Tags: design

When I was braindumping my thoughts prompted by last week’s UX Fest conference, I wrote about dark patterns.

Well, actually I wrote about deceptive dark patterns. That was a deliberate choice.

The phrase “dark pattern” is …problematic. We really don’t need to be associating darkness with negativity any more than we already do in our language and culture.

This is something I discussed with Melissa Smith after her talk on this topic. The consensus in general seems to be that the terminology is far from ideal, but it’s a bit late to change it now (I’m sure if Harry were coining the term today, he would choose a different phrase).

The defining characteristic of a “dark” pattern is that intentionally deceptive. How about we shift the terminology to talk about deceptive patterns?

Now, I get that inertia is a powerful force and it would be confusing to try do to a find-and-replace on all the resources that already exist on documenting “dark” patterns. So here’s a compromise:

From here on out, let’s start using the adjective “deceptive” in addition to the existing adjective “dark.” That’s what I did in my blog post. I only used the phrase “deceptive dark patterns.”

If we do that consistently, then after a while we’ll be able to drop one of those adjectives—“dark”—and refer to “deceptive patterns.”

Personally I’d love it if we could change the terminology overnight—and I’m quite heartened by the speed at which we changed our Github branches from “master” to “main”—but being pragmatic, I think this approach stands a greater chance of success.

Who’s with me?

You can listen to an audio version of Weighing up UX.

This is the month of UX Fest 2021—this year’s online version of UX London. The festival continues with masterclasses every Tuesday in June and a festival day of talks every Thursday (tickets for both are still available). But it all kicked off with the conference part last week: three back-to-back days of talks.

I have the great pleasure of hosting the event so not only do I get to see a whole lot of great talks, I also get to quiz the speakers afterwards.

Right from day one, a theme emerged that continued throughout the conference and I suspect will continue for the rest of the festival too. That topic was metrics. Kind of.

See, metrics come up when we’re talking about A/B testing, growth design, and all of the practices that help designers get their seat at the table (to use the well-worn cliché). But while metrics are very useful for measuring design’s benefit to the business, they’re not really cut out for measuring user experience.

People have tried to quantify user experience benefits using measurements like NetPromoter Score, which is about as useful as reading tea leaves or chicken entrails.

So we tend to equate user experience gains with business gains. That makes sense. Happy users should be good for business. That’s a reasonable hypothesis. But it gets tricky when you need to make the case for improving the user experience if you can’t tie it directly to some business metric. That’s when we run into the McNamara fallacy:

Making a decision based solely on quantitative observations (or metrics) and ignoring all others.

The way out of this quantitative blind spot is to use qualitative research. But another theme of UX Fest was just how woefully under-represented researchers are in most organisations. And even when you’ve gone and talked to users and you’ve got their stories, you still need to play that back in a way that makes sense to the business folks. These are stories. They don’t lend themselves to being converted into charts’n’graphs.

And so we tend to fall back on more traditional metrics, based on that assumption that what’s good for user experience is good for business. But it’s a short step from making that equivalency to flipping the equation: what’s good for the business must, by definition, be good user experience. That’s where things get dicey.

Broadly speaking, the talks at UX Fest could be put into two categories. You’ve got talks covering practical subjects like product design, content design, research, growth design, and so on. Then you’ve got the higher-level, almost philosophical talks looking at the big picture and questioning the industry’s direction of travel.

The tension between these two categories was the highlight of the conference for me. It worked particularly well when there were back-to-back talks (and joint Q&A) featuring a hands-on case study that successfully pushed the needle on business metrics followed by a more cautionary talk asking whether our priorities are out of whack.

For example, there was a case study on growth design, which emphasised the importance of A/B testing for validation, immediately followed by a talk on deceptive dark patterns. Now, I suspect that if you were to A/B test a deceptive dark pattern, the test would validate its use (at least in the short term). It’s no coincidence that a company like Booking.com, which lives by the A/B sword, is also one of the companies sued for using distressing design patterns.

Using A/B tests alone is like using a loaded weapon without supervision. They only tell you what people do. And again, the solution is to make sure you’re also doing qualitative research—that’s how you find out why people are doing what they do.

But as I’ve pondered the lessons from last week’s conference, I’ve come to realise that there’s also a danger of focusing purely on the user experience. Hear me out…

At one point, the question came up as to whether deceptive dark patterns were ever justified. What if it’s for a good cause? What if the deceptive dark pattern is being used by an organisation actively campaigning to do good in the world?

In my mind, there was no question. A deceptive dark pattern is wrong, no matter who’s doing it.

(There’s also the problem of organisations that think they’re doing good in the world: I’m sure that every talented engineer that worked on Google AMP honestly believed they were acting in the best interests of the open web even as they worked to destroy it.)

Where it gets interesting is when you flip the question around.

Suppose you’re a designer working at an organisation that is decidedly not a force for good in the world. Say you’re working at Facebook, a company that prioritises data-gathering and engagement so much that they’ll tolerate insurrectionists and even genocidal movements. Now let’s say there’s talk in your department of implementing a deceptive dark pattern that will drive user engagement. But you, being a good designer who fights for the user, take a stand against this and you successfully find a way to ensure that Facebook doesn’t deploy that deceptive dark pattern.

Yay?

Does that count as being a good user experience designer? Yes, you’ve done good work at the coalface. But the overall business goal is like a deceptive dark pattern that’s so big you can’t take it in. Is it even possible to do “good” design when you’re inside the belly of that beast?

Facebook is a relatively straightforward case. Anyone who’s still working at Facebook can’t claim ignorance. They know full well where that company’s priorities lie. No doubt they sleep at night by convincing themselves they can accomplish more from the inside than without. But what about companies that exist in the grey area of being imperfect? Frankly, what about any company that relies on surveillance capitalism for its success? Is it still possible to do “good” design there?

There are no easy answers and that’s why it so often comes down to individual choice. I know many designers who wouldn’t work at certain companies …but they also wouldn’t judge anyone else who chooses to work at those companies.

At Clearleft, every staff member has two levels of veto on client work. You can say “I’m not comfortable working on this”, in which case, the work may still happen but we’ll make sure the resourcing works out so you don’t have anything to do with that project. Or you can say “I’m not comfortable with Clearleft working on this”, in which case the work won’t go ahead (this usually happens before we even get to the pitching stage although there have been one or two examples over the years where we’ve pulled out of the running for certain projects).

Going back to the question of whether it’s ever okay to use a deceptive dark pattern, here’s what I think…

It makes no difference whether it’s implemented by ProPublica or Breitbart; using a deceptive dark pattern is wrong.

But there is a world of difference in being a designer who works at ProPublica and being a designer who works at Breitbart.

That’s what I’m getting at when I say there’s a danger to focusing purely on user experience. That focus can be used as a way of avoiding responsibility for the larger business goals. Then designers are like the soldiers on the eve of battle in Henry V:

For we know enough, if we know we are the kings subjects: if his cause be wrong, our obedience to the king wipes the crime of it out of us.

On June 3rd, 2001, I launched thesession.org. Happy twentieth birthday to The Session!

Although actually The Session predates its domain name by a few years. It originally launched as a subdirectory here on adactio.com with the unwieldly URL /session/session.shtml

That incarnation was more like a blog. I’d post the sheetmusic for a tune every week with a little bit of commentary. That worked fine until I started to run out of tunes. That’s when I made the site dynamic. People could sign up to become members of The Session. Then they could also post tunes and add comments.

That’s the version that is two decades old today.

The last really big change to the site happened in 2012. As well as a complete redesign, I introduced lots of new functionality.

In all of those incarnations, the layout was fluid …long before responsive design swept the web. That was quite unusual twenty years ago, but I knew it was the webby thing to do.

What’s also unusual is just keeping a website going for twenty years. Keeping a community website going for twenty years is practically unheard of. I’m very proud of The Session. Although, really, I’m just the caretaker. The site would literally be nothing without all the contributions that people have made.

I’ve more or less adopted a Wikipedia model for contributions. Some things, like tune settings, can only be edited by the person who submitted it But other things, like the track listing of a recording, or the details of a session, can be edited by any member of the site. And of course anyone can add a comment to any listing. There’s a certain amount of risk to that, but after testing it for two decades, it’s working out very nicely.

What’s really nice is when I get to meet my fellow members of The Session in meatspace. If I’m travelling somewhere and there’s a local session happening, I always get a warm welcome. I mean, presumably everyone would get a warm welcome at those sessions, but I’ve also had my fair share of free pints thanks to The Session.

I feel a great sense of responsibility with The Session. But it’s not a weight of responsibility—the way that many open source maintainers describe how their unpaid labour feels. The sense of responsibility I feel drives me. It gives me a sense of purpose.

The Session is older than any client work I’ve ever done. It’s older than any books I’ve written. It’s even older than Clearleft by a few years. Heck, it’s even older than this blog (just).

I’m 50 years old now. The Session is 20 years old. That’s quite a chunk of my life. I think it’s fair to say that it’s part of me now. Of all the things I’ve made so far in my life, The Session is the one I’m proudest of.

I’m looking forward to stewarding the site through the next twenty years.

A little while back, I wrote about how much I like the job description of a design engineer. I still have issues with the “engineer” part, but overall it’s a great way to describe a front-end developer who works on the front of the front end: the outputs that end users interact with: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. If it’s delivered in a web browser, then it’s design engineering.

Perhaps you also prefer the front of the front end to the back of the front end. Perhaps you also like to spend your time thinking about resilience, performance, and accessibility rather than build pipelines and frameworks. Perhaps you’d like to work with like-minded people.

Clearleft is hiring a midweight design engineer. Perhaps it’s you.

If you’d like to use your development talents in the service of good design, you should apply. And remember, you’d be working for yourself: Clearleft is an employee-owned agency.

You don’t have to be based in Brighton. You can work remotely, although we’re expecting that a monthly face-to-face gathering will become the norm after The Situation ends. So if you’re based somewhere like London, that would work out nicely. That said, if you’re based somewhere like London, this might also be the ideal opportunity to make a move to the seaside.

You do have to be eligible to work in the UK. Alas, that pool has shrunk somewhat. Thanks, Brexit.

Perhaps you think you’re not qualified. Apply anyway. You’ve got nothing to lose.

Perhaps this role isn’t for you, but you know someone who might fit the bill. Please tell them. Spread the word.

We’d especially love to hear from people under-represented in design and technology.

Come and work with us.

There is much introspection and navel-gazing in the world of user experience design. More than usual, I mean.

Jesse James Garrett recently said:

I don’t think I know anyone that’s been in UX more than a decade who’s happy with how it’s going.

In a recent issue of the dConstruct newsletter—which you really should subscribe to—I pointed to three bowls of porridge left out by three different ursine experience designers.

Mark Hurst wrote Why I’m losing faith in UX. Too hot!

Scott Berkun wrote How To Put Faith in Design. Too cold!

Peter Merholz wrote Waking up from the dream of UX. Just right!

As an aside, does it bother anyone else that the Goldilocks story violates the laws of thermodynamics?

Anyway, this hand-wringing around the role of UX today seemed like a suitably hot topic for one of our regular roundtable chats at Clearleft. We invited Peter along too and he was kind enough to give us his time.

It was a fun discussion. Peter pointed out that whenever he hears an older designer bemoaning the current state of design, he has to wonder what’s happened in their lives to make them feel that way (it’s like when people complain about the music of today and how it’s not as good as the music of whatever time period I was a teenager). And let’s face it, the good ol’ days weren’t so good for everyone. It was overwhelmingly dominated by privileged white dudes. The more that changes, the better …and it needs to change far, far more.

There was a general agreement that the current gnashing of teeth isn’t unique to UX. It’s something that just about any discipline will inevitably go through. Peter’s epiphany was to compare it with the hand-wringing around Agile:

The frustration exhibited with the “dream of UX” is (I think) identical to the frustration the original Agile community sees with how it has been industrialized (koff-SAFe-koff).

Perhaps the industrialisation of what once a cottage industry is the price of success. But that’s not necessarily bad, as long as you industrialise the right things. If UX has become the churning out of wireframes at scale, then something has gone very wrong. If UX has become the implementation of dark patterns at scale, then something has gone very wrong.

In some organisations, perhaps that’s exactly what’s happened. In which case, I can totally understand the disillusionment. But in other places, I see the opposite happening. I see UX designers bringing questions of ethics to the forefront. I see UX designers—dare I say it?—having their proverbial seat at the table.

Chris went so far as to claim that we are in fact in a golden age of user experience design. Controversial! But think about it, he said. Over the next few days, pay attention to interactions you have with technology, and consider the thought and skill that has gone into them.

I had Chris’s provocation in mind when I wrote about booking my vaccination appointment:

I just need to get in, accomplish my task, and get out again. This is where the World Wide Web shines.

Maybe Chris is right. Maybe the golden age of UX is here. It’s just not evenly distributed. Yet.

It’s an interesting time for the discipline of user experience design. I’ve always maintained that the best way to get a temperature check for your chosen field is to go to a really good conference. If you’re a UX designer and you want to understand the state of the UX nation, you should get a ticket for the online UX Fest in June. See you there!