But beyond that you have to do the hard slog of mastering the discipline of UX, real, human-centric design, and accept that not everything important is measurable.

We have plenty of examples of how doing real UX instead of playing a numbers game can differentiate your business, Apple has applied this philosophy consistently over many years.

The root of the problem is a "fuck you, market share at all costs" culture that has come to permeate Silicon Valley. And you can argue (somewhat cynically) that this philosophy makes sense in a blue ocean where you have no competition and just need to gobble up people and turn them into cash before someone else does. But I think going forward this mentality may actually become a liability as more humane alternatives to heavily despised products emerge. Many of the current crop of giants seem to have forgotten that a company's most valuable asset is always its brand.

> mastering the discipline of UX...

There is no reason to be ambiguous about the practice of good UX design.

The main mistake made by most A/B testing is to think that just because you do some testing, it will magically make your UI somehow better. You can make any tests you want, but how do you know they the right tests? And test results do not interpret themselves. There are no obvious conclusions to be drawn from the results of a test.

The correct way to do user testing is to start with clear, articulated goals, then select tests to see if the goals are failing or succeeding. Anything else is just back-dating hypotheses - a known anti-science practice.

The other misinterpretation of A/B testing is that it will make user interfaces "better" for the end user. Testing can only support or disprove the stated goal and it works just as well for goals that are foolish, short-sighted, self-destructive, and malevolent as it does for those that are ethical and beneficial.

The way to do it properly is to hire experienced, competent UX designers and human computer interaction specialists, who understand the problem space and how to keep people engaged without addictive malpractice / dark patterns. Metrics are useful but they are what they claim to be - measurements - and nothing more.

You wouldn't choose which house to buy based on how large it was measured to be, but you would expect a surveyor to make those measurements.

Speaking as a web and video game designer, I can't wait until I can hire someone to think about these things for me.

Once this becomes the goal, the game is already up. It doesn't matter whether you use A/B testing, focus groups, or brilliant designers who operate on intuition. By targeting engagement, you're treating your users as a means to an end and falling afoul of the categorical imperative [1]. You're focused not on meeting their needs as users but your own needs as an engagement-driven platform.

The answer to this puzzle is to take engagement right off the table. An ethical business model is one in which you treat your customers as fully autonomous agents. As soon as you look past people's autonomy and see them as creatures of habit with psychological traits that can be gamed, you stray from the ethical path and find yourself searching for other rationalizations.

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

Instead try to think of your customers the way an old barber would think of his clients: as friends with individual needs who trust your experience in a particular problem domain.

Of course, this approach is extremely unlikely to lead to a billion+$ exit. But if your goal is to become a billionaire and you want to be as stridently ethical as possible, I don't know how to help you (and would invite you to further examine your priorities).

I guess it depends on where any individual places the task on the skill/luck or simple/complex scale. If the task (in this case, a design) is very simple — how many users who want to complete their voter registration form are able to — then experts may have an advantage.

OTOH, if it’s a complex space like facebooks news feed, I don’t think experts are the way to go. They simply think that they are.

FWIW, I’ve run hundreds of multivariate tests in my career. Every place I go, the design team is upset by the process, for the same reasons argued here. Every time, I challenge them to come up with 1 winning variation and 3 losers. If the designer-identified “winner” performs best, i pay them $10. If any of the losers wins, I get $10.

I have yet to meet a designer that can, a priori, pick the winning variation better than random chance would suggest.

Expertise is not valuable in an unpredictable context. Complex user facing systems like the news feed are impossible to predict.

I’m channeling Kahneman and Mauboussin here, but their theory explains my experience very well.

Note that talking to customers is not easy too. To the point that you need to psychoanalyze all the feedback to understand why they make those comments. Useful feedback is very rare. Customers are just not usability experts, they don't really know what they are talking about.

Personally I don't mind clickbait if after doing whatever it takes to grab my attention, the creator delivers on an actually solid high quality educational/entertaining content.

Captain Pedantic, reporting for duty, and that’s not actually clickbait. If the masterful baiter of clicks actually delivers, then it wasn’t bait. I mean, what’s to complain about? Turns out there is a way to target stubborn belly fat, five minutes a day, who knew?

The content should at least match the promise of the headline, or even overdeliver. Then readers are happy.

Only if people have a stake in the decline of a company, and have something to lose. Other wise in these days of executive networks, and people getting in their golf and dinner buddies- Execs mostly care about nothing at all.

The only people to lose anything are a few low level employees and may be shareholders. Shareholders mostly don't care either. People who hold large block of shares, are generally diversified. And since nothing fails at all at once- They are covered too.

So nobody loses any thing much basically.

Rather it's an engineering-first organization, run by an engineer.

Probably a mix of everyone's fault.

It is nakedly a psychological trick to give you a mixture of things you've seen before and new content to make you feel like you should try again more often - the slot machine strategy. No one asked for it.

Of course it helps that ads are easier to integrate into a feed when you don't even know what to expect in your feed in the first place.

So now, not only do these platforms not give a feed of pages and people I subscribe to, they litter my feed with ads and 'popular content' that I never subscribed to! otherwise how could they charge money to increase your organic reach?

what a crock! It was a marketers' dream to have their latest news and coupons delivered to your inbox and have you actually look at them, but if you subscribe to businesses you want to follow, how can the ad network make money? So they turned everyone into a customer of their ad platform, and held your content hostage until you paid up. This has effected numerous friends that are small content producers that maxxed out facebook's 5,000 friend limit and all they wanted was to invite all of their fans to their next event.

/rant

You have 1000 friends each interacting once per day with FB in a news feed worthy way (posting, joining an event, commenting etc). Are you supposed to look at 500 daily news feed posts to get a 50% chance of knowing what that friend you really like is up to? (pushing the trait but you get the idea)

Instead having to seep through endless activities I don't care about I can scan 10-15 posts per day and they are the relevant ones from the groups and friends I want to interact with.

--

I'm fully with you on the point you make about business/content creator you volontarily subscribed to having to pay extra for you to see their stuff.

Its a phrase that is often used but it is usually not as simple as that. Imagine that your existing users have a very different set of needs and priorities as new users coming onto your platform, or not yet users you want to attract. This means making hard decisions that will not please everyone.

Or, as you mention, your shareholders may require you to generate revenue faster and then you are left with a lot of bad decisions to make and your only choice is to pick the least damaging one.

In this case you should side with your existing users who 1) you already convinced to sign up and engage with your product 2) helped you build your product in the first place.

I’d take an established power-user any day over a potential new user that has yet to prove themselves (they might quit the platform as quickly as they joined).

Of course, some idiots don’t understand this, and “Twitter” is the result.

sometimes you don't have that luxury, because "you need to grow".

So in the long term being decent is really good for business but also costly in short term.

Optimizing for the short-term is what many killing companies and good products.

> Corporations have no priority except to make money. If making money is at odds with positive user experience (which is almost always is), making money wins.

That attitude has a similar problem: socialism has been gaining in popularity, and I'd say that's a direct result of corporations over-prioritizing their money-making over both customer priorities and other social priorities (like paying reasonable amount of tax).

I had been a customer of theirs for years, starting with the DVD rental. After a while they started adding the streaming content which was cool, but then they eventually separated the two services and switched my plan from DVD rentals to exclusively streaming content. All without any action on my part or any consent from me.

Eventually, I quit Netflix because between Prime Video and Hulu, I was covered for my streaming needs and with the exception of a few shows, was unimpressed with Netflix's original content so it was a waste of money for me.

Fast forward to a week ago, I decided to give Netflix another shot. What amazed me is the dark patterns you speak of. Like downloading content for offline viewing.

I was without access to my normal ISP and had to use cellular data so I opted to download a show. 1 episode was 100 MB and I'm on Google Fi so it was basically $1 of data usage which I understood. But then when the episode was over, I stepped away from my phone to go to the bathroom and when I came back, I found that the episode had been deleted from my phone, and that the next episode had automatically downloaded without any action on my part incurring another $0.90 of data (not to mention deleting the episode I had intentionally downloaded making the first $1 a waste)

I saw at the top of the download section that there was something called "Smart Download" enabled that claims to do exactly that - delete the last episode and download the next, but it's only supposed to happen on wi-fi which wasn't the case for me. I turned off the feature as it was obviously broken and tried contacting customer service.

The CSR I talked to then told me that the app cannot delete or download material without me clicking a button - which contradicted their description of "Smart Download" that I had just read, and he explained there was no way for them to process a refund or credit to my account because they don't have any way to do that.

This seems like a pretty major problem.

Even when confronted with a direct customer complaint, their response was just to deny, deny, deny rather than taking even minor steps to rectify the issue. This seems mind boggling from a customer service perspective when companies like Amazon will bend over backwards to keep their customers happy. Even Hulu will credit you a free month of service when they goof - they even do it if you try to cancel the service because you can't find anything good to watch. Netflix's service isn't good enough to justify this type of behavior and general apathy. Customer-last seems like a crummy business model.

I do a lot of cellular/tethering and know some of the pain points but can recognize that the needs are quite different to the regular user who may consume stuff at home then want to take stuff with them on the go.

Normally I see that UX often caters to the lowest common denominator which leaves power users and niche users sidelined.

My personal bug bear on this subject is that YouTube no longer buffers entire videos and holds them there - presumably this saves them lots in traffic costs and additionally allows them to up sell YouTube premium

Without the "Smart Download" enabled the episodes persist until I delete them or cancel my service, that's the assumption with a download. Smart download immediately deletes whatever you downloaded as soon as it sees fit - which in my case was erroneously assuming I was on wi-fi. And this was my first download, it's not like it had some storage space restriction to deal with. I had ~16 GB free and it was 100 MB.

The next episode feature aside, it seems weird to say, "Okay, download this one" and then it saying, "Okay, so you meant download it and then delete it".

And to your Youtube point, I think it depends on the use-case. I fully agree with holding the buffer there, but if I'm on mobile data, I might not necessary want it to just load as much as it can as soon as it can because I pay per MB.

This seems more like a CS fault than anything. Netflix is a huge company and CS agents are outsourced/so far from the actual product team that they operate on guidelines/info that might actually not be true/outdated. I'd say it's just a problem with a huge organization.

Others say "hire competent UX people", but I don't think it's necessary, and I don't think doing that will help.

Even the best UX person won't help you if management - or processes they set up - push for microoptimizing profitability at all costs. If the competent UX person doesn't have morals and ability to push back based on that, they'll either leave, or - worse - implement the bad things that much more efficiently.

The way I see it, companies must realize where their profit/growth optimization borders on user abuse, and then not cross that line (or be made to not cross that line).

I’ve yet to find a UX team I’ve worked on with enough political capital to win any conversation which results in a net-decrease in profits, regardless of the ultimate benefit.

Too many quarter to quarter direction to overcome the profits-today-at-all-costs momentum which grips management.

I have my differences of opinion with most UI/UX teams I worked with (in particular, I don't buy the trend of making software as easy as possible at all costs; it leads to dumbing down and reduced utility). But I'm not blaming UX people for this. They have as much to say in this topic as developers about third-party JS bloat - i.e. we can all complain all we want, out of practicality or morality, and ultimately the decisionmakers don't care.

This reminds me of a few years ago when they did "cash for clunkers" to stimulate the economy. Tons of people took advantage of it and car dealerships has two amazing months........ followed by four months of almost no sales. All that happened was that people who would have bought one in the next six months took advantage of the incentive now. It didn't create any new demand for cars or stimulate anything. If you only measured success during the first two months you might have been convinced that it was a roaring success.

Psst.. Are you ready to feel old today? The Cash for clunkers program was from 2009. Yeah, really. (The federal program in the US at least, I don't know if states ran their own version since)

The point here is that just because people think they want or like something doesn't necessarily really mean they do, especially when what they're 'consuming' is in some way different than the regular long term consumption of the product (as you hit on). I don't think it's much of a coincidence that some of the most famous marketers, most relevantly here probably being Steve Jobs, weren't particularly interested in what the consumer thought they wanted.

From a sociological and personal point, problem is the companies which effectively make money off of stealing people's time and data for profit by making them agree to short term gains through addictive content.

What we as responsible adults need to do is to find out what addictive psychology is and put an end to these opportunistic constructs through law making.

In my opinion, time is better spent on cultural skills and pursuits, not flocking to "the next big thing" you are spoonfed.

Sadly this didn’t happen because the entire company is based on a lack of common sense by the looks of it.

I'd suggest either just giving an honest rant or giving actual advice. And for that you have to really unpack what you mean by "common sense" until somebody who doesn't have "common sense" can have a chance of understanding and fixing the problem.

In this case, simply doing some basic user-testing would’ve been considered common sense and would’ve brought up the problem immediately.

Telling a company "do some basic user testing" is a useful recommendation. Telling them to have "common sense" isn't.

Either the company truly didn’t have anyone do user testing, or they did and were ignored (which doesn’t surprise me either considering the child they appointed as “CEO”).

Maybe the problem isn't with my rant, but that somehow the people running that company do indeed not know what they're doing?

The infamous Facebook user emotion study comes to mind: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/06/28/facebook...

Anyone know why tech companies aren't held to the same ethical standards as academia?

You can test, find something is objectively better, but then have your users dislike it for fashion or historic reasons, or whatever.

The problems associated with NHST are well documented (three that are especially awful: multiple comparisons lead to uncontrolled rate of false positives; large sample sizes leading to statistically significant but substantively irrelevant effects being "accepted"; hard thresholds of statistical significance are arbitrary and the difference between a significant effect and insignificant effect is rarely significant). In addition, there are problems that emerge from using NHST as part of an A/B test: namely, using live, rolling samples to identify significant results rather than prespecifying sample sizes; and making atomic changes as though they are additive without re-testing joint hypotheses of multiple changes.

But when you come down to it, the question you want to ask is "Is B better than A?" and the question you do ask is "If A were truly no better than B, how often would a sample of size n drawn using the same sampling procedure I think I'm using produce the impression than B is as much better than A as it is apparently in my observed data?", and two problems are that these aren't the same question and almost no one knows they're doing the latter.

To be totally fair, one of the most common problems with NHST (the null hypothesis is patently absurd) isn't necessarily a problem in the A/B UX case.

Not sure which of these in specific the grandparent is referring to, but I suspect they and I are on the same page in general.

Unless you can predict what this difference is expected to be with some precision beforehand it is not possible to legitimately attribute it to your favorite reason.

I would start here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/186099

Although that does point to a common problem of 'design for purchasing manager' where software is designed for the sake of pleasing people who don't actually use it and merely adds a bunch of useless cruft that would rapidly become an irritating obstacle to users but looks impressive on first blush.

Cycle metrics so that you don't get stuck on local optimization minima.

It's also helpful to have long term and short term optimizations to avoid burning fats, like measure both conversion and yearly conversion because it's more than likely that a discount for a week will not increase yearly conversion but will reduce yearly earning.

This was learned hard by steam, they made the sale event so big the whole game industry changed their pricing practices dropping in time much much more slowly than what it used to be.

I think it's the system working as it should, and I just hope people don't over-react and try to throw the system out when it seems to me to be actually doing a pretty good job at healing itself here.