Title: Calculated Misery: The Dark Side of UX Strategy
Context: What’s worse; an unintentionally bad user experience or one designed poorly on purpose?
Synopsis: One of the unassailable tenets of modern business is that failing to supply customers with a superior user experience is the quickest path to irrelevance and eventual bankruptcy, right? Not so fast my misguided friend! It would seem that not everyone so scrupulously adheres to a user-first philosophy of building a business. There are cases—in which the customer may even share some culpability—that link profit margins with pain-limiting upsell opportunities rather than a superior baseline experience. This seems counterintuitive, and indeed immoral from the perspective of design orthodoxy, but you can’t argue with success. Of course your definition of success becomes rather important when trying to find the optimal balance between profit maximization and miserable customer minimization.
Best Bit: “Inducing behavior change through pain rather than pleasure feels insidious. Anti-human. Wrong!”
via uxmatters.com
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