Culture Clash Issue #289 - The blurry line between empowerment and exploitation in UX
Why we must pay attention to this trend
It feels like the field of User Experience (UX) is taking a bit of a beating these days. A few weeks back I wrote about the push to look beyond the limits of user centered design. My writeup was about a growing concern that a user centered approach is no longer enough. As product designers, we must consider the full ecosystem of actors affected by a product experience. Why I'm losing faith in UX, by Mark Hurst, speaks to one of the most interesting and unique challenges facing UX. Mark is the founder of Creative Good, a creative UX consultancy in NYC.
Mark claims that UX has been on the decline for some time. He identifies the prevailing forces leading to this decline. In the early 2010s, the data driven techniques of Wall street migrated to Silicon Valley. Many of the Big Tech firms adopted this algorithmically driven product strategy. The hunger to harness the potential of data science and algorithms was irresistible. Data driven design began to supersede traditional UX.
In the late 2010s, Big Tech redefined User Experience as User Exploitation. Mark points to Amazon’s dark web pattern for canceling a Prime membership. Amazon, a UX leader at the time, made canceling a prime membership intentionally difficult. Their goal was to ensure that as many users as possible stay subscribed.
Dark patterns are a predatory UX approach intended to make a process much more complex than it needs to be. Another example of an exploitative dark pattern is Facebook’s content recommendation engine. The engine surfaces the best content and advertising based on user preferences. But the user has no awareness of what's happening behind the scenes. Facebook constructs a digital clone of every user based on mountains of data. It uses this clone to generate content recommendations that are insanely accurate. Users have no transparency into the algorithm and how it works. They have no real ability to control it in any intentional way. This whole paradigm is the main narrative in the documentary, The Social Dilemma.
In the past decade, a lot of design talent left noble and less lucrative pursuits, to join this new world order. Facebook alone is accountable for much of this design brain drain.
In the words of Mark Hurst:
The unholy rebirth of UX has had a staggering cost. It's well beyond the stupid hassle of Prime cancellations, and even beyond the Big Tech criminality, I've written about. In the end, turning UX into an actively harmful discipline has drained talent and expertise away from projects that could, and should, have had more help.
Amit Lubling, an entrepreneur and investor, eloquently describes the complex equation facing UX:
Almost any large company runs on metrics. Investors sit on the board and control the founders. Unless the only metric is customer joy, they will design dark patterns. It's virtually impossible to design now without thinking of things like revenue, competitive advantage, stickiness, churn, etc. There are products that try to get you in and out and do what they need but I think they're rarer these days since everyone is competing for attention.
More than ever before, digital experiences are at the center of our lives. UX is the glue that binds these experiences together. For anybody in design who is reading this: It’s our responsibility to speak up about this terrible trend. It might be an uphill battle. But we must ensure UX stays focused on empowerment and not exploitation.
5 Links
✍🏻 Aligning Your Calendar With What Matters Most
This post from the always insightful, Steve Schlafman, is one of my favorite for the new year. It’s about how to design your calendar to enable you to have better control of your time and ultimately better mental health. Most of us live by our calendar, which is why this post is so important and relevant. Dig in.
To understand how to design great products, you must also dive into the business model and economics behind it. This post about CashApp, one of the most interesting and innovative apps in the fintech space. This post breaks the business in fascinating depth. This type of writing is not just for business people. You can learn a lot from this post as a product designer. Especially if you’re interested in this space.
📱 Carrot Weather receives major overhaul with new design and customization
I’ve tried every decent weather app in the AppStore. Most recently I’ve settled on Hello Weather, designed by Jonas Downey, who is also the designer of the Hey. I first discovered it on John Gruber’s home screen of all places. It’s simple and well designed. But the latest Carrot Weather update has me jumping ship. Carrot Weather has launched an incredible update with super impressive customizations. You can basically build your own weather experience using their interface builder. The customization design patterns in this app are something to pay attention to.
✍🏻 Why iPhone is today’s Kodak Brownie Camera
Om Malik continues to deliver in his product essays.
My own personal journey in the world of photography began with the iPhone. I didn’t even know that I could create photos until it came into my life. For about seven years, my iPhone was my only camera. Everything I knew about photography, I learned on that device. It wasn’t until March 2015, after nearly eight years of owning an iPhone, that I would buy a “real camera.” The Brownie was transformative in exactly the same way, acting as a gateway camera for many and allowing those with even just a passing interest to produce decent photos — at least, most of the time.
Another nod to Creative Good. They’re the makers of this simple recommendation site. Being that they are anti big tech and surveillance capitalism, their product recommendations are super interesting. The best search engine, browser, VPN, Email provider and so on. I discovered a really interesting zoom and google meet competitor based in Norway that I never heard of.
📱 HakiTo - Dog Activity Monitor
HakiTo is an app by one of the readers of this newsletter, Ionut Danifeld. He’s from Bali, Indonesia. HakiTo is an app that helps you keep track of all your dog’s activities from daily meals and exercise to annual vet visits by sending reminders for all. It’s the perfect time to be releasing this app since so many people I know have recently gotten dogs during the pandemic. Enjoy!
I had to include this fairly controversial tweet from Ken Kocienda, formerly on the original iPhone team and long time Apple Employee. He questions the notion of web browsers as software platforms. He received a reply from Alan Kay on Quora, who is one of the fathers of computer science. He’s worked on the first Object-Oriented Programming language and some of the first GUI interface paradigms at XEROX Parc. A fascinating exchange.