> repeatedly tell them No on a question
And you can't even tell it "No", it's typically "Maybe later" or "Not now". When will "modern UX experts" understand that "No means No".
And you can't even tell it "No", it's typically "Maybe later" or "Not now". When will "modern UX experts" understand that "No means No".
Honestly i don't think you can put blame on any single individual - including the CEO - and have things change, this isn't a single player (or even single corporation, considering Microsoft isn't the only one doing these shady things) game.
Who do you think should be shamed for this? The developers who put it there? The UI experts who said where to put it? The UX experts that came up with this particular image as a way to maximize engagement? The product owners who told the team to add some extremely gross visual shock image to the app to boost engagement, and who approved that particular choice? The QA team that let it through? I'd say: yes, all of them.
You definitely can't put blame on a single individual here. There's lot of blame to be put on many individuals across the organizational structure. I picked an extreme hypothetical example to work like a contrast agent, to make it easier to see that there are parts of the org that are directly involved with some wrongdoing (vs. indirectly involved by e.g. setting incentives), and it's not absurd to want to put blame on all of them.
Blaming a cog (for something the machine wants anyway) is tantamount to scapegoating. The machine will change out the part for one that more or less serves the same purpose.
IMHO this is actually the biggest problem with modern application development, no accountability at all and everybody hiding behind somebody else instead of admitting failure, so all one can hope for is a poor compromise that's the average of many opinions (each single one of them even probably good, but not when mixed with random other opinions).
Funny enough, it's the same problem, everybody weaseling around a clear "No" ;)
Regardless, though: at the end of the day blame must fall on an actual people, as it is people who make decisions and it is people who take actions and it is only people who can stop any of it. It is utterly ridiculous that even if we were to create a law that said it was illegal to create a dialog box that said "maybe later", somehow we would merely fine Microsoft and hope that disincentivizes the behavior while all the people who push on the law and continually test its boundaries in new products don't really have to worry about it themselves.
FWIW, I actually will say I am more than a bit sympathetic to the argument that we should just blame everyone vaguely involved to the point where if we meet someone who works for these companies we should look at them with some side eye... but, the reality is that some people at whatever company we are talking about (here: Microsoft) are obviously more to blame for whatever evil decision we are dealing with than others, and so your attempt to pitch a tent so big that anyone not just merely vaguely involved with a decision but somehow in the entire industry should somehow be deserving of equal shame--and so we should oh-so-conveniently just not blame anyone at all--feels like a disingenuous attempt at distraction.
What needs to be done is to address the incentives that cause the above.
The fact is, too many awful things occur because people are happy to hide behind companies and organisations and say they "had no choice". The idea of "just following orders", which has been a sad human tendency for millennia.
Yes, do call out bad practice when you see it. But please don't be hostile to (any/some of) the employees "who build these systems". They're doing their job/s. They're not responsible for the giant evil megacorp that employs them. They don't "empower" the corporation. It's obviously not that simple.
What is simple is that Microsoft doesn't treat Windows users like vermin because some random UX guy said to. It's the other way around. The UX guy got told what to do. The engineers got told what to do. They all got told what the software was supposed to do and they tried to make the software to do what it was supposed to do, because that's what their job is.
And for this one example, the imaginary UX guy actually made a more correct choice. The "maybe later" button is likely the best design given the constraints. The user isn't allowed to truly say "no, never", so presenting the negative option as "no" and then showing the dialog again a bit later would be a worse UX than the "maybe later" button which at least does what it says.
Speaking of giant evil megacorps, maybe direct your hostilities towards them instead. Your issue is with them, the company. It's their software/behaviour.
People should not do things they believe to be unethical. You do, as an employee, have the autonomy to say no to unethical tasks. You are therefore not blameless when you perform unethical tasks, because you chose not to say no.
I've quit jobs where I believed the project I was asked to work on were unethical, and that I had no other choice at the company. My first job out of university, I was asked to write code to cheat on an industry benchmark. I was 19 years old but I still somehow conjured up the courage to tell my manager that I would not feel comfortable working on that.
But you see senior engineers here with 20 years of experience just shrugging and saying "Well, boss told me to do it so I have no choice!"
The main point I was making is in the first paragraph. I was responding to what was essentially a call for random individuals to be identified and harassed because of their potential connection to some user-hostile software. I politely recommended/requested to not take such actions. I think if you have an opinion or concerns about a software/product/design/practice you should try to turn it into a meaningful contribution and express your thoughts in some way that you deem appropriate and helpful. If your preferred method of expressing your thoughts is shaming and harassing people, or other generally violent and harmful acts then you should keep your thoughts to yourself. The same applies to calling for others to act in such a manner.
> People should not do things they believe to be unethical. You do, as an employee, have the autonomy to say no to unethical tasks. You are therefore not blameless when you perform unethical tasks, because you chose not to say no.
You're not really disagreeing with anything I said (other than in intensity) but I'll respond to this directly.
People generally don't go out of their way to do things they believe to be wrong ("unethical"). People do tend to cross their own boundaries more easily when under pressure.
Different people have different levels of autonomy in life and at work. It's normal to find it difficult to say no to your manager.
Playing a part in some project does assign some responsibility to you. The smaller the part, the smaller the responsibility. Blaming an individual contributor for systemic problems with a project is unfair and a bad way to fix the problems.
Scale and context is important. Many/most things are issues of degrees. Applying your extremely rigid framework to a scenario with the scale of a single employee at Microsoft is bizarre/comedic.
Of course they are! People aren't magically born hired to some giant company... they choose to--hell: they even fight to!--work there because they like making more money than they could at another job, in no small part as these jobs involve doing some evil things that extract more value from the world.
> They all got told what the software was supposed to do and they tried to make the software to do what it was supposed to do, because that's what their job is.
First off: who is telling them? Microsoft isn't some AI: it can't tell anyone what to do as it has no agency of its own... people had to make every single decision and take every single action that you are attributing to "Microsoft". They can't "all" be told what the software is supposed to do: someone--often someone low in the org chart, fascinatingly, but this sometimes could actually be someone high up--had to come up with the idea and do the telling.
Second: no... just because "that's your job" isn't an excuse to just do whatever your boss wants you to do, even when you disagree with it; that is a ridiculous level of blame shifting. If you don't want to be held responsible and you somehow can't quit then you should at least be helping in protest of whatever you are finding yourself doing.
> The user isn't allowed to truly say "no, never"...
I mean, why not? Well, because someone, somewhere--a person, with a name, whether they were high or low in the ranks--decided it was more profitable to take agency from users, and then a scant handful of other people were willing to go along with that decision in exchange for everyone being paid their share of the spoils.
(BTW: I would totally accept an argument that this button is a silly example to care deeply about. I'm not attached to the example myself: I was replying to someone else who cared about this and so am adopting this frame. There are much much worse decisions being made by Apple and Google these days.)
I'm not trying to make an argument about that feature. I think it's a good, overt example of Microsoft's attitude towards Windows users. There are many others like it and many are more and less offensive.
> I mean, why not?
You seem to have missed my point here (my bad). In the hypothetical scenario (the key points of which you are repeating) the imaginary UX team did their job well, by making the outcome of each choice more clear than they would/could have been and possibly even giving the user more than zero choice in the first place.
> Of course they are! [responsible for the company that employs them]
Of course they're not! It's obviously not that simple.
You seem to be making/repeating a "no one is holding a gun to their head" argument. There's not really any way to argue with that, because it's such an extreme point of view to hold. So I'll just say:
Yes, people make choices. I thought we all knew that. I also thought that we all knew that there are any number of complicating factors involved in any one of those choices. I think you should consider that not everyone has the power or opportunity to do whatever they want to at any point in time.
That sounds an awful lot like "I was just following orders" :/
It has since become even worse. Forcing users onto cloud accounts, installing Zynga-tier crapware as part of routine updates and generally morphing into an advertising platform with a vestigial program loader attached.
The thing about the "maybe later" option is that it at least indicates what is going to happen when you click it. By the time that dialog was being designed, the 'aggressively recommend the new, worse Edge browser' "feature" was already set in stone.
I don't think it's believable that any number of these UX experts at Microsoft would have the power to change something as big as how the new, worse Edge browser is to be "recommended" to users.
I could believe an employee with a UX-related job title strongly recommended that all such choices are worded to explain what they do.