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When does good User Experience become evil?
The Moral Ambiguity of User Experience
Where It All Started
When I started my placement with a user experience agency this year, my knowledge of UX was limited to the brief overview I had been given in the second year of my degree. I knew that as a designer, you should always aim to create a good user experience. I had encountered websites with awful user experience and wanted to make sure my designs never caused people the sort of frustration I had felt when using a confusing interface. On top of this, a good user experience is beneficial for businesses. It can increase user conversion by creating a frictionless user journey through the site or app. Increasing conversion increases profits. So the benefits are two-fold. The user is happy because they had a frictionless experience and the business is happy because it’s hitting its key performance indicators (KPI’s).
After a few months of working, I started to realise that the designs and suggestions we were making to our clients were almost always the same. We talked about having contact information always available to the user, as this increased trust in the company. Having reviews from past customers can help users feel well informed and therefore support their decision to purchase. These things all seemed logical and very straightforward. It was only after the head of UX shared an interesting infographic from digitalsynopsis.com that I started to realise that these ‘best practices’ in design, were actually based on psychological principles. And that we, as a team, we’re using psychology to influence users behaviour.
I was unsure of exactly how much these specific design patterns were influencing the user. However, I did know how much conversion usually increased after our suggestions and designs were implemented on a website. After all, our clients are the businesses, not the users, and our main goal is to help them increase conversion. At this point I put it out of my mind, it was an interesting topic but I didn’t feel the need to learn more about it.
When I came across an an interview by Adobe on Nir Eyal’s article ‘The Morality of Manipulation’ I started to think about it more. It opened my eyes to the idea that as a designer it is my job to consider the…
