It's like the internet has been overtaken by an army of advertisers and wannabees photoshop artists.
I'm curious about UX, because sometimes it's aimed to make consumers feel good, and sometimes it's to be productive. I'm wondering if UX is backed by science/engineering.
Yes it is and has been for a long time. Time and motion studies were taken throughout the 20th century and even in the 19th. (There was a recent HN posting about such a study in aircraft cockpits of the 40s or 50s and the need for adjustable seating, relaying to air crashes). Don Norman published one of the first great such books (Design of everyday things) — check out the nuclear plant photo!
There was a deep study of the efficacy of design in print media which fascinatingly to be settled on different design points in different countries, though the most scientific such studies waited until computers were readily available.
Early GUIs were controversial and UX studies going back to the early 70s by people like Stu Card and by Fitts have been both surprising and influential. Xerox PARC where Card worked even hired anthropologists.
UX researchers are pretty important today. All the “big guys” (FAANG etc) and less well funded companies as well.
Engineering? Well companies spend a lot on their sites and devices. You can decide on that part.
My GF did her PhD work in AI/learning (world looked different in the early 90s) and has been Sr Researcher at Microsoft, Google, LinkedIn, FB, Amazon and didn‘t work on Web sites for any of them. She also worked for some smaller companies, still big, and some of those were web sites but none ad-supported.
The issues ranged from “how do people use this feature” to “how do we find a way for new, different kinds of people to use our product? How can it fit what they want?”
A better way to think about it in this context I suppose is that it's all about thinking about the human's cognitive models and how you can 1 - get a handle on what works and 2 - figure out why to be able to reproduce it. A lot of her work for the past couple of years seems to be on the former; a few years ago I would have called her studies "anthropological".
I'm not an expert in this area (though my AI work dates back to that era as well) so am just going on snippets of what she says about her work, none of course which can include anything confidential.
If that is true, one has to imagine that their skills are being employed differently than they used to be. It feels to me like UX used to be about serving the user's interests, which is definitely not something modern UX paradigms seem to concern themselves with.
Modern UX paradigms are very much "how do we make the user interact with our product in the way that we intend?" (usually the way that goes through as many ad-laden paths as possible).
The main exploit you want is a reaction. Next time your commuting on public transport if you spot someone looking at social media on their phone watch their body language. As they scroll the endless pages of guff, you can start to learn their body language and how they react. With this you can start to psychoanalyze the user reactions and you can then use this to trigger a person to flip in to a emotional state; allowing you to socially engineer the person especially within a UX model. Media News does this all the time; you can easily cripple a person with just two sentences of text and a picture. It's why a good troll is so effective.
If you spark a response, you've got their attention as exactly the downvote I received is. Another example of a human exploit in the world we live in. With that downvote it can flip the persons emotional state where the feeling is of "oh,no" because my "value of 69" is now "68". A pointless number, an pathos exploit which can be manipulated by bots.
Revenue driven design will win every time.