11/02/2021

On losing faith in UX

On January 28 Mark Hurst published the article Why I’m losing faith in UX, which received a lot of attention in the following days. The author describes a progressive decline in how UX is used: started as a way to create user-friendly tools, today it’s employed mostly for User eXploitation. It is used to deceive users, from making it almost impossible unsubscribing from online services, to using dark patterns to increment the chances of selling products. On the opposite side, UX isn’t used anymore to help people, as the author shows with the negative example of New York’s vaccine site.

The article received a lot of positive feedbacks from the tech community. I really liked the discussion on HN, with a lot of messages that agree and amplify the point expressed by Mark. He also wrote a follow-up to collect some of the most important responses.

I think that the amount of success the article has received is a measure of its significance and correctness: these dynamics are undoubtedly real and shape the way we experience technology every day, as users but as builders too. Stated with the word of Mark:

People are feeling intense pressure, driven by the business model of their employer, to pervert the goal of UX - from helping and enabling users, to deceiving and exploiting them.

I’m really happy to have found this article, and that it has been so successful: this argument needs all the attention it can before anything can change in the way we understand technology.

At the same time, with respect and humility, I want to advocate for a lesser naive narrative about UX. I firmly believe that UX, like many other disciplines, will always bend to what moves the world. Since in our current society the profit of few matters more than the well-being of the many, UX will always be used to deceive and harm people.

We live in a world where the tools and techniques we could employ to make everyone’s life easier are being used to make them spend money, often for things they don’t need. UX has always been doomed to be used against users in my opinion. Probably it seemed immune to market logic in the first years, when its potential to increase profits wasn’t understood by companies.

In other words, the situation in which the UX finds itself is not a deviation from a path of growth and well-being of everyone: it has always been on the same path, but we couldn’t see in the beginning.

I absolutely don’t want to sound nihilistic; I want to correct the narrative under which we read the story of UX to understand what action needs to be taken. Believing that UX can really help people in an economic context where the market laws dominate can be misleading, and maybe waste the efforts of the ones that are trying to change the status quo.

But that’s another story. Before I finish, I want also to suggest you to check out Mark Hurst. I didn’t know him before his article came out, but I really like his point of view about technology. If I had to suggest a few things above others, I really like his article A simple tech ethic. Also one of his books, Customer included, seems to be a text worth reading if you care about your users. But who am I kidding? I need to finish too many books to buy another one.

On losing faith in UX

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