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
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!
I didn’t wake up expecting I’d hate the most fashy one of the y combinator folks even more, but here we are