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Are there folks who work on front ends and in design here who have been explicitly told to implement these?

by oooyay 3y ago

mock-possum 3y ago
I was doing some contract work with an ad agency, client was Cisco, and part of the site was a ‘sign up for this thing’ page - and of course they wanted the ‘subscribe to promotional emails’ box checked by default when the form was presented to the user. And I was like - nobody actually likes that though. Nobody likes that, people resent it, it’s basically a way to trick people into giving you permission to send them spam. Everyone kind of laughed and agreed, but the account supe was like “yeah, but it’s what the client wants, so” Tech lead was walking past my desk on his way out at the end of the day, and he was like, “the thing about the subscription box? Let’s just ‘forget’ to do it and see if anybody notices.” Seemed like a good thing to do, so we did - but it came back as a QA ticket, and we deprioritized it, until finally the account guy swung by my desk and was like, “I know we don’t like the checkbox thing, but we do actually need to do it.” And I was like alright fine I’ll do the checkbox thing wah-wah.
- sanitycheck 3y ago
  I don't even bother raising it as a problem these days. More effective is to implement it exactly as specified so the designer is happy and the the managers are happy and the client is happy. Then a month or so later, "accidentally" introduce a regression. Oops, the checkbox isn't checked by default any more! Nobody is thinking about it by then, nobody is checking it, and nobody will notice.
  - oooyay 3y ago
    Smells like https://grugbrain.dev/#grug-on-saying-ok https://grugbrain.dev/#grug-on-saying-ok
  - handy2000 3y ago
    I had success in the past hampering the process by linking to various legislations (e.g. GDPR, CCPA) and asking my PM to reach out to legal to approve the implementation. At larger companies legal is usually pretty cautious and takes a very long time to respond.
pstorm 3y ago
These are tame compared to some of the stuff I have been tasked with at a previous company. I don't want to go into specifics really, but I can tell you that it sort of became normal. Should we test out defaulting the newsletter checkbox? Sure, oh great, it improved newsletter conversions! Should we show a fake "X amount of people viewed this product"? Sure, if it works we can actually implement it! Etc. etc. Until I was outside of the culture of the company for a bit, I didn't see any issue. Improvement of metrics was all that mattered.

Are there folks who work on front ends and in design here who have been explicitly told to implement these?

by oooyay 3y ago

Are there folks who work on front ends and in design here who have been explicitly told to implement these?

I was doing some contract work with an ad agency, client was Cisco, and part of the site was a ‘sign up for this thing’ page - and of course they wanted the ‘subscribe to promotional emails’ box checked by default when the form was presented to the user. And I was like - nobody actually likes that though. Nobody likes that, people resent it, it’s basically a way to trick people into giving you permission to send them spam. Everyone kind of laughed and agreed, but the account supe was like “yeah, but it’s what the client wants, so” Tech lead was walking past my desk on his way out at the end of the day, and he was like, “the thing about the subscription box? Let’s just ‘forget’ to do it and see if anybody notices.” Seemed like a good thing to do, so we did - but it came back as a QA ticket, and we deprioritized it, until finally the account guy swung by my desk and was like, “I know we don’t like the checkbox thing, but we do actually need to do it.” And I was like alright fine I’ll do the checkbox thing wah-wah.

sanitycheck 3y ago
I don't even bother raising it as a problem these days. More effective is to implement it exactly as specified so the designer is happy and the the managers are happy and the client is happy. Then a month or so later, "accidentally" introduce a regression. Oops, the checkbox isn't checked by default any more! Nobody is thinking about it by then, nobody is checking it, and nobody will notice.
- oooyay 3y ago
  Smells like https://grugbrain.dev/#grug-on-saying-ok https://grugbrain.dev/#grug-on-saying-ok
- handy2000 3y ago
  I had success in the past hampering the process by linking to various legislations (e.g. GDPR, CCPA) and asking my PM to reach out to legal to approve the implementation. At larger companies legal is usually pretty cautious and takes a very long time to respond.

pstorm 3y ago

These are tame compared to some of the stuff I have been tasked with at a previous company. I don't want to go into specifics really, but I can tell you that it sort of became normal. Should we test out defaulting the newsletter checkbox? Sure, oh great, it improved newsletter conversions! Should we show a fake "X amount of people viewed this product"? Sure, if it works we can actually implement it! Etc. etc. Until I was outside of the culture of the company for a bit, I didn't see any issue. Improvement of metrics was all that mattered.