Post #2680407

2026-02-10 12:42 UTC

@mralancooper@hachyderm.io @skry@mastodon.social Hmm, I don't know about that... In my personal experience (in companies from 5 - 80,000 people) it _always_ were the actual UX designers/teams doing the dumbing down, designating feature proposals or interaction/visualization methods as "unimportant", "too complex" or "too alien", ignoring users' intellect/agency and treating them like 4 year olds. Management was often just trusting them to be the "experts" on the project and therefore pretty hands off... Especially in larger places, I think a lot of these things are also down to internal politics, i.e. a dislike of the idea that someone outside their team would have competence (and long history) in this field too... I just think, UX as a branch of the modern tech industry generally has much more business oriented goals by now and therefore has become incompatible with the goals and priorities of HCI and "interaction design" as disciplines, i.e. empowering the user. Increasingly I'm having the sour feeling that this empowering is absolutely not in the interest of many tools/apps/services anymore... it's just become about farming, conditioning and funneling users to hit certain moving, internally defined goals YMMV! 🤷‍♂️

Replies (2)

@mralancooper@hachyderm.io 2026-02-10 17:18

@toxi@mastodon.thi.ng @skry@mastodon.social I don't think you and I differ that much. I have always referred to my work as interaction design for the reason that "user experience" and "design thinking" were bowdlerizations of true IxD. This was done as a sop to management who dislike hard problems with time-consuming answers. Management repaid the favor by hiring "UX professionals" rather than interaction designers. Those UXers then exhibit all of the faults you describe. My earlier point was that the origin of this problem lay in the hands of management. They did not want to take the time and make the investment in good product design. They wanted quick and easy answers. The practitioner community gave them what they wanted in an act of self-debasement that was ultimately suicidal (something akin to refusing to unionize). Additionally, the growing consolidation and monopolization of the industry made it clear to business leaders that dark patterns and other bad behaviors generated more profit & revenue than good design and user satisfaction did. So, basically, everyone was miserable except the oligarchs. My company--being dedicated to quality--never got very big and because I spoke truth to people who mostly wanted easy affirmation of their opinions, never got very rich. The small cadre of practitioners who learned what good practice could accomplish never really moved the needle industry-wide. So, my opinion often centers on what I saw COULD be done, rather than on what WAS done. Such is life.

Open ##2680408
@skry@mastodon.social 2026-02-10 19:52

@toxi@mastodon.thi.ng @mralancooper@hachyderm.io As a usability pro, the only good answer to the conundrum above is “we can test that”. We would prototype the best ideas and test them, then cherry pick the parts that worked, make a new prototype and test that. Everyone sees what works and how task failure happens.

Open ##2680411