We got a lot of complaints. People couldn't see their resume in the "years of experience" box. Worse they kept getting error messages saying their resume was too long. It was restricted to 2 characters! These same people had glossed over the "biography" box.

So, yes, your ability to reason about a UI and the requisite UX has nothing to do with how others will reason about it. You'll get to learn the hard way like I did.

My point is that the author writes as if something that is perfectly familiar to any mobile app user--and is literally the standard way to present a default option that can be changed--is something that has never been seen before. As I said, find me a mobile user who doesn't know what that arrow means in the screenshot in his article. He gave up all credibility with me at that point in the article. It may be that there's a story here, but either way this is just terrible journalism.

There certainly is a understanding problem here, even if the individual components are all familiar, because it's not at all clear what tapping a chevron on a "service fee" would do anyway, and it's certainly far from default to assume that that's how you would tip, especially if you were unfamiliar with Instacart, and didn't realize tipping is a thing.

It's also unclear how the "Service" fee is distributed. There is an explanation which states that "Unlike a tip, which can only go to the shopper delivering your order, a service amount allows us to pay all shoppers (including those, for example, that also pick out ordered items at the store)".

This implies that it's a "Shared Tips" model as in some restaurants, where tips are distributed evenly amongst the staff that worked that shift. But could also be interpreted that they just collect these "optional" service fees centrally in order to pay all nationwide workers, which simply amounts to corporate revenue unless they are actually distributing 100% of the service fee to Instacart contract employees.

Instacart, as with all "sharing economy" apps, seems to be making quite a bit of corporate revenue on the backs of workers by misleading users.

That may be true, and I'll take your word for it. However, if I have to have used the app to understand the author's point, it's a poorly written article. Catching this kind of thing is why newspapers have editors. It's bad writing and it weakened whatever point the author had.

Agreed about the ambiguous wording and whether this goes to the company or directly into worker pay is unclear.

You are not your user You are not your user You are not your user

~~

Beyond just that, putting things behind a chevron dramatically decreases actual usage. It's why things like hamburger menus are so bad--significantly reduces discoverability, -even when users understand the pattern-. A chevron is even worse, because it generally indicates "details", "settings", or "advanced". Nobody wants to do that.