UX Cruelty

Don’t blame it on the algorithm — assuming you’re designing experiences for “happy, upbeat, good-life users” might make you a terrible person.

 

My friend is going through a divorce. Like nearly 5 million other Americans. And recently Facebook greeted her with this careless user experience:

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When this UX intrusion happened to her, it reminded me of a similar, psychological violation I’d read about four months earlier. That post, by Eric Meyer, had begun:

I didn’t go looking for grief this afternoon, but it found me anyway, and I have designers and programmers to thank for it. In this case, the designers and programmers are somewhere at Facebook.

I know they’re probably pretty proud of the work that went into the “Year in Review” app they designed and developed, and deservedly so—a lot of people have used it to share the highlights of their years. Knowing what kind of year I’d had, though, I avoided making one of my own. I kept seeing them pop up in my feed, created by others, almost all of them with the default caption, “It’s been a great year! Thanks for being a part of it.”  Which was, by itself, jarring enough, the idea that any year I was part of could be described as great.

Still, they were easy enough to pass over, and I did.  Until today, when I got this in my feed, exhorting me to create one of my own.  “Eric, here’s what your year looked like!”

fb-year
 

A picture of my daughter, who is dead.  Who died this year.

Yes, my year looked like that.  True enough.  My year looked like the now-absent face of my little girl.  It was still unkind to remind me so forcefully.

I remember first reading this post the day it was published, Christmas eve 2014. When I went to look it up after my friend’s own violation by a Facebook app module I was surprised to (re)discover that it had been titled, generously, “Inadvertent algorithmic cruelty:”

And I know, of course, that this is not a deliberate assault.  This inadvertent algorithmic cruelty is the result of code that works in the overwhelming majority of cases, reminding people of the awesomeness of their years, showing them selfies at a party or whale spouts from sailing boats or the marina outside their vacation house.

But for those of us who lived through the death of loved ones, or spent extended time in the hospital, or were hit by divorce or losing a job or any one of a hundred crises, we might not want another look at this past year.

To show me Rebecca’s face and say “Here’s what your year looked like!” is jarring.  It feels wrong, and coming from an actual person, it would be wrong. Coming from code, it’s just unfortunate.

 

But of course, it did come from an actual person. “[The app] was awesome for a lot of people,” the product manager for Facebook’s Year in Review app, Jonathan Gheller, later told The Washington Post. Like all the digital experiences with, and within, which we all increasingly live our lives, an actual person — in fact a whole team of people — was responsible for concepting, designing, building, testing, and iterating this experience. No doubt, the responsibility for the rollout of this particular app featured prominently in a number of Facebook employees’ job performance reviews. From start to finish, this experience was crafted by people (not code). Calling its end result “inadvertent algorithmic cruelty” is like describing a drunk driving accident as “inadvertent gasoline cruelty.” For sure, it could have been avoided with an empty gas tank, but is that really the most accurate way to ascribe accountability in this situation? (Don’t blame it on the algohol).

“In creating this Year in Review app, there wasn’t enough thought given to cases like mine, or anyone who had a bad year,” Meyer wrote. “If I could fix one thing about our industry, just one thing, it would be that: to increase awareness of and consideration for the failure modes, the edge cases, the worst-case scenarios.”

If I could fix one thing about our industry, it would be to destroy the idea that these scenarios are edge cases.

Last year in the US, 2.6 million people died, leaving behind untold numbers of Facebook users who mourn the absence of their loved ones.

Right now 8.5 million people can’t find a job;

14.5 million people have cancer;

16 million people suffer from depression;

23.5 million people are addicted to alcohol and drugs;

45 million people live below the poverty line (including 16 million children)

These are not “edge cases.” These are not “worst case scenarios.” These are all people who use Facebook. And that’s not even counting your run of the mill disappointments, broken hearts, and inevitable wrongs and slights and meannesses that are, basically, life.

“The design [of the Year in Review app] is for the ideal user, the happy, upbeat, good-life user,” Meyer wrote. But if you are a product manager or UX designer creating experiences that will afflict affect hundreds of millions of people and you are only designing for an “ideal user”… at best that’s just lazy, and at worst — it’s creating LITERAL suffering.

Put another way:

Screen Shot 2015-04-16 at 7.40.34 PM

As Oliver Burkeman writes in The Guardian:

The world, obviously, is a manifestly unjust place: people are always meeting fates they didn’t deserve, or not receiving rewards they did deserve for hard work or virtuous behaviour. Yet several decades of research have established that our need to believe otherwise runs deep.

Confronted with an atrocity they otherwise can’t explain, people become slightly more likely, on average, to believe that the victims must have brought it on themselves. Hence the finding, in a 2009 study, that Holocaust memorials can increase antisemitism. Or that reading about the eye-popping state of economic inequality could make you less likely to support politicians who want to do something about it. These are among numerous unsettling implications of the “just-world hypothesis”, a psychological bias explored in a new essay by Nicholas Hune-Brown at Hazlitt.

If we didn’t all believe that [things happen for a reason] to some degree, life would be an intolerably chaotic and terrifying nightmare in which effort and payback were utterly unrelated, and there was no point planning for the future, saving money for retirement or doing anything else in hope of eventual reward. We’d go mad.

Yet, ironically, this desire to believe that things happen for a reason leads to the kinds of positions that help entrench injustice instead of reducing it.

Much in the same way that the “just world” cognitive bias can actually lead us to make crueler decisions, designing product features with the “happy, upbeat, good-life” ideal user bias can lead us to create crueler user experiences.

“To shield ourselves psychologically from the terrifying thought that the world is full of innocent people suffering,” Burkeman writes, we, as humans, “endorse policies more likely to make that suffering worse.” And by denying the full spectrum of the realities of people’s lives, awesome and tragic, we, as experience designers, do the same. Except we’re the ones with the power to actually do something about it.

“Just to pick two obvious fixes,” Meyer wrote at the end of his post, “First, don’t pre-fill a picture until you’re sure the user actually wants to see pictures from their year.  And second, instead of pushing the app at people, maybe ask them if they’d like to try a preview—just a simple yes or no.  If they say no, ask if they want to be asked again later, or never again. And then, of course, honor their choices. This is… designing for crisis, or maybe a better term is empathetic design.”

Or how about just, you know, design.

In the wake of Meyer’s post, the product manager for Facebook’s Year in Review app told The Washington Post. “We can do better.”

But four months later, Facebook’s photo collage assault on my friend suggests perhaps they don’t really think they can.

“Faced with evidence of injustice, we’ll certainly try to alleviate it if we can,” Burkeman wrote, “But, if we feel powerless to make things right, we’ll do the next best thing, psychologically speaking: we’ll convince ourselves that the world isn’t so unjust after all.”

    



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STOP IT!

Forgive me if I have a lingering respect for the English language —

NutriBullet, you’re the worst, with this wronggrammar.

fuelyoursexy

Stop it.

Also, Expedia, aren’t you better than this derivative ish?

expedia-ad-campaign copy

Jesus. STOP it.

Lysol. SERIOUSLY.

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STOP IT.

Copywriters?

Fuck you, dudes. Wronggrammar is not the flat design of “brand storytelling.” Stop trying to make fetch happen.

Brand managers?

Ugh. You too.

STOP IT!!

    



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Make More Ads Like This

It’s not that fucking hard.

 

Yesterday I was served this ad as the pre-roll in front of a TLC music video on YouTube and kind of freaked out. It was such a profound departure from the typical ad aimed at women, it felt like I’d seen a unicorn. I then proceeded to devote way too much of my day trying to find it afterwards. I reloaded “Creep” at least 50 times to try to get the same ad again. I finally ended up tweeting at @SecretDeodorant to help me track it down. (Thanks, Secret!)

“Did you know, striking a confident pose for 2 minutes can leave you feeling fearless all day?”

Did you know that this is actually true?

 

As social psychologist, Ann Cuddy, explains in her Ted talk, this is actually true whether you believe it or not! Our body language affects not only how others see us, but it can also change how we see ourselves. She goes on to show how “power posing” — standing in a posture of confidence, even when we don’t feel confident — can alter testosterone and cortisol levels in the brain (all things that affect perspiration, by the way) and may even have an impact on our chances for success.

When people feel happy they smile, but conversely, holding a pen between your teeth, which forces the facial muscles into a smile, will actually make you feel happier. So you can stand there doing the “Wonder Woman” and feel silly the whole time you’re doing it and it doesn’t even matter. Our minds change our bodies, and likewise, our bodies can change our minds. Posture can become power. For a product so intimately tied to the mind-body connection, this message is a no-brainer.

Oh, hey, sup, creative directors and brand managers: MAKE MORE ADS LIKE THAT.

Make less ads like this:

 

You can either have your intended target associate your brand with a message that depicts them as clowns, and experiences that make them feel foolish — the kinds of things we all try to avoid, forget, and deny. Or you can associate your brand with experiences that LITERALLY make people feel assertive, confident, and powerful — a sensation we all crave like a drug fix, and cling to with all our might in the face of an uncertain world.

The choice is not that fucking hard.

    



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Plan To Fail

fight-club_airlinesafety

 

This month’s Harvard Business review cover story, Strategy for Turbulent Times, explains how the pace of competitive change has reached an “inflection point.” Up until now the business world has been obsessed with the notion of building a sustainable competitive advantage — it is the idea at the core of strategy textbooks, of Warren Buffett’s investment strategy, and the successes many 20th century companies. But we are now living in a time where competitive advantage often evaporates in less than a year. As the article proclaims: “Sustainable competitive advantage is now the exception, not the rule. Transient advantage is the new normal.”

I was thinking about this article last Thursday when Instagram released a new update that now supports 15-second video sharing, a direct assault on Vine, Twitter’s app which came out just six months ago, and defined six-second video as a new content format. By Sunday there was already blood in the water.

Vine had dropped from No.2 to No.7 on the U.S. iPhone download chart of free apps in the wake of the new Instagram video update. Sunday was the first day since March 27th that Vine did not place in the top-5 most popular American iPhone apps. In another stronghold, Mexico, Vine dropped from No.3 to No.10 in three days. In its biggest European market, the United Kingdom, Vine dropped from No.5 to No.12. Globally, Vine placed in the top-10 iPhone downloads in 11 countries on Sunday. Down sharply from 34 countries last Thursday, and 29 countries just two weeks ago.

It all sort of begs the question: If Twitter had gone in with the assumption that Instagram would replicate this concept at the first opportunity, how would they have made Vine differently?

Would they have integrated the Vine functionality into the Twitter mobile experience directly rather than try to establish a new, external platform around a single utility? That, after all, is what Instagram did. Admittedly the jumble of video and photo content in the same feed is a bit foreign right now, but we acclimated to images and video in our Twitter feeds, and we’ll get accustomed to this all too quickly, too.

Twitter released a new product that introduced a novel content format disconnected from the mothership. Instagram said, thanks for doing the market testing for us, we’ll take it from here, and wove Insta-video into what they are as an app now.

It was either Benjamin Franklin or Winston Churchill who remarked in a prior century, “Plan to fail and fail to plan.” In the 21st century, the truism is now more accurately something like “Fail to plan to fail, and fail to plan….AND plan to  fail.”

What would you do differently today, if you knew your competitive advantage wouldn’t last tomorrow?

 

    



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today’s ad fail award goes to

rapeyskyy

You know what, Skyy? I’ve always found your ads amusing in the past. The pineapple one was a study in optical double entendre excellence. And, of course, the twin cherry ad was an instant classic. I may be a Grey Goose, or, failing that, Ketel One girl, myself, but  a preference for understated sophistication when it comes to vodka doesn’t mean I can’t still appreciate a well-done bit of innuendo.

This latest ad, however, just peeped this morning on the subway, of a giant Skyy bottle inserted up a girl’s cooch, has veered straight past entertainingly sexy and into downright rapey territory. This makes your brand seem like the preferred choice for sex offenders. Is that the idea, Skyy? If not….

Rally-banner

    



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