Kill the "user": Musings of a disillusioned technologist
15 comments
·February 5, 2025rogual
dist-epoch
> At the core of Photoshop is a consistent, powerful, tightly-coded, thoughtfully-designed set of tools for creating and manipulating images. Once you learn the conventions, it feels like the computer is on your side, you're free, you're force-multiplied, your thoughts are manifest.
It's funny that today there still isn't a free image editing software comparable with the Photoshop from 2000. Krita is close, but still cumbersome to use.
freetonik
I've written a short blog post "User is Dead" a while ago https://rakhim.org/user-is-dead/
> User is dead. User remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the developers, the designers, the growth hackers? What was holiest and the final judge of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our A/B-tests and new features. Who will wipe this blood off us? What garbage collector is there for us to clean ourselves? What conference of atonement, what disruptive technology, what sacred meeting shall we have to invent?
Tasteless, but I felt, and still feel, like the notion of a user is truly lost. Somehow, the only technology which technically allows direct 1-many relationships between a small group of builders and a vast number of users, managed to create an industry which actively prevents and disincentives such relationships.
rjbwork
>Somehow, the only technology which technically allows direct 1-many relationships between a small group of builders and a vast number of users, managed to create an industry which actively prevents and disincentives such relationships.
Bean counters and social status games players came in and spewed money everywhere and said to the engineers: "do your engineer thing, we'll handle the money and the people".
tobr
I got into interaction design and UX design because so much of it was so bad. At some point along the way it seems we got too good at it. Many of the points in this article frankly makes me feel somewhat embarrassed to describe myself as a UX designer. Maybe I should start to think of myself as a… personal computing designer? small software designer? dignity designer? (No, surely designing ”dignity” is somehow an even worse pretense than designing ”experience”.)
gyomu
We lost the plot when interface design became UI/UX (and all the associated modern variants on this terminology).
The goal of an interface is clear: it is how a human interacts with a machine. Buttons, dials, latches, sliders - those are interfaces. We can reason about them, make taxonomies, determine what operations they are appropriate for (or not), and so on.
“User experience” tries to capture everything into a nebulous haze that exists not to serve a human with a task to accomplish that a tool will assist with - but a business and how it will capture “users” and guide them on the “journey” it deems most appropriate to reach its sales goals.
Design students won’t be able to formulate a cogent thought on what the properties of appropriate interface feedback are, but they’ll be great at cranking out “personas” and sleek landing pages that enumerate marketing points. Something’s rotten.
ben_w
> No, surely designing ”dignity” is somehow an even worse pretense than designing ”experience”
Much.
"Dignity" seems be be mostly used when it is missing — without any dignity, lost their dignity, helping others regain their dignity…
And Dignitas.
"Experience" seems still positive to me, at worst a bit cliché.
atoav
UX can be used and abused. The biggest sin is that instead of thinking about the big picture of someone sitting at their computer and trying to do a thing that requires multiple programs to work together, bad UX designers assume they start from scratch without any existing environment and have only to anseer to their own project.
Imagine if something like Command line pipes would exist for GUI applications and then ask yourself why it does not (the closest thing might be copy/paste).
If you as an UX designer try to empower your users and do that in a way that does not break all existing convention without a good reason, you will be fine.
A industrial designer can design medical injection systems for drug cartels with the goal of catching more sheep or for a medical non-profit with the goal of making actual medical help cheaper — design is not the problem, the business interest it might be used for is.
Designers aren't always in the position to make their decisions freely, but you can put your weight behind the right side and everybody in here will appreciate you for doing so.
kevingadd
I think this string of questions from the middle of the post really gets to the heart of it:
⁃ Does the “user” feel respected by the software?
⁃ How does this software affect the mental health of the “user”?
⁃ How does the software fit into the rest of the “users” lifestyle?
⁃ Does this software help the “user” perform a task/entertain them without coercion?
A lot of modern software looks really bad if evaluated through the lens of these four questions.
dist-epoch
> How does this software affect the mental health of the “user”?
We need to talk about Jira...
atoav
This is why I predominantly use CLI tools where it makes sense. Two CLI tools are more alike than two AI tools, theh tend to respect the user and their intelligence more, there is no sign in, it works together with other software and it will work for decades.
I'd love if GUI applications were similarly stringent or even had the goal of creating an ecosystem, but they don't, they are competing against each others trying to grasp user attention, bending them to their wills, locking them in. Not all of them of course, but the mental overhead with CLI is much smaller.
hello_computer
Yes cyborg. The more you unite with the machine, the more you will be used like one. There are no free rides. No calculating or politicking your way out of the metaphysical toll.
Nasrudith
There were wiffs of it before, but I immediately knew the weiter was full of crap once he whipped out the communist-conspiratorial view of Taylorism. Talk about a red-flag!
You can see this in venerable software which has lived through the times of "designing for the user" and is still being developed in the times of "designing for the business".
Take Photoshop, for example, first released in 1987, last updated yesterday.
Use it and you can see the two ages like rings in a tree. At the core of Photoshop is a consistent, powerful, tightly-coded, thoughtfully-designed set of tools for creating and manipulating images. Once you learn the conventions, it feels like the computer is on your side, you're free, you're force-multiplied, your thoughts are manifest. It's really special and you can see there's a good reason this program achieved total dominance in its field.
And you can also see, right beside and on top of and surrounding that, a more recent accretion disc of features with a more modern sensibility. Dialogs that render in web-views and take seconds to open. "Sign in". Literal advertisements in the UI, styled to look like tooltips. You know the thing that pops up to tell you about the pen tool? There's an identically-styled one that pops up to tell you about Adobe Whatever, only $19.99/mo. And then of course there's Creative Cloud itself.
This is evident in Mac OS X, too, another piece of software that spans both eras. You've still got a lot of the stuff from the 2000s, with 2000s goals like being consistent and fast and nice to use. A lot of that is still there, perhaps because Apple's current crop of engineers can't really touch it without breaking it (not that it always stops them, but some of them know their limits). And right next to and amongst that, you've got ads in System Settings, you've got Apple News, you've got Apple Books that breaks every UI convention it can find.
There are many such cases. Windows, too. And MS Word.
One day, all these products will be gone, and people will only know MBA-ware. They won't know it can be any other way.