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Comment by ericd | Hacker News Reader

I think it comes down to respect. Modern designers seem to have very little respect for users, and in some cases, it seems to veer into contempt.

No, you may not disregard what I want you to do, the most I’ll allow is for you to delay it by an hour, at which point I’ll interrupt what you’re doing again. Because I know better than you what you should do, despite my having zero context.

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I don't think it is the designer's fault, it is the fault of data driven culture done poorly and picking the wrong incentives. In your example, if the dialog is say for a system upgrade, the metric would be percentage of users finishing the upgrade. An annoying, non dismissable notification would clearly boost this metric. Any decrease in user satisfaction short of public revolt on social media will not be noticed, or will be noticed over a time scale too long to be attributable to the notification change. By that time the PM has already taken credit for decreasing the number of users running old software.

Yeah, I think you’re right that it’s likely largely due to data-driven management. Brand damage is relatively hard to measure, and doesn’t seem to make its way into OKR’s.

Another way of thinking about things is that whoever is setting these incentives are indirectly designing the software, which obviously causes issues.

It’s shockingly easy for large companies to completely destroy useful software loosing out on billions per year with nothing obvious to blame.

> Modern designers seem to have very little respect for users

Tragedy of the commons. In general it’s probably a good idea to hold a healthy disrespect for your average user.

Power users used to be the norm, and as that changed, so did the design.

I think it's less about individual designers and more about the industry in general. A company that respects its users will find it harder to get money from advertisers and investors.

the industry needs better advertisers and investors, then

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