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The paucity of good design
We should be living in a golden era of software design. We’re not.
User experience (UX) is everywhere. Big companies invest in UX researchers, designers, writers and usability sessions. These new professions have spawned their own genre of books, blogs and conferences (or more cynically, BS). Nonetheless, modern products are mostly rubbish. Most modern, “well designed” products suffer from 3 main problems:
- Everything feels like an engagement trap regardless of whether that’s the right business model.
- The UX industry assumes everyone is an idiot, which makes products harder to use.
- Even on new and expensive devices, software feels slow and buggy.
The engagement trap
New software is just a reworking of Nir Eyal’s Hooked. The engagement model is too hard to pass up for most companies: offer free or artificially cheap content and software. Monetize attention.
If this led to a two-tiered system of low-quality content for the masses and higher quality products for purchase, fine. I could live with that. Instead, the engagement business model is creeping up.
I’ve long wanted to subscribe to the New York Times and Economist. But an expensive subscription doesn’t opt me out of their vast tracking and ad tech juggernaut. You’re also shunted into an auto-renewal scheme that’s a real hassle to cancel.
I buy Kindle books with the expectation that I can read them in peace. The iPad Kindle app has gone from a lovely reading experience to having in-app notifications that can’t be disabled with constant nags to buy more books.
This greets me when I open the Kindle app:
These notifications are impossible to disable:
Fair enough. Amazon is a slimy company. Switching to Apple Books should get me out of this, right?
Not so fast. While the experience is better, the store is never completely out of sight.
