
Subverted Design - kawera
http://joelcalifa.com/blog/subverted-design/
======
bhauer
I don't use Facebook, so I have never seen that "Are you sure you want to
deactivate your account" dialog before. That is truly a marvel of
psychological warfare aimed at the user.

I am in awe over the sentence claiming, "Your ... friends will no longer be
able to keep in touch with you." This gives me—a non-user—some insight into a
phenomenon I see in Facebook users: a belief that there are no other forms of
communication left in this world. Facebook inculcates and continuously
reinforces a notion that other communication media are not only uncool, but
essentially don't exist. To Facebook and its true-believer users, there is no
way to email a friend. No way to write a personal blog entry. No way to make a
phone call. No way to use any other means of communication. It's Facebook or
living in a cave. You don't want to live in a cave, do you?

Even the less true-believer users will be conflicted about their inability to
stay up to date with their 1,700 Facebook friends, apparently unwilling to
recognize that no one has 1,700 friends and that life can be very fulfilling
without hearing trivial updates from 1,650 people you had a passing contact
with some time in your life.

But whatever. I don't mean to argue here that anyone should stop using
Facebook. I'm merely recognizing that cancellation dialog as a triumph of user
hostility.

------
kartan
Companies that play nice can't compete with companies that abuse our human
biases and flaws. There is a niche for customers that care, and actually get
annoyed by this practices, but it's not representative of the global
population.

Only a combination of laws that forbid the worst practices and better
education for citizens can solve the problem. Because, as for today, improving
our brains to remove our cognitive failures it's not an option. Animals
evolved tricks, hacks and heuristics to deal with world rules that are
completely subverted in the on-line world.

> If you look at a Product Manager’s performance reviews, you’ll see they’re
> often inextricably tied to metrics. Make this number go up. Now make it go
> up more. Make that other one go down. Ok, here’s your bonus.

This goes way deeper than UX design. A good read on the topic may be
[https://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/11/04/forget-more-
re...](https://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/11/04/forget-more-regulation-
make-corporations-serve-public-interest) . We need to rethink corporations,
that will allow all citizens to have a moral behaviour at their jobs. Instead
to have to wait to become "... immensely valued within the tech world. ...
well compensated." to be able to afford it.

~~~
angarg12
This can be seen very clearly in videogame monetization.

We love to hate microtransactions, timers and loot boxes, but the fact is that
those techniques won the war long ago. Some games have tried to be the 'White
Knights' of monetization, but those who have succeed are far and wide.

The only reason why there has been significant backslash recently is because
producers noticed that they could get away with it and kept pushing the
boundaries until it became so outrageous that it elicited a response.
Personally I stay cynical; it remains to be seen if there will be a change in
trends in the industry in response to player's backslash.

------
jrochkind1
“We, the undersigned, are graphic designers, photographers and students who
have been brought up in a world in which the techniques and apparatus of
advertising have persistently been presented to us as the most lucrative,
effective, and desirable means of using our talents…

…We think there are other things more worth using our skills and experience
on…

…We do not advocate the abolition of high pressure consumer advertising: this
is not feasible. Nor do we want to take any of the fun out of life. But we are
proposing a reversal of priorities in favour of the more useful and more
lasting forms of communication. We hope that our society will tire of gimmick
merchants, status salesmen and hidden persuaders, and that the prior call on
our skills will be for worthwhile purposes. With this in mind, we propose to
share our experience and opinions, and to make them available to colleagues,
students and others who may be interested.”

— First Things First, 1964

[http://www.designishistory.com/1960/first-things-
first/](http://www.designishistory.com/1960/first-things-first/)

------
csbartus
Right in time. And not just the design is broken but also the code.

Lately I've been fascinated by that all new apps and services I've started to
use are all broken.

A first surprise was Instagram has no iPad app just mobile; Pinterest doesn’t
let you upgrade your profile pic on web just inside the app; the Dribbble app
doesn’t let you update your profile nor upload posts; Pinterest can’t take a
https url in your profile just www; when adding a photo on Behance the photos
from the iPad folder are doubled; and so on.

My first thought was: we live in the era of design, there are billion dollar
companies, yet the experience they offer sucks.

And the second: what the hell those designers and developers do out there? Is
everybody in a bubble in the valley?

~~~
Psilidae
It thoroughly confuses me how every company seems to want to reach as many
customers as possible yet most would rather invest time on maintaining
multiple platform-specific native apps rather than have one good web app.

It's just splitting design resources, engineering and testing resources, and
shutting out customers who actually want to use the service but don't have the
system on which they chose to focus.

------
uxcolumbo
More examples here:

[https://darkpatterns.org](https://darkpatterns.org)

------
evrydayhustling
These are great examples of dark patterns, but the conclusion that designers
should appoint themselves user representatives is dangerous and self-
aggrandizing.

 _Companies_ should be user focused... if your business or product metrics
aren't aligned with user value, try to fix that or leave. Declaring yourself
liberated from metrics, planning processes, or other structure because you are
the user advocate at the table is _so_ unproductive -- whether it comes from a
designer, a sales person, or anyone else.

At the very very least, if you are going to claim authority for advocating for
the user, you should be held to the same standards as PMs (should be): do user
research, be data driven, and make the outcomes of your research useful to
other people in doing their jobs.

------
abritinthebay
I agree with the _concept_ here, but some of the examples are strange.

The AirBnB and Etsy ones in particular - they show there is demand and a
limited number of spaces/inventory/etc. That's useful information to me!

How annoying is it to find the perfect place to stay but when you go to book
they're sold out... and you just missed the last spot? Same thing for buying
something.

Now you can argue they could communicate those differently but it's a _good
feature_.

~~~
toufka
Read the source code - most of those dialogues ("only X left!") are hard-coded
random numbers and are in no way correlated to actual inventory or demand
information. Said another way, they are lies [1].

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15297915&goto=news](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15297915&goto=news)

~~~
abritinthebay
That’s an implementation detail tho - not a design one. So my point about the
complaint still stands.

~~~
design
It speaks to the intention behind the design, which apparently isn't user
value.

------
chris__butters
It gets worse with designing for marketing campaigns, the amount of anti-
patterns like confirm shaming is ridiculous. There needs to be better
guidelines and enforcement to stop companies from using psychological "hacks"
to get into our minds to trick us into doing something.

------
alanfalcon
We designers must all be like Tron: fight for the user!

------
rglover
H/t to Joel for writing this as well as posting it on his own site.

~~~
design
Many thanks :) I'm glad it resonated.

------
Shoothe
Excellent article and something to really think about.

------
lbotos
I thought this was going to be about the search for LA's new designer:

[https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jan/19/los-
angeles-...](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jan/19/los-angeles-
advert-for-graphic-designer-draws-surprise-attention)

