(2023-06-27) The Aura Of Care

Stephen Farrugia: The Aura of Care. False Legitimacy Gained Through UX. In November 2022, Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb, began a tweet thread with “I’ve heard you loud and clear” in response to a customer backlash over the way they hid additional costs till the checkout page

The dark pattern was no mistake. Intentionally designed to deceive and benefit from excited holiday planners and their potential to give in to the sunk cost fallacy.

The decision to fix it only came after the balance of business value and public relations started to tip the wrong way. Chesky presented himself as a model CEO doing right by his customers as if he wasn’t responsible for wronging them in the first place

People bought it too. He demonstrated how bright a performative aura of care can shine to hide questions about the business activity or even questions about the business’s legitimacy to exist.

In April of 2022 Twitter added the option to write short descriptions of the images you attach to a tweet. Those descriptions help vision-impaired people that rely on synthesised voice software to read out the contents of a page. The thing about image descriptions is that the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) standards for HTML—the document structure language of the web (and Twitter)—has required them since 1999.

If we look at industry-wide examples we can see how intrinsic care replaced with business incentives leads to low quality black-and-white photocopies of the original ideas. Everything becomes optimised to meet business requirements and any surviving sense of care that remains is there by chance.

responsiveness in commercial web apps focuses mostly on being visually accessible to devices used by a target demographic. Anything outside is considered an edge case and ignored, or again, supported by developers and designers taking initiative in their own time.

become part of the everyday lexicon. Normal people who don’t make tech products say they prefer a product “for the UX”. Normal people who do make tech products say their product “has great UX”. It’s generally accepted as a measure of how easy something is to use, how little it gets in the way.

But the real innovation is making it seem like the ease of use, the user experience, is the only thing that matters, because sometimes a product doesn’t offer much else.

Notion is a popular cloud-based product that is marketed with no purpose more specific than productivity or collaboration. It takes existing products like wikis, project management tools, and document editors and mashes them together into one window

Despite inheriting all of its usefulness from other useful things, Notion’s success is the result of good usability design that makes it easy to use those things in one place. For Notion the UX is the product.

For a UX designer at Notion the concern is that it can be used easily, not how well it does a specific task for a specific expertise.

But the inside secret of commercial UX is that the empathy is just a posture and the businesses benefit from the aura of care without having to entertain it.

Search Twitter for “FTX UX” and you’ll find no shortage of “it had a great UX” tweets published well after the fraud was exposed

There are Laws of UX that use psychology to design better products & services and at the top of most UX book lists you’ll find Nir Eyal’s Hooked to learn how to build habit forming products.

Centralised crypto products come from a community-wide UX need to obscure necessary complexity rather than create usefulness that is concrete enough to justify it.

UX ignores questionable usefulness and the bright aura of care distracts from real questions of ethics and harm.

For most, choosing where you work is a luxury. It’s going to be the commercial UX roles that pay the best every time

UX needs to make clear distinctions between commercial design work and design as a social good so the aura of care is not just an aura.