"It's good design to provide a worse experience to your customers?"
Define "worse". People will complain about doing all sorts of things that are better for their long-term interests.
If you're building a product that provides greater value to users with greater user engagement, then it's in everyone's best interest to promote user engagement, even if that means upsetting the people who would rather gain the benefits of your product without actually using it. You can't make all of the people happy all of the time.
> Define "worse". People will complain about doing all sorts of things that are better for their long-term interests.
It's telling that you're comfortable deciding on your user's behalf what is better for their long-term interests, in a way that just so happens to benefit your perceived interests.
> If you're building a product that provides greater value to users with greater user engagement, then it's in everyone's best interest to promote user engagement, even if that means upsetting the people who would rather gain the benefits of your product without actually using it. You can't make all of the people happy all of the time.
If you're building a product that provides greater value with greater engagement, then it's in everyone's best interest to drive engagement by giving users value that makes them want to be engaged, rather than playing tricks like annoying them with e-mails that contain no content.
This is quite ironic, since I'm pretty sure Apple is the king of deciding what's in their users' long-term interests in a way that's actually better for their interests.
Some examples: removal of the floppy drive from the iMac, removal of the optical drive from the Air, removal of "Save As" from MacOS, removal of Google Maps data from the native iOS maps app, "you're holding it wrong" response to the iPhone's antenna issue.
Just because you agree with these decisions or the mental gymnastics required to justify them, doesn't mean they can be ignored.
Define "worse". People will complain about doing all sorts of things that are better for their long-term interests.
If you're building a product that provides greater value to users with greater user engagement, then it's in everyone's best interest to promote user engagement, even if that means upsetting the people who would rather gain the benefits of your product without actually using it. You can't make all of the people happy all of the time.