User Experience Insights
UX = User Experience or is UX = User Exploitation
I can’t agree with all the content in the article but like it is in a democracy, you have to carefully listen to other opinions. UX Designers are human and can fall into the pit of dark UI patterns, but that doesn’t mean that we are all only thinking about how to exploit the user.
What do you think? https://creativegood.com/blog/21/losing-faith-in-ux.html
It's an interesting topic, and I would like to share the Your undivided attention podcast, which discusses partly the same aspects but mainly from a social media perspective. How the business model there basically is to keep users on the platform for as long as possible.
Luckily, as we're dealing with business software and business apps, at least for me, there is no benefit at all in keeping a user in an app for longer than necessary. Quite the opposite in fact, the quicker for instance a maintenance worker can report the material usage, tools and work performed, with a high quality and correctness, the better. It would actually be bad for the business to make that process any more complex and difficult than need be.
I don't see that the "business UX", if that's a thing, would fall into this category of user exploitation any time soon. We would be really far off track if that was the case...
Hi Jörgen,
I like your profile picture, I also started with a Commodore 64 😉
I agree with you that it should not happen in "Business UX" and also my entire AppHaus team is avoiding this kind of dark pattern as it does not make sense for us and the user. That's why I can't agree with all the content in the article but it is important to know that these topics exist.
Working in an innovation team with customers could also lead being infected with dark patterns in case we develop something for a customer and he is keen on keeping the user on a platform or want to buy him things you don't need. I remember that this was (or partly is) still the case when you book a flight with Ryan Air.
In case we do a Design Thing Innovation workshop, this could be a demand (or business need) from the customer. You can only avoid this by knowing it and take care that you create a sustainable and human design.
Thanks for the podcast tip and your contribution.