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Comment by Zombieball | Hacker News Reader

I read a good article once (can’t seem to find it, I’ll link it if I do) where a UX designer had a similar reaction to a website. He was angry that he needed to provide an email address to access the “show me what this tool even is” part of a website. He concluded it was bad UX and wrote an angry tweet.

Turns out the UX of the website had been user tested extensively. The design they chose was the most successful at achieving their goal (new user signup or something).

The learning lesson was you may not be the target user for the design. Or you may not realize what the primary goal of the design is.

Edit: This was the article I referenced https://medium.theuxblog.com/there-are-no-ux-best-practices-...

To clarify I wasn't trying to defend dark / grey UX patterns. Just thought I'd share as it helped me look at (what I consider) bad UX in a different frame of mind.

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Oh, I think everyone complaining knows precisely what's the goal of this design. This is a "grey" pattern - not very dark, but sort of signalling that the people you're dealing with do not have your well-being in mind. Not evil, just not nice.

Yup.

If a user doesn't understand something that a designer has worked to make hard to understand, that's bad UX, not good UX. If the phrase "user experience" is to have any meaning at all, the analysis has to be centered in the user's values, not the designer's.

As an example, if a mark is taken in by a well-executed pigeon drop [1], one could call plausibly call it a well-designed scam. But one cannot call it good UX.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigeon_drop

“Help, there is this defective machine, it made a loud noise and a piece of metal emerged and lodged itself in my abdomen. It is unsafe, a very bad design!”

“Well, actually, it is a gun, and it is a very good design for its intended purpose. It’s just that the manufacturer does not have your interests in mind.”

> The design they chose was the most successful at achieving their goal (new user signup or something).

Sounds like they didn't define their goals well. I bet that would lead to a lot of people signing up just to learn more and then abandoning their accounts.

Personally, I provide fake info/email address to sign up on sites when it is required but never plan to return to the site. Do they get more signups this way? Yes, but it is probably a low quality user group and not likely to convert further.

> The learning lesson was you may not be the target user for the design. Or you may not realize what the primary goal of the design is.

A bad design doesn’t get better just because there are excuses that explain why it’s like this. It’s hard to justify that "Someone visiting my website to get info about my product" is not a target user.

Agree, also it is terrible UX if it is not apparent when you can not decide for yourself whether you are the target user. It isn't hard and it saves from these two scenarios:

1. Oh, this isn't for me, glad I found that out quickly - saved me lots of frustration.

2. Yeah, I'm not the target audience for this but I know of another niche where this is useful despite that - I might actually try it out!

It also gives a very bad impression of the company to actively not caring about frustrating users they are not interested in.

Seems I paraphrased the article poorly, here are the actual key points:

1. Never assume you know more about a design than the company that made it.

2. You don’t know the problem that the design is solving.

3. Don’t jump to conclusions until you have data to back it up.

4. You don’t have to be right to be a good designer. You just have to listen when you’re wrong.

5. Always test. Always.

6. There are no UX best practices.

In general I tend to align with you though. Do right by the user, and its probably the right thing for your company too!

If the problem the design solves is the designer's problem but not the user's problem, then it is definitionally a bad user experience.

You could call it a well-executed exploitative design, I suppose, but you can't call good UX when the U has an X that is by their lights bad. And even calling it "good design" only works if one thinks design has absolutely no ethics built in.

As a comparison, you can't really call what Josef Mengele did "good medicine". It doesn't matter how technically skilled he was or how much he accomplished for his employers, because medicine is deeply and explicitly patient-centered. Many designers believe that unethical use of design skills is flat out bad design, no matter how much money it makes.

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