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grey ace, adhdtism


hobbyist game developer, professional procrastinator, and kink trash goblin


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Zorotek is @7x9000's
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GoopySpaceShark
@GoopySpaceShark

gods professional UX is such bullshit

stakeholders, focus groups, statistical analysis, and heatmaps are where design goes to die. they're the reasons why every website nowadays is either designed by committee or a cookie cutter clone, because either they come up with insane caricatures of users to test by or they try and pursue some concept of "perfect usability", which is the design equivalent of boiled, concentrated piss

the only times I've ever made something usable and unique in any reasonable length of time are when I've tried just using the thing myself. "users" are people. you are a person. I am a person, ergo I can just judge for myself if something was easy or hard to do. the term "users" is honestly kinda dehumanising, and I regret that I've fallen into using it myself

trying to turn design of any kind into a science and trying to "perfect" it is just a step away from advertising and marketing horseshit, chasing metrics of dubious worth to reach some impossible idea of perfection and selling your fucking soul in the process

I swear this was all dreamt up by middle management and CEOs so they could have their pretty graphs and because they don't trust the people they hired to not fuck up



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in reply to @GoopySpaceShark's post:

hi! actual professional ux designer here to say that reddit post is distressingly accurate.

There's some genuinely cool stuff happening in the academic space regarding figuring out what makes a site not suck and make them more accessible to people with disabilities and all that jazz but the problem is that the only reason our beloathed CEOs care about that kind of study is because it lets them push the equation of "how much can we annoy our site visitors before they go spend their money somewhere else" more towards "annoy them".

I think the problems runs a lil deeper than tech. Like yeah, Google sucks now, streaming is ruined forever, and every news site is an unnavigable mess of signups and subscriptions, but have you ever noticed that when you're at the grocery store, the milk and eggs are at the back? It's the one thing most people buy every time they shop there, if grocery stores were designed to be most convenient for the customer, they'd be at the front, right? But by putting them at the back, you've gotta walk past every other aisle, and it gives you plenty of time to go "oh, I should pick that up too", and now half the store becomes a physical popup ad.

This is an old, intentional technique. These companies are run by capitalists, and capitalism demands infinite growth. They KNOW the ads and banners and newsletters and popups suck, we've demonstrated that a hundred times over, but they add like, two percent revenue or signups or page views or whatever so obviously they have to stay. So your milk and eggs will stay at the back of the store until we live in a system meant to serve people, not profits.