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You'll find that the vast majority of bad UX decisions aren't coming from designers themselves, but from management. See also: A/B testing UIs to maximize arbi

You'll find that the vast majority of bad UX decisions aren't coming from designers themselves, but from management. See also: A/B testing UIs to maximize arbitrary metrics

pdntspa 4y ago
Designers are the gatekeepers though, maybe they should stand up to these folks more often.
- nvrspyx 4y ago
  I think one of the main problems is that a surface-level argument can easily be made that user engagement represents the quality of the user experience (i.e. "users that spend a lot of time in the app clearly like it"), despite falling apart if you dig deeper than the surface. The allure of short-term profits makes such an argument attractive to upper leadership. It also makes it more difficult for a lower-level employee, like a designer, to convince them against it without direct evidence that optimizing for user productivity is better than optimizing for user engagement. Combine the ease of making that argument with potential financial incentives to the designers to optimize for that, then you get relatively easy conformity to that goal. I'm sure there's plenty of designers that will happily accept it, so as a company, you can easily replace any designers that push back.
  - pdntspa 4y ago
    I suspect a lot of that is because designers aren't often technology lifers, rather seemingly entering this field smelling profit and riding the wave as it were. I don't know what the solution is here other than firing them all and replacing them with engineers and passionate tech nerds who remember their history. Which won't ever happen, and the situation is hopeless. The world we could have had...
    - warning26 4y ago
      Nonsense; plenty of people in UX, myself included, have tech backgrounds. Software engineers aren't immune from the "higher metrics == uSeRs lOvE iT" trap. Consider early Google, when they infamously A/B tested 50 shades of blue for a button. Did that actually improve anything? Of course not.
nvrspyx 4y ago
I wouldn't call those metrics arbitrary, they're just trying to measure something different. It's no longer measuring user productivity, it's measuring user engagement. It's no longer how quickly a user familiarizes and gets something done with the software, it's how often and how long the user uses the software.

You'll find that the vast majority of bad UX decisions aren't coming from designers themselves, but from management. See also: A/B testing UIs to maximize arbitrary metrics

pdntspa 4y ago

Designers are the gatekeepers though, maybe they should stand up to these folks more often.

nvrspyx 4y ago
I think one of the main problems is that a surface-level argument can easily be made that user engagement represents the quality of the user experience (i.e. "users that spend a lot of time in the app clearly like it"), despite falling apart if you dig deeper than the surface. The allure of short-term profits makes such an argument attractive to upper leadership. It also makes it more difficult for a lower-level employee, like a designer, to convince them against it without direct evidence that optimizing for user productivity is better than optimizing for user engagement. Combine the ease of making that argument with potential financial incentives to the designers to optimize for that, then you get relatively easy conformity to that goal. I'm sure there's plenty of designers that will happily accept it, so as a company, you can easily replace any designers that push back.
- pdntspa 4y ago
  I suspect a lot of that is because designers aren't often technology lifers, rather seemingly entering this field smelling profit and riding the wave as it were. I don't know what the solution is here other than firing them all and replacing them with engineers and passionate tech nerds who remember their history. Which won't ever happen, and the situation is hopeless. The world we could have had...
  - warning26 4y ago
    Nonsense; plenty of people in UX, myself included, have tech backgrounds. Software engineers aren't immune from the "higher metrics == uSeRs lOvE iT" trap. Consider early Google, when they infamously A/B tested 50 shades of blue for a button. Did that actually improve anything? Of course not.

nvrspyx 4y ago

I wouldn't call those metrics arbitrary, they're just trying to measure something different. It's no longer measuring user productivity, it's measuring user engagement. It's no longer how quickly a user familiarizes and gets something done with the software, it's how often and how long the user uses the software.