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.
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.
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.