myth2018 6y ago
      Indeed. I'd also mention a small experiment I often do. If you have the opportunity of visiting a company still using COBOL, Clipper or some other text mode software, ask their users for an opinion on those old systems compared to the current ones. Most of them prefer the acient ones. When asked why, they simply say "I don't know. It works, it feels right". Even the younger users (who already had experience with web applications, big tech's stuff etc when they joined the company) prefer the text based ones. I'm not at all implying that every software should be text based. But I think there are some very important lessons to be learned here. Things we developers used to know, intuitively. I think UX designers should listen more to those users and less to theories and to Google and its MDC trying to make the internet look like their own products
• ddevault 6y ago
  Cached version: https://web.archive.org/web/20210128223057/https://creativegood.com/blog/21/losing-faith-in-ux.html https://web.archive.org/web/20210128223057/https://creativeg...
• TeMPOraL 6y ago
  > sure, they said, we can do the research, listen to customers, and make recommendations for improvement. But what if leadership not only ignores our recommendations but tells us to do something different? Do the research? Listen to customers? These are so 1990s. I'm surprised the author didn't cover that one explicitly: how much of the problem with UX comes with it being "data-driven" these days? In lieu of acquiring direct feedback from the users, everyone these days just overloads their products with telemetry, runs countless A/B tests, gaze tracking experiments... just about everything imaginable except talking to the users. It's nice to be data-driven - good, quantifiable data is easy to gradient-descent on. But somehow, the metrics tend to be selected in context of what profits the business the most, and not what maximizes the value of a product to the user...
  • tenebrisalietum 6y ago
    > But somehow, the metrics tend to be selected in context of what profits the business the most, and not what maximizes the value of a product to the user... The divergence happens when the user isn't the one paying for the product; e.g. when the user's company is paying for it or when advertisers pay for it instead.
    • Spivak 6y ago
      It’s not all sunshine and rainbows on the paid side of the house. All the disconnected out of touch decision making still happens but the metrics are ARR and churn. The game is making it as easy as possible for people to pay us and inconvenient as possible for people to stop.
    • dbtc 6y ago
      Whenever I encounter the word "user" in the context of software products, I think of "Bubbles" from The Wire.
    • dmix 6y ago
      This theory quickly breaks down when the same applies to B2B SaaS as it does to ad driven businesses.
• stakkur 6y ago
  I noticed a change--philosophically and in perspective--when 'usability' was slowly replaced by 'user experience'. With the advent of the Web, this idea of 'the experience' has mostly supplanted much of the research and test-driven usability I participated in.
  • RickS 6y ago
    Agreed. Much as there's a difference between "free as in speech and free as in beer" there's a distinction between "usable like hammer and usable like cocaine". For as long as engagement is allowed to pay better than utility, thats what's on the menu.
• exoque 6y ago
  Things were better when the Operating System decided how a gui should look and work. I just cannot comprehend how anybody could come up with something like the redesign of https://www.tagesschau.de/ https://www.tagesschau.de/ which was launched this week. Yes, it's supposed to be a news site.
  • jazzyjackson 6y ago
    I cliked your link and opened my devtools out of curisority, and every headline is under the class name "teaser", so it would seem the main intent of the site is to tease you! Besides that, it looks like no one did any design at all, like what you'd get on the default template of wordpress or other CMS
  • masswerk 6y ago
    It's definitely a new site, in the dystopian sense. Usage hint: Reducing the browser window to what is approximate smartphone width in portrait orientation somewhat helps with the experience. Clearly, using anything other than a mobile device is deviant. On the other hand, in terms of UX, I felt somewhat neglected as there wasn't a "Use our App!" popup. Also, the lack of welcoming "Subscribe!" popups (options "I can't wait!" and "Later, but for sure!") is a bit reminiscent of past decades of public services and their arrogant attitude towards customers needs. I was even left to my own on any attempts to scroll without any reassuring popups gratifying my engagement by another opportunity to click a button. I could just scroll and scroll without noticing, accompanied by a growing feel of loneliness and solitude in this digital void. If this isn't pure negligence… ;-)
  • spideymans 6y ago
    Looks like they imported a cheap React theme and called it a day
  • stephentmcm 6y ago
    Sarcasm? While I don't read German, this is actually a pretty good design for a news site. It's clean, consistent and uncluttered. It loads quickly and doesn't have any obnoxious animations or advertising. The font choice is clean and well spaced, but let down by poor definition of link vs title/theme colour. It's clearly a massive improvment on the last design: https://web.archive.org/web/20210101011826/https://www.tagesschau.de/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210101011826/https://www.tages...
• jazzyjackson 6y ago
  Thanks for introducing "user exploitation" to my vocabulary, it certainly describes the overwhelming focus on giving ad networks as much screen real estate as possible so we can be surveilled by marketers and governments alike. As an additional correlation to the timeline, Taboola took off from 2007 to 2013 especially, when all the online journalism sites were trying to figure out how to stay afloat and suddenly they were all handed a guaranteed monthly income, all they have to do is mix scams and health-scare and "Tommy Chong CBD" fraud in with your news, your readers will love having relevant recommendations for what to read next! (It's my conspiracy theory that the only reason these ad networks pay out so well is to keep the surveillance dragnet wide, track what information every person sees -- for the price of a little click fraud) But back to the topic, these design changes (even editorial changes to what headlines are on your front page) are certainly not done with the user in mind. Another design trend that has completely taken over of course is algorithmic timelines. Both Twitter and Instagram started pushing non-chronological sorting on previously chronological feeds in 2016. This is a transparent effort to take advantage of the slot-machine-addiction of reward and disappointment brought about by a refresh of content -- requiring you to refresh the page and load more ad impressions. I can't tell you how many times I tried to use facebook's search feature, but eneded up scrolling down the timeline trying to find a post I saw earlier, how many dozens of ad impressions were bought and sold while I scrolled, all because facebook couldn't be bothered to write a useful timeline search? The places where people spend most of their time online (social media, youtube) are designed to act like quicksand, information is re-arranged every time you hit the back button, just because they need to mix some payola in and keep you on the site. /rant I think there is still a log of creativity to be had with computers, for my part I'm building a WYSIWYG CMS that frames all of its data into polygon 'tiles' that fit together into a mosaic in 2 or 3 or more dimensions, just something to get away from the rectangles and single column timelines that make everything look the same. I can't even remember what website I saw something on because I can't tell one from the other. So, see also another great piece on web design from 2016 [1] relating to design trends in physical spaces, the trend of cafes and airbnbs to ignore any of its local context in favor of a bland Le Corbusier-meets-Edison-Bulbs style, a full on mcdonaldization of service so that you never have to try anything new (except even mcdonalds adapts the menu to local taste) [1] https://www.theverge.com/2016/8/3/12325104/airbnb-aesthetic-global-minimalism-startup-gentrification https://www.theverge.com/2016/8/3/12325104/airbnb-aesthetic-...
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• jhunter1016 6y ago
  It has likely become not just unprofitable to focus on UX, but downright detrimental to the company’s bottom line. I say this without the evidence to back it up, but the anecdotal evidence is everywhere. I see it all the time as I preach UX improvements. If my theory here is right, then the problem can’t be solved by preaching UX to businesses. I think it can only be solved by reminder end users that they deserve better.
  • patrickmcnamara 6y ago
    I think Apple focus a lot on UX compared to competitors to their advantage and they are mindbogglingly profitable.
• jjcm 6y ago
  I'd actually argue otherwise - UX has gotten tremendously better in the last decade. Online products have been moulded perfectly towards improving the use case for their customers. The main issue though is that you aren't the customer anymore. Look at Facebook - they've done an absolutely incredible job becoming a dream experience for advertisers. Youtube has catered to these advertisers as well and blocked controversial content that wouldn't look good next to their brand. It's a golden age to be at the head of a marketing team with a large ad budget. These companies have made golden escalators for getting sponsored content in front of the productized consumers. If you want UX to succeed and become something that benefits you as a user, then you should focus on platforms where you truly are the customer. Look at Square or Patreon - in both platforms you are truly the customer, and their UX is incredible.
  • m463 6y ago
    I would imagine the signup process is a dream :) For example, when you create a calendar appointment in office, it's one click to make it a teams meeting. figuring out privacy settings... not as easy (basically send an email)
  • dleslie 6y ago
    Indeed; consumer-oriented software previously focused on user productivity as its primary concern, and at present this class of software is focused on user engagement as its primary concern. Engagement is often at odds with productivity.
  • Aerroon 6y ago
    >Look at Square or Patreon - in both platforms you are truly the customer, and their UX is incredible. I'm sorry, are we talking about the same Patreon? Because patreon.com has a bunch of seemingly pointless clicks for posting content. Here's the step-by-step for posting a video from the creator page: 1. Click on Posts in the sidebar. An animation creates a dropdown - this frequently stutters even on a reasonable desktop and creates a small delay. 2. Click on New. This loads a new page where you can select a post type. 3. Click on Video. This loads another new page where I can select Vimeo or Add URL. 4. Click on Add URL. This immediately creates a textbox under the button that I can paste a URL into. I can set a title, tags, additional content and post it. --- Compare this to uploading a video to Youtube: 1. Click on Create. This immediately opens a dropdown. 2. Click on Upload video. This opens an upload video box that you can click on to open a file upload dialog or you can drag a file onto it. If you're on the Youtube frontpage then there's a page load in this step, but if you're on the Creator Page, then there's no page load. 3. While the file is uploading you can fill in the title etc and even press Publish immediately (while it's still uploading). I understand that the two cases aren't equivalent, but the experience of posting content feels better on Youtube. I think in terms of UX something like imgur or streamable are great examples. Edit: I was overly harsh at first. It's just a part of UX that has consistently annoyed me with Patreon. Overall it's decent, but these small things make it feel worse than it is.
• tenebrisalietum 6y ago
  > In the single biggest public health crisis in the world, New York can't build a usable vaccine website. The telephone - 1950s technology - is our best option, after 25 years of web development. I think the latest thing in the 1950's was Touch-Tone. The telephone itself is actually 1870s technology.
• dev_tty01 6y ago
  Well, at least there is a cancellation page. Seems like the exception on the web.
• draw_down 6y ago
  The framing is wrong - thinking of these as problems of design. As though the practitioners just need to do a better job, or do better at petitioning their bosses to let them make things nicer. If making things nicer for people gets in the way of dollars, guess what will win 95 times out of a hundred. There's something you can safely put your faith in. This is about incentives and business. You cannot design your way out of that.
• powerlogic31 6y ago
  You can barely see the needed information and forms because of all the whitespace of new websites these days.
• ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
  Well, he's right. I feel sorry for the students that studied psych, hoping to help people in need, and, instead, are working for companies to produce dark patterns. That must suck; but at least they probably make more money than they would, helping people. Unfortunately, in the US, at least, we value the reaper, more than the servant. Teachers and social workers are paid badly, treated with immense disrespect, and sidelined. People who make money by treating their users like chattel are lionized and held up as national models. Ah...well. That's the USofA. For me, I decided that I love UX -the original kind, and I write software that implements it. I don't particularly care if I ever make a dime off it. I love to write high-quality, non-manipulative, useful software. It's a rare luxury, and I'm grateful to be in that position. It does make me sad to know that the kind of work that I do is scorned, but that won't stop me from doing it. I like the anglerfish metaphor. Perfect.
  • prox 6y ago
    Well said. A redefinition in design not driven by big tech would be a great initiative. Maybe even an open source data bank of non dark patterned practices. Another shout out for “About Face : the essentials of interaction design” which everyone should read, especially programmers.
• kgin 6y ago
  Governments are notorious for contracting websites to the lowest bidder that claims they can check all the requirements boxes. Websites run through the same procurement process as buying toilet paper for the offices. And the result is websites that do technically check all the boxes in the document thought up by someone charged with "getting a website built for this", but rarely anything that would be considered a good experience. The federal government has gotten a lot better at this since the founding of 18f, but state and local still has the problem of checklistware
• revel 6y ago
  The dark patterns described here are part of a broader pattern for big tech. The firms mentioned, Amazon, Google, etc, have made the strategic decision to debase their products to further monetize them. This is similar to the way in which high-end fashion brands are often tempted to cash in on their brand name by marketing to mass market. Just as with high-end retail, this is journey goes one way. Now these companies have embraced the lowest common denominator version of themselves it will be difficult to reverse these decisions. The one big tech exception to all this is Facebook which basically zoomed straight towards the lowest common denominator version of itself yes continues to plough ever deeper trenches each year
  • m463 6y ago
    I'm reminded of the story of the new Nike CEO who called up Steve Jobs asking for advice. Jobs told him "Get rid of the crappy stuff".
• kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
  I recently needed a plumber because of an emergency clog. I don't use Angie's List but I gave it a shot. Their plumber search runs you through a ridiculous multi-page questionnaire process rather than just showing relevant results. Some genius was paid highly to come up with this crap. It can't be helping their their future prospects as an operating concern.
  • rpdillon 6y ago
    I worked at a company that did this. The data showed that the longer we made the questionnaire, the more people felt invested in the process, leading to fewer abandoning when we finally asked for email address.
• ignacio65 6y ago
  So true. I think the UX of websites is still better that before, but now there is also reverse-UX / anti-UX (difficult cancelling of subscription, leading to purchase). I don't think it's bad per se, just not very moral.
• nexthash 6y ago
  It all depends on what the tech company putting out the service is trying to achieve. While there may have been an era of increased hype in 'good UX' prior to 2008, UX as user exploitation has always been around. Both serve distinct roles for the tech company in pursuit of the ultimate goal: making money. One attracts users away from the competition, the other prevents them from leaving. The users themselves are secondary in this equation, because cash and profit come first to ensure the business survives and expands. I looked at the some of the author's services like Good Todo and the law I have described above also applies to them. They are merely coming at it from a different angle, emphasizing user privacy and convenience as a competitive edge to get users to stay.
• sriku 6y ago
  Dark patterns are everywhere and I'm afraid not enough people are raising a ruckus about them. For example, the "Google Pay" app in India, which works via the UPI system, shows its own "scanner code" in the app as opposed to the standard UPI QR code. Furthermore, you can't discover where the UPI QR code is, if you want to pay using BHIM - an app that works directly with UPI payments. If you're using GPay too, then you can access the scanner code. If not, you used to be able to select the UPI QR code from a menu and scan that. However, later updates have hidden that - not eliminated it, mind you, deliberately hidden that. You have to "swipe left" when you see the GPay scanner code to get to the QR code - not at all a discoverble act. My wife discovered it by accident after we were puzzled a few times about where the QR code that used to be accessible went (both of us use BHIM). As a consequence, folks who use GPay do not know about UPI. This is, in my books, malicious design. Hanlon's razor would ask me to try "stupidity" first. But no. This isn't stupidity. It is downright malicious (the benign term being "dark pattern") to do this .. at least at Google's level.
  • 867-5309 6y ago
    swiping became popular as smartphones matured. more than one monitor on a PC became popular around the same time. suddenly some cool genius transvented the concept of accessing a useless second desktop on a teeny tiny screen. his golf buddy thought it would be useful to hide ugly, pesky clutter there. hey presto! your grandma is using snapchat gestures to accidentally delete bridge club emails the three bar menu button is more intuitive than this hidden-yet-integral functionality swiping bullshit, and you can hide an infinite amount of submenus behind such a recognisable icon. why are we still swiping? don't get me started on phone gestures on laptop trackpads. they should come with CTRL-0 laser-etched on to their flimsy scratchplates
    • matsemann 6y ago
      On Gmail swiping from left to right can either open the sidebar or delete the email you hit, depending on how far from the edge you started. Fantastic.
      • 6y ago
• ehnto 6y ago
  There haven't been that many innovations in UX on the web for a while. It's all essentially buttons, toggles and drop downs. I was expecting a lot more boutique interfaces, tightly crafted to the specific use case. My guess is we are actually not very good at developing that kind of thing as an industry. Product configurators are a good example of what I mean, they are super rare and considered monumental undertakings by most agencies. Prized monoliths of culminated talent, that break in two years and get replaced by a series of drop downs because as an industry we avoid risk like the plague yet cycle agencies annually.
  • RickS 6y ago
    It's not that we aren't very good at it, it's that nobody wants to do it. I'd liken it to building codes: given the advances in materials science, one would expect us to be building wildly more diverse styles of homes, with ornate forms and functions that were unimaginable 40 years ago. Why don't we? It turns out that consumers are cheap and unsophisticated. As hardwood becomes plywood+edging becomes MDF+veneer, people are willing to boil the quality frog to grease economies of scale, and by the time we wonder why the hell nothing in our house lasts longer than 2 years, a very heavy pendulum is in motion and that's about the end of it. There are real gains here for templatization, repeatability, speed, and maintenance. When everything is built the same way, it's easy to find someone to work on it for a low price, and the people who use it know how it works before they walk in the door. Just as every house looks like home depot, every app looks like bootstrap. Breaking these cycles requires that the masses have taste, funds, bargaining power, and lasting resolve. On average, we don't. I don't know if it's possible to separate the good from the bad. Things that used to be metal and last 30 years are now plastic that might not make it 30 days. But those same forces are the only reason it's economical to produce eg a flagship phone, which are downright miracles of manufacturing.
  • masswerk 6y ago
    You mean, like in the age of Flash integration? Design awards used to have a "Navigation" category…
  • specialist 6y ago
    The universe of implemented use cases, solutions to people's real world problems, has exploded. But just considering the widgets (ignoring voice, touch, haptics, need I go on?), just the actual visual language and interaction models, there's never been a better time to be a designer (UX/UI). I used to create custom (owner draw) widgets for Windows. At the time I thought they were super complex. Today, the simplest web widget dwarves anything I did. Just the typeahead combo dropbox add-on for Bootstrap has more code and subtly and capability than anything I did. > I was expecting a lot more boutique interfaces Then make them.
• hizxy 6y ago
  Who cares anymore.
• goertzen 6y ago
  Of course you’re losing faith. UX is a misunderstood religion. It’s practitioners believe that they work for the “users”, but really these “users” they imagine don’t exist. Which is hard for them to accept, after carving their user personas and praying to them for answers. The owners don’t mind having the UX priesthood at the table. Especially once they realized that they just needed to adopt the language of user experience cult without giving up any real power. Years later practitioners are noticing the trick and realizing they’re fooling themselves. 1) Users are customers. 2) You work for your boss/company. 3) It’s good to advocate customers, but don’t turn your preferences into a religious crusade.
• andrenotgiant 6y ago
  >[Big Tech] is turning UX into an actively harmful discipline has drained talent and expertise away from projects that could, and should, have had more help. An enraging example comes from right here in New York City: our vaccine websites are impossible to use So how is Facebook to blame for bad vaccine sites? Should they fire their user-experience teams to stop the "drain"? Not sure I follow the logic here.
  • RickS 6y ago
    It's the "drained talent" aspect, which IMO is correct. If I remember correctly, government salaries typically max out around G14, which was lower than most starting SFBA bigco salaries. The world is pretty ripe with people who can make a stable, usable vaccine website. But on the whole, they don't want the job for 50k in a dingy building from the 1950s when they could make 250k to work on a shiny app that psychologically manipulates their peers in perverse but increasingly effective ways. Imagine soda companies buying up basically all of the water in america and canada to make some highly addictive line of drinks, such that when a hurricane hits and people need rations, the government can't get water at a price and quantity sufficient to provide relief. Big tech is so profitable compared to every other sector that they can outbid the rest of the nation for engineering resources, leaving every other sector to be staffed by the dregs. This is an oversimplification of course. Some people really want to stay in not-san-francisco. Some people really want to serve their country. But in aggregate, engineering talent is disproportionately hoarded by SV tech cos because they're willing to buy as much as the world can make for more than anyone else can pay. edit: I say "engineering" a lot here but it's similarly true for UX design. The concentration effects are weaker, but the price deltas are bigger.
• wonnage 6y ago
  At BigCo I've found that senior UX designers are primarily engaged in grift. The daily grind of polishing the ubiquitous rough edges in the existing UI is beneath them, so they feel like they need to go redesign the entire product every two years. The sole clients of this redesign are the execs, who want to see something shiny. The massive redesigns aren't really amenable to A/B testing; after launching, they generally are deeply flawed and engineers spend a quarter clawing back to the usability of the original design. Eventually it becomes the new baseline, which means it's boring, which means it's time to redesign again. Repeat until you leave, collect your accolades for all the redesigns you presided over, and depart to go do the same at BigCo2.
• hizxy 6y ago
  UX lost to sales, product and engineering.
• mastrsushi 6y ago
  Companies have deliberately made cancelation processes more difficult for a long time. That's not some byproduct of the "UX dark ages" you're having nightmares about.
• deathanatos 6y ago
  > This example may not seem like much: cancellation processes are often a hassle, even in Internet companies. (As far back as 2006, AOL made national news for insolently refusing a customer's cancellation request.) > When Vincent Ferrari, 30, of the Bronx, called AOL to cancel his membership last month, it took him a total of 21 minutes Wait… that's … that's it? I just cancelled my Comcast account. The call is here in my history: 28m 35s. That only counts the time on the call, mind you; you still have to return their hardware. Including that, it took me well over an hour (driving, waiting in line at the UPS store, driving home), particularly since it had to go to a UPS store. If we count the time that I also spent going to a Comcast store, trying to return their equipment there, which the store and phone representatives later informed me that I "can't" do, because they don't accept "business" class equipment there despite their website directly contradicting that[1], then it took well over two hours to cancel. We've come so far. [1]: https://business.comcast.com/help-and-support/repairs-installation/return-your-comcast-business-equipment https://business.comcast.com/help-and-support/repairs-instal... (There was a separate call to disconnect service, that was 10m 37s. We moved, and thought we might have Comcast on the other end, so we did that part separately. When we shopped for an ISP on the other end, nobody picked up the phone for Comcast, so we went with their (only) competitor in our area. So, whether you want to count that against the time it took to cancel, IDK.)
• babesh 6y ago
  Replace UX with programming and it is the same exact story: “Losing faith in Programming”. You go in hoping that you are creating code that helps your user and end up optimizing for ARR.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• carlreid 6y ago
  What are some good resources for learning friendly UX?
• ceilingcorner 6y ago
  When I happen to come across an old site from the 90s or early 2000s, it’s such a breath of fresh air. No complicated UX, no “get my newsletter!!” pop ups, and content focused on text instead of hideously huge images that serve no purpose. While it might have been ugly, the Internet was so much more fun before the finance and marketing people got involved.
• kstenerud 6y ago
  There's another somewhat related problem: UI fatigue. Many companies have now gotten into the habit of changing their UI with every release, moving things around and changing the depth at which functions lie. Apple is particularly guilty of this. Try following a tutorial for adding a button to a view in Xcode - the UI to open the assistant panel isn't where their documentation says it should be. And this happens with every single release of Xcode. There isn't a single Xcode tutorial on the web that is accurate anymore (not even Apple's own docs).
  • jbreckmckye 6y ago
    I suspect that orgs perform arbitrary UI redesigns for the same reasons supermarkets occasionally reorganise their product layout. It stops customers getting too efficient at extracting only the value they think they want.
    • majewsky 6y ago
      I can see that argument for apps that want to sell products or show ads, but what about GP's example? What value is there in getting in the way of a software developer trying to create apps for your platform? My personal guess is that most UI redesigns are busywork explicitly created to justify the existence of the UI design department. (And I don't say this to throw shade on UI designers in general. This could just as well be the new manager trying to keep his headcount, or the new lead designer removing all traces of the previous designer's work over personal quarrels.)
      • jbreckmckye 6y ago
        Part of it may be the same reason that developers love to rewrite code: all creative works over a certain age accumulate compromises, and newcomers don't understand the reason for those compromises. So a new set of designers, like a new set of developers, feel compelled to "rationalise" what they've inherited. Sometimes they succeed, and build a much more logical information architecture... but many times the new design succumbs to the same entropy that that the original one did.
• Bvalmont1 6y ago
  It's a young field. We need UX/ advocates with a seat at the table defending the users. Better yet, we need UX advocates across the board. But it'll take time, most companies are just getting into it. But making better UX a company wide effort is a good start. As for the bigCorps, obviously this is a wider discussion than UX alone, as having these dark patterns fall through the process indicates a certain problem in company culture and/or decisionmaking. It's a bit early to start losing faith, we're just getting started.
  • hulitu 6y ago
    > It's a young field and we need UX advocates with a seat at the table actually defending the users. It's not easy and it will take some time, but as the knowledge of UX is increasing across decision-makers and people building products, we will get to a better place. With all due respect: you are new here. The level of UX is at Windows 1.0 or Xt widgets. I hate to say that but windows 3.1 looks like a revolution compared with Windows 10, OSX (current) or Material "design". There was a time when things worked. Now the dark ages of UX have come i it will be a long time until the new industrial revolution will come. > It's a bit early to start losing faith, we haven't even properly started yet. This is true for Win 10 and Google's brain dead interface. Some not so long time ago things were much, much better. The worst thing is that there is budget allocated for such things.
    • Bvalmont1 6y ago
      With all due respect, I'm talking about the practice of aligning user needs to product. If we're talking about UI elements inside a design system (such as material design), that is a different discussion alltogether. That's not even where the OP is about. "The worst thing that there's budget allocated for such things" is just offensive and invalidates all the progress that was made in the past decades in the field of HCI. Frankly it's dissapointing to see in HN how little understanding there is in what is happening in this field and to see all these passive-aggressiveness towards UX design is frankly demotivating. UX is something that in my opinion is carried by every person that touches the product in some way, it's about more than just putting some flows together as a designer and harrassing developers.
• mouzogu 6y ago
  The worst dark pattern I've noticed lately is in the cookie acceptance pop-ups where you take 30s to uncheck all the cookies and then press the "Accept All" button, so evil and annoying!!
• zubairq 6y ago
  Loved this article, well done!
• jariel 6y ago
  It's a good post but: " but a major one was the exodus of financialization experts from Wall Street to Silicon Valley. Suddenly the "get rich quick" mentality that had caused the 2008 crash was being adopted by senior leadership at Big Tech firms. " Stop with these 'blame wall street' populist fantasies. The 'fault' of 'whatever' is happening is 100% tech and it has nothing to do with bankers. In reality, young people coming into the industry with a different set of values than those that came before them are driving this. A generation that simultaneously declares to be more 'socially conscious' is literally driving these activities, which is quite hypocritical. The shift is easy to see: people having grown up more separated from their communities, with culturally secular values (not bad one's just more intellectual than rooted in relationships with those around them) can simultaneously detach themselves from the consequences of their outcomes at work, while at the same time participating in a 'protest' about something or the other in order to validate their self-identity as 'socially conscious'. We're going to need a broad set of basic regulations, hopefully not too harsh, probably led by the EU as the only institution that seems to have enough power and wherewithal to care enough. While note making any statement about politics - Biden's 'side' would be the most likely group to be concerned about privacy, and yet we haven't heard a peep about them on the issue. The other 'side' is deeply concerned about 'freedom of expression' which is good, perhaps they can find a way to make some legislation about it.
• aristofun 6y ago
  Ux was never a thing business wise. Tons of popular products with shitty ux proves it. Unfortunately for end users, but this is the line where business and customer interests goes different directions.
• genezeta 6y ago
  tl;dr: I wanted UX to be a principle, to have a noble moral standing and be used only for "good". But it turns out UX is just a tool and as just a tool it is now being used for "evil".
• visarga 6y ago
  Three things I would change - UX, filtering and ranking - to be made user customizable, or allow alternative front ends and rankings provided by third parties. That would solve many problems. I would apply this rule to all large internet companies - Google's UX and ranking, Twitter's UX and ranking, etc. They all sin by tricking users (UX), hiding stuff (filtering) and selectively showing stuff in "the one true way" (ranking). Why are they doing this? To milk the web for user data, ad money and extract more money from customers directly. Our eyeballs are their most prized product. But the end result is this mono-culture / single take on UX and ranking for all. Practically it would mean to force them to open up their backends to competitors, or be split into front and back, with open competition. I would also spin off the user data part of backend to allow portability of user pods. There should be more rights to users on the internet. Deplatforming, manipulation and exploitation can't continue like this.
• meerita 6y ago
  The problems I see with UX being UX lead for several years and, switched to PO: UX was valuable when most people who produces websites didn't have much idea and team composition was totally different. Plus, market maturity increased and the amount of good practices patterns made UX totally secondary. Most of the businesses are started from frameworks who include a huge amount of good UX but, that is not enough. In order to be sure you have two options: go full qualitative tests, or go quantitative tests, for the second ones you don't need UX, you need a good PO with tons of answers and a data team who crunches the data for you. This way you can move faster, as the article says.
• Mindwipe 6y ago
  Well designers, now you know what it's like for users who have had to suffer with you sticking bigger fonts and more whitespace padding in every design for the last ten years despite users wanting the opposite.
• npteljes 6y ago
  I think there's a difference in objectives and motivations of the providers and its users. It is this difference is what poisons their relationship, UX included. Why would service providers not play underhandedly (like with dark patterns) when there's immediate value for them in it, and no real negative consequence? Their goodwill would cost them money directly. Sometimes they even _have to_ play like that, otherwise competitors will squeeze them out of the game altogether. And it's not like users in general are any better morally. I think what needs to change is the idealistic view on UX. That service providers manage UX to make the user experience better for the users. I think what happens is that they do just that, but not in a way that will hurt the health of the business. And in the meantime, they will do everything that they can get away with.
• willswire 6y ago
  One of my big time complaints about UX is the lack of reflexivity for end-users and support technicians. As a college student, I worked part-time for the campus IT department. My job mostly consisted of responding to support tickets that came into our system. Around 90% of these requests required me to initiate a remote desktop connection with the client. Never in a million years could I simply understand the problem that the user was experiencing by their explanation. So why on earth are there so many systems in place that don't offer a user-perspective view of the data? I'm not just scoping this problem to the world of IT - I've experienced this problem from both the support technician and end-user standpoint in sales, support, and education.
• weeboid 6y ago
  Easy, incentivized signup with difficult off-ramping has been a business model since … forever. This is not new to digital, it is much more nefarious as the possibility domain with ability to quickly iterate patterns is much higher. OP is focused on retail/consumer space, UX is still a huge diff in enterprise and will continue to reside at or near the C suite
• shuringai 6y ago
  sorry OP but this just means that since '97, UX evolved faster than a human can follow (as usual in tech) and you are just out of touch with current trends. UX is still of the same, if not better importance as a decade ago (remember that uber is just taxi with better ux, airbnb is just accomodation with better ux, and revolut is just banking with better ux)
• janaagaard 6y ago
  > UX is now "user exploitation." Pretty well said.
• sktrdie 6y ago
  I fail to see anybody mention this but isn’t UX entirely subjective? Also big corps have AB tested the hell out of everything leading to a UX that converts the most and hence is probably the best. Complaining about bad UX and then not showing many examples but merely a few outliers also is a bit misleading. To me it seems a possible way forward with UX is adaptivity. We need to make users reach their goals in the way they want it (hence subjectivity). Any static UX in the way of that is by definition bad. Good UX should adapt, evolve and morph for the user at hand. And it should do this dynamically and not compiled before hand by a few UX think lords that know how it should be done. Just my 2 cents.
  • specialist 6y ago
    "You can't test your way to quality." Counterintuitive wisdom from my QA/Test days. Maybe it's a koan. Other's have already dismantled the A/B testing sham. From my own experience, noobs do this to show management they're doing something. Justifying their continued employment.
• nbzso 6y ago
  Recently I had a problem explaining to a recruiter why I am designing only UI, Visual language and care only for visual parts of the product. She didn't react at all when I started talking about "Dark Patterns":) It is requirement nowadays, it is not optional. If you as a designer don't think about new ways to exploit the user base, you are not worth your salt. I moved only to visual stuff for two reasons: 1. Designers used to think about the user, functionally and aesthetically. Nowadays designers who cannot draw a straight line move templates around and comply with the management without any form of critical thinking. 2. There is no way for me to be a "writer" and do the dishes. Yep, nowadays designers must not only code but and write compelling stories to be hired. Utter nonsense.
  • nmg 6y ago
    Thanks for this insight, can you expand/give examples about the compelling stories you've been asked to write?
    • nbzso 6y ago
      This is not a secret. Here is a regular article for UX designer requirements, and under number 4 we have: UX writing Writing is the unsung hero of UX. People speak highly of coding, which is a skill that shouldn’t be dismissed, but writing is a talent that can be nurtured over less time to create brilliant user experiences. Pick up your phone and look at any of your apps and it will be filled with perfectly crafted words. https://bit.ly/3cnEkuo https://bit.ly/3cnEkuo In this point in my 20 year career as a designer I simply refuse to comply. You cannot create long term value for your customers by shifting the focus of design from the user to the product managers and shareholders.
• specialist 6y ago
  I eschewed clicking this link when this hit front page. I thought it'd just be more whining. I was wrong. I'm sorry for the delay. That angelfish metaphor is just perfect. The WFMU graphic is terrific. The criticism is spot on. -- Yes, and: Why I also left UI. TLDR: No one at any time has ever cared about mental models, metaphors. The serious aspects of UI, QA/Test, methodologies have all been swept aside. I don't know why. Even in the 90s, other geeks were hostile towards UI. -- In the 90s, I considered myself a UI designer. Before the kids started saying "UX". Which is like my kid telling me that "emo" wasn't anything like "goth", because "goth" is what old people listen to. Um, ok. Sorry, kid: Same smell, new slogan. I mostly did direct manipulation graphical user interfaces, similar to AutoCAD and Illustrator. I had been programming since grade school. Slinging code was just what one did. I fucking loved working on UI. During a time when most geeks hated it. Except game devs. At some point, I got tired of trying to persuade the priests working at Autodesk and MicroStation to stop abusing their users. I'll just make my own UIs, dammit. My one contribution to the art of UI was somehow divining new mental models. Transmuting complex stuff into "well, duh" simple. You know you've nailed a solution when you can delete the related pages and chapters from the docs. Good UI explains itself. h/t Donald Norman (Just like good code.) Example 1: For a game, I created navigation controls which unified walking on the ground and flying in the air (like a bird), while avoiding getting "hyperlost". (We never shipped. For comparison, the 3D RTS game Myth's UI was kinda the same, but not really.) Example 2: For our production printing software apps, I "fixed" the color mapping UI. Mapping named colors w/ RGB values to CMYK is straightforward. But lithography has a bunch of colorants which cannot be represented in RGB, like double black and metallics. I made it stupid easy to control. Example 3: Also for printing, I created a parametric image positioning (imposition) app which generated the production plan from a simple specification. The Holy Grail. Just in time for the print industry to crash. -- To implement my UIs, I had to dive deeper and deeper into programming. I can't really explain why. Something always got lost in the translation. I've always had to show vs tell. There was always some legacy technical reason why I couldn't get the UIs I wanted. So I'd have to fix the next layer down. So instead of engaging directly with end users, working on their real problems, I'm coding OpenGL bindings and web services and persistence layers. I think this is called yak shaving. It's a terrible, terrible trap. Over the years, the harder I worked, the further away I got from my objectives. -- My criteria for a successful idea, back when we geeks still cared about learning organizations, was if the idea outlives one's own participation. By my own standards, I've had very few successes. Regardless of the domain. Project management, testing, writing, UI design, etc. I did a lot of cool shit. Most of it now lost. I also never figured out how to monetize, profit from my ideas and creations. My guess is doing stuff and getting paid are two different domains and very few people have both. I think both of these failures are related. Or along the lines of this Hurst article, maybe being a working artist is just hard. I know a lot of struggling artists. I respect any creative who figures out how to get paid. -- Geeks remain hostile to stuff they don't understand. Yes, there's now better visual arts and visual communication, it's still pretty rare. I attribute this to having fewer gatekeepers. Anyone can throw their work up on the web. And just like visual design, geeks (and non-geeks) don't understand mental models and metaphors. They'll see the work. Acknowledge that it's good. But since they can't figure how it came to be, the work is somehow invalid. Or due to luck. Or somehow otherwise illegitimate. You can't A/B test yourself to greatness. (Riffing on wisdom from my time doing QA/Test.) But I've never been able to explain my intuition and non-linear thinking to other geeks. There is no "show your work", like all the steps of long division to satisfy the math teacher. I'm still grateful to the one geek boss I had who was at least honest about his rejection. He was a math whiz and had previously made a lot of money selling software to Wall St. He demanded that I walk him thru my solutions. I'd demo, show him my notebooks (eg storyboards), the results from usability testing, etc. But he just couldn't accept the end results because he couldn't understand how I logically got there. OMG we had such fights. Years later he apologized. He had tried to do his own UI for some of the same problems. He admitted mine were better. And that he should have been more accepting of my style of thinking. Which he called "abduction" (vs deduction or induction), but I don't think that's right either. There are certainly other reasons why creative work is diminished, rejected. This is just the brick wall that I noticed. -- So. To wrap up this rant. Being a creative is hard. Everything Hurst wrote is spot on. I just wanted to add my own personal history (color) to compliment his thesis.
• indymike 6y ago
  UX is a tool. Like all tools, UX can be used for good or evil. Good and evil are hard to define sometimes.
• LockAndLol 6y ago
  I remember reading or hearing somewhere: we have some of our smartest people working on the best way to sell ads to people. On an unrelated note, I like the style of the blog: no 3 column bullshit. I can resize the screen however I want to and the text flows all the way from the left edge of the screen to the right edge. Barely any wasted space. Beautiful.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• damirkotoric 6y ago
  UX was never about the user to begin with. It was about giving companies competitive advantage. That is essentially the ROI of UX, and it was since the term was first coined.
• munawwar 6y ago
  lol similar to the blog, I just got tricked into a prime membership. I'd swear that I didn't click the button in their full screen "upsell" page in the middle of the checkout process.. but yet money gone and only half refund. Their customer contact details is hidden so deep, that it took me 10 minutes to find out. Finally contacted them and got the remaining amount as store credit. Experiences like these puts me further of amazon. Now think about the definition of good UX.
• lenitabinol 6y ago
  I have to cancel my credit cards when a vendor makes it that difficult to unsubscribe