
UX Bloat Nonsense - fookyong
http://yongfook.com/ux-bloat-nonsense
======
al_james
Quote of the day: "This is where you stop looking at your startup as a self-
masturbatory piece of UX genius and start looking at it as a business"

There was an article on HN the other day about expedia increasing revenue by
removing a confusing form field on their booking process. I think the lesson
is that users find different things confusing / annoying than UX experts (or
web designers). UX experts ramble on about 'clutter' and simplification,
however, in my experience, everyday people have a high tolerance to clutter as
long as its the right clutter and that clutter is easy to understand (or is a
really great deal). At the end of the day, put your faith in data driven split
testing, not UX zealots.

~~~
jasonlotito
And anecdote about my first experience with the intricacies of design. A
company I worked for about 10 years ago was building an application that had
lots of graphic elements to it. One of the colours they were using was red. It
was being used throughout the application in bold ways. It looked really nice
and slick. However, when we went to show it off to the partners, they were
taken aback. See, they were from Taiwan (or some other nation in that region,
I forget which), and they were almost insulted by the colour red. Using red
was frowned upon for reasons I can't remember, but I believe it had to do with
poor luck. Basically, it was bad to use the red.

It was at that moment that I realised that UX is not as easy as making it
simple to use. UX isn't build around rules, but reason built on testing.

~~~
asolove
Do you perhaps have this backwards? In the West, the common association green-
good, red-bad is pretty common. In Asia it is usually reversed: green-bad,
red-good.

~~~
jasonlotito
Maybe. There was a lot of green in the application as well, so that could very
well have been it. It was 10 years ago, and I wasn't involved in the design.
Whatever the color, it looked good design wise, but we had to change the color
because of the culture.

------
JoelSutherland
To counter his disclaimer, Japanese and American web sites are very different:

[http://www.zeldman.com/2010/07/25/the-puzzle-of-japanese-
web...](http://www.zeldman.com/2010/07/25/the-puzzle-of-japanese-web-design/)

This doesn't address his core point. I've always believed that users will
tolerate a surprising amount of crap to get what they want. Godaddy isn't
exactly suffering.

~~~
fookyong
To give some context, we certainly don't prescribe to the cluttered aesthetic
of some other Japanese ecommerce sites. We are much more about letting the
product do the talking:

Screenshot:
[http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1205/5145308747_25d89aa4e5_o....](http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1205/5145308747_25d89aa4e5_o.png)

~~~
aikinai
I was going to say the exact same thing as JoelSutherland, so I'm glad you
posted a screenshot of your site.

And now I want to say thank you so much for bringing some taste to the
Japanese internet, especially the Japanese fashion/shopping internet.

------
adamjernst
Every piece of "bloat" has two consequences: it annoys some users -- possibly
to the point of scaring them away from the service -- and it convinces some
other users to do something profitable.

The fact is, savvy users are much more likely to stick with a bloated system
than we like to imagine. I still buy tickets from Orbitz, despite the pages of
upsells I have to click through, because I have an account there and I know
their quality of customer service.

------
raganwald
There's good stuff here, but one worry... The stuff about fading customer
acquisition and needing to upsell existing customers more... This sounds an
awful lot like the trap that many "mature" companies get into where growth
levels off and they switch their focus to squeezing the maximum amount of
revenue out of existing customers.

There's a tradeoff, and all of the business practices involved in squeezing
more out of the "captive audience"--pricing, UX, everything--drive some
customers away and alienate other prospective customers.

This drives the need to squeeze even more out of captive customers, and the
business and their most entrenched customers begin to circle each other in a
deadly embrace.

The author isn't advocating any of this, of course, it's a post about UX. But
I did get that feeling like the argument was part and parcel of this dilemma
facing businesses as they mature.

------
weego
I'm not really sure where this is coming from, but really any sensible UX
person will say "good UX is requiring the least out of users to allow them to
achieve their goals while having enough to deliver your business objectives"
and not "less is better".

Obviously there is no perfect balance for any market and bloat is a completely
subjective value to tag on to anything. Bloated in relation to what? In what
context?

For a site that sold £1000 shoes Amazon's UX principles would be a crazy
strategy to implement, but if you apply the same idea visa-versa I imagine
that Amazon would be able to measure lost revenue in the tens of millions. But
there will be an underlying essential UX requirement because both sites are
based on the principle that people have actively chosen to look for an item,
and by making that decision they are, more than likely, willing to put up with
more than, say, someone looking around a support site for help with their
printer drivers.

------
danilocampos
> This is where you stop looking at your startup as a self-masturbatory piece
> of UX genius and start looking at it as a business.

What crap. User experience and business aren't mutually exclusive. You have a
choice: make money as a result of making your users happy or make money at the
expense of their happiness. It's as simple as that. As your decisions compound
on one side of that balance or the other, the shape of your brand begins to
emerge.

My preference, continually, is to work with companies who optimize their
business on the side of making me happy. They are playing a long term game
that I respect, and which respects me. On the other side, that's the kind of
user experience I want to create myself.

It's a bit like arguing that you can be a successful organism by being an
asshole. Its definitely true that you can. But I posit you can be a successful
organism by being good to people, and that the upshot is that it's a lot more
fun.

Edit: And, of course, this is an _exhausting_ trope, but do I need to mention
that one of the largest companies in America makes great user experience the
acid test for their business decisions?

~~~
astine
"User experience and business aren't mutually exclusive."

They are not necessarily always aligned either and you may have to choose at
one point. UX is very subjective and taking a dogmatic approach to it and how
it affects your business isn't a very good idea.

~~~
bradleyjoyce
Since when is having a poor user experience good for business.

I would also say that having a poor User Interface and poor User Experience is
doubly bad for business.

I'm reminded of the recent article posted here to HN about Expedia removing a
single field from their checkout form that resulted in $12MM to the bottom
line.

Better UI + Better UX = Better Business

~~~
dkarl
_Since when is having a poor user experience good for business._

Would you like fries with that?

Article continues on page C8.

The DX is a fine automobile, sir, but the LX offers a lot of extra safety
features, which I'm sure mean a lot to you with such a charming wife. (Are you
newlyweds, ma'am?) Traction control, ankle air bags, anti-impact rustproofing,
everything a _lucky_ man like you needs to safeguard his precious cargo. And
the premium for these features is really not much compared to what you have to
lose.

Leave this box checked to receive product information and spam.

The product is configured using a bespoke business process description
language that describes your configuration in intuitive problem-domain terms.
It's so simple and intuitive, a non-technical person can understand this fake
example! The support contract specifies that our consultants will be available
at reasonable rates to attempt to train your business analysts to be
programmers, and then to attempt to train your IT staff to write code in what
turns out to be an arcane '80s-era language with dozens of undocumented bugs
and sharp edges, and then to do all the work themselves at great cost since
nobody can actually be trained to configure the product in any reasonable
amount of time.

~~~
bradleyjoyce
touché (even though all your examples are in un-related industries) :-)

------
Pewpewarrows
You can certainly have a successful business without a proper UI/UX. Don't
think for a second, though, that a good UX won't significantly improve your
company. Facebook itself started as being the clean, user-friendly alternative
to competitors like Friendster and Myspace.

------
trustfundbaby
I don't think upselling has to be a negative thing ... if you put a bit of
thought into it and are actually trying to help the user, it definitely could
be a big plus.

I love when I put a book or some Music in my cart at Amazon and it shows me
related items I could be interested in ... I think almost 25-50% of the stuff
I've bought from there has been as a result of this.

What I do find rather retch-inducing is this idea that you as a business are
'leaving money on the table' by not trying to upsell me, it shows that you see
me as a wallet and could care less whether I find some awesome book or new
music that makes my week.

I would never want any business I run/start to end up like that.

ever.

------
SimonPStevens
It's possible to both up sell and have a good UX. Provided the upsell UI is
sensibly restricted, unobtrusive and actually related.

Sometimes up selling can actually helpful. I brought a camera recently because
I dropped my last one and smashed the screen. After adding it the basket the
site listed a few related accessories which included a leather case. Following
my recent breakage it's exactly what I needed, but for some reason I had
totally forgotten. As it happens I searched a bit a got a different case, but
it was their upsell prompt that reminded me I needed one.

------
kls
_I'm a director of one of Japan's largest online fashion flash-sales sites. I
have a vague idea of what I'm talking about when it comes to e-commerce._

Ahh that familiar smell of insecurity fills the air once again.

------
lubujackson
Thank god someone finally says something about this. If I see another one of
those "73 Beautiful Web Designs" with all the same layout and content type
(simple blog) I'm going to go nuts.

------
Abid
What's with the disagreements? His argument is against the claim that
"'simple' is unilaterally better for your business." He's entirely correct. At
some point, you'll have to go out and get new customers if you want continued
growth. Public companies - the commerce variety he mentions specially - are
implicitly required by shareholders to show such growth if they are to remain
relevant. And so, you'll have to find ways to make that happen. Upselling
seems to be one such source.

------
goodside
The trick to being nice is that you have to do it even when it seems like a
bad idea. This isn't because suffering losses is virtuous, it's because you
lack the ability to tell when it's safe to be mean. If you have an
extraordinary ability to predict user backlash, which you may well have, by
all means go ahead and piss some people off. But don't scold people for having
the humility to know that they personally can't get away with it.

------
ThomPete
The major problem with UX is that many people from the UX industry are
academics not designers.

This creates an unhealthy focus on users and too little focus on customers.

For anyone interested I wrote a lengthy essay speaking of some of the same
things.

[http://000fff.org/getting-to-the-customer-why-everything-
you...](http://000fff.org/getting-to-the-customer-why-everything-you-think-
about-user-centred-design-is-wrong/)

------
paraschopra
There is no right answer to this. As hinted in the article, you can have a
good business with a cluttered UX (hello Ebay) and you can have a good UX with
a bad business model (hello thousands of web2.0 companies). Or, you can have
the best of both worlds: good UX + good business (hello Apple).

I don't see UX and Business as mutually exclusive.

------
lukestevens
Great post, simple explanation: UX people don't measure profit. That's a huge
disconnect that leads to these weird professional silos between UX and
marketing/ecommerce. The sooner UX people start measuring profit -- like they
should -- the better.

------
shalmanese
[http://www.quora.com/What-should-you-do-if-your-business-
goa...](http://www.quora.com/What-should-you-do-if-your-business-goals-and-
product-goals-are-in-conflict)

------
pornel
Sometimes opposite of good UX brings (at least short-term) revenue:

<http://wiki.darkpatterns.org/wiki/Home>

------
DanielBMarkham
I hate to be terse and snarky, but I think the entire counter-argument boils
down to "GoDaddy.com"

Go try to buy a domain from GoDaddy. See where all of this up-selling gets
you.

This is a simple issue, he is correct. The marketplace will decide.

Strange that this would show up today, I blogged about this trade-off between
user annoyance and profit just yesterday:
[http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2010/11/good-and-
evil...](http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2010/11/good-and-evil-i.php)

