Feedback types: Is this a thing? / challenging perspectives / general opinions
Here’s an outline which I originally posted as a tweet thread but would like to flesh out into a fill article with images like the attached one to illustrate the “zones” that people may/may not realise they are acting in when they say stuff like “what’s good for the user is good for the business”
I am writing this because I’ve published a few things now which say that empathy and “human centeredness” in commercial design, particularly UX design/research, are theatrical and not compatible with capitalism if done deliberately. That means they can be true as a side-effect, or by individuals acting under the radar of their employers. It has become common to hear the good for the user = good for the business response - and I want to write something that demonstrates how it is an incomplete sentence, and any way to add the necessary information to make it true results in the speaker admitting they are not acting in the interests of users or humans.
Here’s the basic outline so far:
What’s good for the User
“What’s good for the user is good for the business” is a common response I get to my UX critique. When I try to understand the thinking behind that response I come up with two possible conclusions:
Conclusion 1: They are ignoring the underlying product and speaking exclusively about the things between the product and a person. They are saying that making anything easy to use, intuitive, pleasant, makes a happy user and a happy user is good for business.
This type of “good for the user” is a business interest that values engagement over ethics. It justifies one-click purchases of crypto shitcoins, free drinks at a casino, and self-lighting cigarettes. https://patents.google.com/patent/US1327139
Conclusion 2: They are speaking exclusively about the underlying product and the purposes it was created to serve. They say a good product will benefit the business. But this means they are making a judgement call on what makes a product “good”.
This type of “good for the user” is complicated because it is a combination of objective and subjective consideration of each product individually. It is design in its least reductive form because the creation of something good is the same with or without business interests. A designer shouldn’t use blanket statements agnostic to the design subject. “what is good for the user…” ignores cigarette packet health warnings and poker machine helpline stickers there because of enforced regulation, not because of a business paying designers to create them.
It’s about being aware of the context, intent, and whose interests are being served. It means cutting implied empathy for people if it is bullshit.
If we look at this cartesian plane diagram we can see the blue and green quadrants that corporate product design operates in. The green being where the “good for user, good for business” idea exists, and the yellow representing the area that the idea ignores, dismisses, etc
GDPR did a number on what little faith I have in business ethics. I wasn’t surprised that adtech, having its business model made all but illegal if the spirit and letter of the law were followed, would need to be dragged to compliance by force, kicking and screaming all the way. I did not expect half the goddamn internet to engage in a zerg rush of violations to overwhelm already underenthusiastic regulatory bodies and spread FUD.
I’ve read through the entirety of GDPR and its accompanying recitals in two languages. It’s some of the most carefully considered and reasonable legal text I’ve ever digested. It goes through meticulous trouble to allow processing personal data for purposes where it’s technically necessary (e.g. cookies for logging in users of storing contents of a shopping cart), legally or contractually necessary (recording the place of residence for members of a club or shipping address for a purchased item), in the legitimate interests of either party provided it doesn’t infringe on the rights of the subject otherwise (e.g. access logs of a web server for the express purpose of security forensics). All of these without ever asking for any permissions, just a list item in an easily accessible privacy policy page.
A business should almost never have to ask its user for their consent to process their personal data, because the other lawful purposes cover just about everything you’d want a business to do for you. If you need to give permission for more, it’s almost certainly being used to show ads to you, being sold to someone who shows ads to you, being sold to someone so they can adjust your social credit, or at best to make you an unpaid beta tester. And because everyone uses Google fucking Analytics, it’s also being used to show ads to you.
Even so, everyone asks you to sell your soul anyway, because everyone uses Google Analticks and people who program websites for a living think reprogramming a website to not use Google Analticks is hard. And in some cases their business model is selling your personal information to Google for a pittance and they want to pretend their business model deserves to exist. Incompetence is indistinguishable from malice here, and that means you can try and keep dragging your feet until people maybe forget there ever was a reason why sites ask for cookie permission.
Analytics don’t even work to make websites better. How do I know? Because websites keep getting worse. Whatever improvements may come from tracking my usage (as if), enshittification dwarfs it all. This all ties back into what you said about UX. I’ve seen hackernews go “oh I always opt in to tracking because they use that to improve the website”. Charitably assuming genuine ignorance instead of malicious astroturfing, I now have a response to them. If those analytics are used to improve the site at all, they’re optimizing for the business, not for the user. And those interests are, more often than not, cross-aligned.
Sorry about the rant, I hope it wasn’t too off topic to maybe give some ideas for this or some future article.
I’ve felt all of this in my bones for the longest time without the words to describe why. I keep seeing hacker news types act like these cookie permission prompts were forced on them by “bumbling EU politicians” and thinking no, this shit was all you assholes trying to defang a good set of policies that rightfully threaten ad profits (because it’s a fucking busted model for web content)
I’ve seen hackernews go “oh I always opt in to tracking because they use that to improve the website”.
this is so much like seeing an advertiser claim that most people like ads and blocking them is immoral. takes so bad it’s like the poster’s a space alien failing to pose as human
Imagine a door-to-door salesman who sees a “no soliciting” sign and goes ahead with his thing anyway. He starts his sales pitch with “Can I interest you in…” and thinks he’s being clever since in his mind that’s technically asking for a special permission for soliciting. And of course, “no” isn’t considered a final answer until the door has been slammed in his face.
That’s what the cookie banners are.
this is legitimately how the door to door sales people in my area are too. sales never fucking changes
GDPR is a great example of this. I would say it’s biggest failing was in recognising all of the nuances and scenario variability while forgetting that most businesses would take the easiest route regardless of how it impacted people. Especially that they would establish the gdpr-consent-popup as a norm which works like a bendy mirror on the gdpr “Look what your policy has made us do to the internet!”
Google Tag Manager (GTM) is the tool that opened up the ability for marketing and sales people to push scripts to a website without any understanding of the broader impact.
What you’re saying about adtech is incredibly true, and GDPR isn’t just scary because they think what they are doing is unethical, it’s because GDPR would require them to understand everything they are doing. Something which tools like GTM make almost impossible because it lets them plug in a bunch of scripts which write in scripts that write in scripts. I worked as a FE dev for an ad-revenue based publishing company in Australia during the GTM boom and the forensics work I had to do to find which tracking/content syndication script was breaking everything was mind-numbing. These things bypass the developers by design, because developers don’t necessarily care about people either but they do care about their reputation in code.
The email unsubscribe link might be another good example of what you’re saying where it starts off as a good thing but quickly becomes a bandwagon that benefits from perceived goodwill but is another data collection opportunity.
haha here’s a mod of my diagram to show what I cringe-call “empathy drift” where anything that starts out as being done without regard for, or even adversarial to, business for the benefit of people and becomes somewhat popular will be adopted by business because of the perceived goodwill and continue the rotational journey into oblivion.
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This is kind of like something I’ve badly written about before called “effective automation” where instead of using computing power to make everything easier by default we can find opportunities to use that power to make things more involved, or to require more involvement from us because they are things that benefit from our deliberate attention, deliberate attention that is mistaken as friction https://fasterandworse.com/ineffective-automation/
I like it so far! this is roughly in line with my experiences in tech, where software ethics is largely either ignored or ridiculed, depending on the nature of the business (the more culty your startup is, the more likely you are to catch a PIP for talking too loud about morals). as you’ve pointed out in this segment, it’s very common instead to try to apply capitalist motivations to something that might outwardly bare a slight resemblance to ethics, but which fails entirely as an ethical framework when examined in any detail
there is a possible third conclusion I feel like I’ve seen play out a few times: the transitive property, where someone (usually an executive) talks about “what’s good for the user is good for the business” but really means “what’s good for the business is good for the user”. this kind of brain rot is pretty common among the more right-libertarian parts of the software industry (you’ll see it a lot on hacker news), and it leads to some of the wackiest justifications for user-hostile actions I’ve ever seen. Reddit employed this type of reasoning (without the phrasing) a lot while trying to excuse cutting off API access, for example
Thank you for this. The transitive property is a really good point because it is becoming more common as these bigger companies achieve a kind of unspoken “public utility” status, usually by referring to themselves as technology rather than product. This means they can talk about doing shitty things as if their hand is forced and they are doing what they can to ensure some kind of service is maintained for people. It is really effective for making people who say “reddit doesn’t have to exist” seem eccentric or extreme.
oh exactly, we’re seeing it right now with AI hype. it’s a massive useless expensive subscription service being marketed as if it’s a public utility you’d be crazy to be without
I have another article outline which I’m working on that talks about the SaaS product being an accumulation of decades of digital products shedding the constraints of the physical world to eventually shed the product definition itself. Take away physical media and you take away boxes and shelves. Something that takes up space has to justify itself with purpose or novelty or luxury, etc. Same for the materials of construction and packaging.
“Application” describes something for purpose. Eventually we bundle them all under “App” which removes the purpose connotation.
Eventually the downloading of an app is replaced with the accessing of an app. Iterative design means there are no versions anymore.
Buying something that is amorphous makes less sense so the subscription model rises. But traditional subscription was a two-way pre-defined scheduled exchange of value. Monthly payment for monthly issue. It was still buying but with a commitment to keep buying. Software subscriptions are more akin to renting. You’re paying to access something that is never a static form.
The purpose of something that has shed almost all of the things that make us ask “is this something I need?” becomes less pertinent. The purpose can be replaced with claims of potential and, as long as it has stuff that can be useful, the user is left to find their own uses.
People see LLMs as public utilities because no one tells them what they are for, they find their own use. If Stanley release a metal bar and call it “The Ultimate Tool” for “Anything you can imagine” they are doing the same thing but it seems funny because its an object that takes up space. If I find the metal bar is good for supporting my car while I work under it, that’s the purpose I find. Just the same as if I use it to beat someone.
Software might be the most misleading word of the industry that has survived all these changes. Nothing soft about it.
(sorry, a bit ranty)
I like this understanding of SaaS more than the one I’ve internalized: that it’s a return to the mainframe days. that’s a useful model from an engineering perspective (compare the UI cues and design priorities of an IBM x/system and a large cloud provider’s admin dashboards, especially around how billing and compute are treated) but yours is a better model for understanding how these systems work sociologically
weirdly, the example of applications becoming amorphous services without a clear purpose that came to mind for me was (and I hate this term but it’s the one in use) AAA gaming. there was a big push towards making games into live services which are amorphous blobs of dynamic content that can’t truly be bought. alongside the reasons you gave, one reason that corporations love to push this model for AAA games is that (in spite of promises to the contrary), live services have a defined and usually extremely short shelf life, and after that it becomes impossible to play the game in any form. this isn’t compatible with how I engage with video games, so it was a big part of why I switched almost entirely to playing indie games, where this model is unheard of
Oh I’m so glad you brought up games. They are so interesting because they are “games” before they are “software” - regardless of them being digital or physical products, commercial or social, whatever, they have a purpose of entertainment built in. If they aren’t entertaining, they suck. That’s the invisible barrier that crypto people ignore, think doesn’t exist, or are too dumb to understand. We never called games “applications” because their application is consistent no matter what genre of game they are.
I’ve thought about a link between games and spreadsheets in this sense. They are both things that computation, as a means for satisfying their purpose, is undeniably perfect for.
Games are one of the few consumer-grade software products that give a tangible reason for buying a faster, more powerful, computer.
But we have to upgrade because the operating systems get bloated and the web is putting more and more load on our machines for very little pay off.
ugh
yeah, games-as-service is a fantastic example of one of the cases I reference in my other comment
it becomes so easy for games companies to just shift to lootboxes and apparel as their “delivering value” path, and beyond social outroar there’s essentially no counterpressure available in-system to modulate that happening (and even in the social outroar case there’s no guarantee it’ll work)
your observation about services-subscriptions as renting strikes a chord with me - I’ve been referring to a lot of it as rentware for a couple months now (and am sure that my friends tire of me ranting about rentware in DMs)
sometime I’ll find the spoons to write up my rant about it. one aspect of the rant is a critique of how many things have become rentware simply because it’s an easier cashflow model for the vendor, along with the negative effects of it. and specifically “easier” not “simpler” - allows engaging more cashflow while not necessarily increasing product function (and in many cases worsening products)
it will also include a big bit of screaming about apple - whose push in the app store (scrubbing old free apps, pushing new apps to include paid offerings) have, imo, been a significant contributor to this worsening state of affairs
lol this is literally the excuse Bluesky use for every bit of their incompetence. It’s about the vaporware TECHNOLOGY that no user wants because it’s fucking stupid rationalist dreams, not the actual service with hundreds of thousands of demanding shitposters we’re actually in the present moment running
this is a vein that weasel Sam Altman has definitely struck. Maybe he picked it up from his time as reddit ceo. Photos with world leaders to talk on behalf of OpenAI is not advertising his product, it’s advertising that his product is not a product.
the ceo of what now!
He was the president of Y Combinator and was briefly the CEO of Reddit.
I didn’t wake up expecting I’d hate the most fashy one of the y combinator folks even more, but here we are
I’m an academic and probably not your intended audience but here’s my thoughts in case they’re useful!
Is this a thing?
I think so, the broad idea makes sense to me, and your examples really stood out to me for driving the point home. (“one-click purchases of crypto shitcoins” is particularly delightful.) As you flesh this out more, I would as an outsider love to see further examples and exposition about the domain your expertise is coming from.
I’m especially interested to leaen about what kinds of scenarios people use this phrase in response to your UX critique. (It’s not 100% clear to me whether folks would be using the phrase to reject your critique or in acceptance of it; or if both happen.)
Challenging perspectives
So I see the phrase as depending a lot on what the speaker means by “good for the user” and “good for the business.” I like how your arguments cover how the intended meaning of “good for the user” changes what the phrase means. However, maybe a bit naively, I feel that “good for the business” can be meant in a few different ways. Even just in terms of making profit, maximising short term vs long term profit can look very different, but more widely I think businesses are driven by a lot more than just profit incentives. (E.g. Twitter/X as an example of vanity) Some people might think of “good for the business” as being morally charged, in which doing good to the customers would make the business “good.”
This perspective is definitely tinted my being in academia where we thoroughly suck at optimising for profit!
General opinions
Silly opinion from my maths background, but I’d just call it a diagram rather than a cartesian plane diagram! The cartesianness and planeness of the diagram aren’t really important to point out.
Title tweak suggestion: “What is ‘good for the user’”
All offered very much in the spirit of take or leave it. To end: I think its an interesting topic and I enjoyed reading your outline!
Firstly, if I can interest an academic with my writing, that’s definitely a win for me. Thanks for this considered feedback!
Ok:
I would as an outsider love to see further examples and exposition about the domain your expertise is coming from. I’m especially interested to learn about what kinds of scenarios people use this phrase in response to your UX critique.
Thanks for highlighting this. I often wonder how necessary it is to qualify my position with some indication of who the fuck I am/think I am.
As for the kinds of UX critique that get’s this response, I’ve tweeted quite a bit about a UX posture that doesn’t match the commercial reality. One particular post that went viral (for someone like me) was this one: https://nitter.net/fasterandworse/status/1528748399528398851#m and my recent “The Aura of Care” article which got some attention on Medium after the UX Collective published it and modified my title to “The Fake Aura of Care in UX” with this comment particularly being the one that pushed me to think deeper about this mantra:
However, maybe a bit naively, I feel that “good for the business” can be meant in a few different ways. Even just in terms of making profit, maximising short term vs long term profit can look very different, but more widely I think businesses are driven by a lot more than just profit incentives. (E.g. Twitter/X as an example of vanity) Some people might think of “good for the business” as being morally charged, in which doing good to the customers would make the business “good.”
This is a great provocation which adds a whole other dimension to the ways the statement can be interpreted. It’s clear that most members of expertise-based communities rarely reflect on these things about the businesses that pay them. This doesn’t matter for a community of graphic designers discussing and debating typography and colour theory - but it becomes a problem when the community develops a brand of care and empathy.
The “good for the business” is good to explore further. I said they could be making a judgement call on what makes a product good but it’s really about the business behind the product because any commercial design is marketing.
Silly opinion from my maths background, but I’d just call it a diagram rather than a cartesian plane diagram! The cartesianness and planeness of the diagram aren’t really important to point out.
haha, perfect! You caught me trying to sound smart. I think I googled “what is a four quadrant x/y axis chart called?”
Title tweak suggestion: “What is ‘good for the user’”
Good point.
Thanks again for the great feedback. It is appreciated. I’m still the only one to post anything on here but it’s already proven to be a valuable forum.
Firstly, if I can interest an academic with my writing, that’s definitely a win for me. Thanks for this considered feedback!
I don’t promise to be a good academic 😂 but I’m glad my comments were helpful 😊
I often wonder how necessary it is to qualify my position with some indication of who the fuck I am/think I am.
It’s mainly that I found it hard to place where your experience was coming from without a concrete idea of your job experience (e.g., the article reads a bit differently coming from a front end developer vs a UX consultant, etc.)
That said, I didn’t at any point while reading think “who the fuck does this guy think he is”—your expertise and knowledge come through really clearly just from the quality of your ideas.
“The Fake Aura of Care in UX”
I gave this a read and thoroughly enjoyed it! Really got me thinking about what’d good for the user not being the same as what the user enjoys the most. A videogame example: grinding for loot on World of Warcraft is worse for you than doing chores, but it is easier. I wonder if software that’s difficult to use for ethical reasons is always going to be at a disadvantage in the market. Probably not, because absolutes are rarely true, but the conditions for the sucess of ethical software over easy to use software are interesting to think about.
Thanks again for the great feedback. It is appreciated. I’m still the only one to post anything on here but it’s already proven to be a valuable forum.
Honestly I think the forum a great idea, also an actual antithesis to the site the name is a pun on—the more positivity on the net the better. Thanks for making it!
Now I just need to figure out what I can get away with posting myself without compromising my anonymity. My academic writing is generally meant for publication so that’s out, but perhaps I can get away with some of my fiction writing for the D&D games I run—height of sophistication I know 😏
A videogame example: grinding for loot on World of Warcraft is worse for you than doing chores, but it is easier.
I’ve never thought about it inside a game like this. It adds perspective to the rise of casual gaming on smart phones. Like the runner games and driving games where the action happens on rails so you only have to worry about parts of the controls, like turning or jumping. I’ve not played WoW but I did play Animal Crossing when it came out on the GC and it was basically a doing chores game where the reward for doing stuff is your own satisfaction. It wasn’t online and despite some memory card sharing capabilities it was a solitary experience.
Probably not, because absolutes are rarely true, but the conditions for the success of ethical software over easy to use software are interesting to think about.
This is what I try to remind myself whenever I write about these things. If I spot myself hinging an argument on a dichotomy I make sure I think and understand the dichotomy away. It usually results in a better insight and a stronger argument.
Animal Crossing must have been a hell of a game to pitch into production. It’s like the Seinfeld of video games, a game about nothing and it was addictive
It’s mainly that I found it hard to place where your experience was coming from without a concrete idea of your job experience (e.g., the article reads a bit differently coming from a front end developer vs a UX consultant, etc.)
My CV summary - I’m a front end dev/design veteran. I’ve been doing it since about '97 when we were called web designers and did the photoshop and the code. I’ve worked in corporate, agency, and startups. I am Australian but have been lucky to work a few years in Japan and now based in France. I’ve managed front end dev teams and IA/UX teams. I’m pretty much unemployable these days because I was put off by the rise of client-side rendered JS web apps and lagged behind in adopting the skills - plus I haven’t really hid my identity in my writing about the industry, so I don’t land many interviews any more. 😅
Honestly I think the forum a great idea, also an actual antithesis to the site the name is a pun on—the more positivity on the net the better. Thanks for making it!
Credit to @self for the idea and getting it started. Please post your fiction writing! I’d love to see your creative process and give any feedback I can. Also for your academic work, you don’t have to post the writing - I think this can be a good space for spitballing ideas too. “Is this a thing?” has become my favourite question.
Sorry my reply’s a little late, it’s been a busy couple of weeks!
Animal Crossing/Super-stimuli
I think part of the reason Animal Crossing is so much more of an enticing environment to do chores in than real life is because progress is so much more salient within it. Even without a explicit progress bar filling up every time you do a chore, every interaction with the world in Animal Crossing is more vibrant and quicker to resolve than in real life. Sort of “supernormal stimuli” for completing chores if that makes sense?
I think anything with progress is likely to have the same addictive value (idle games for example) which makes me wonder.
Experience
No wonder your expertise was clear: you’ve got a lot of it! Hopefully the upside of being frank with your views is that the interviews you do land are with companies that are more likely to listen to you. (I suggest, naively.)
My web dev experience is almost entirely with the client side JS frameworks 😅 I built my first web app in 2014 with AngularJS and Flask, which was definitely a mistake. But I learned a lot quite quickly from that mess and the major web app I built was almost entirely client-side with Firebase for the back-end.
I’m not a professional web developer though, the app I built was for some academic project. Its turned out to be a really useful skillset to have in my back pocket, and definitely gave me an appreciation for software development that I think a lot of academics don’t have. The number of academics that write code without version control is terrifying!
Posting Fiction
I’ve been thinking about what to post, and I have some ideas.
I actually have a homebrew D&D setting that I think the crowd on this board is is the best audience I could hope for. All the societies in it are satirical takes on various philosophical stances including some of the groups discussed on the other awful.systems boards.
I just need to find enough time to sit down, polish up my notes up a little so there’s a hope other people can understand them!
No wonder your expertise was clear: you’ve got a lot of it! Hopefully the upside of being frank with your views is that the interviews you do land are with companies that are more likely to listen to you. (I suggest, naively.)
Thanks for this. One thing I am finding is that technical web expertise has a short half-life where around 6 years is peak and beyond that starts to have the opposite effect. Baggage and all that. Always sticks with me this one time on the orange site I saw an argument about web accessibility and a young’in dismissed an older, more experienced poster as an “a list aparter”
I actually have a homebrew D&D setting that I think the crowd on this board is is the best audience I could hope for. All the societies in it are satirical takes on various philosophical stances including some of the groups discussed on the other awful.systems boards.
Honestly, we have two posts on here now and both have had so much more feedback and observation than I expected. I say you should go for it.
Only thing is now I feel guilty because I haven’t followed up on my post yet. I need to write a draft with all the great feedback in mind.
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