It's good design to provide a worse experience to your customers?
This is why I've always enjoyed Apple products. They don't perform these kind of ridiculous mental gymnastics to justify doing a worse job for their customers.
That sounds like a rather credulous statement in the face of regularly imposing restrictions in the ios ecosystem that punish or restrict users to damage a competitor. It's difficult to believe the ebook war was pro-customer for example.
They clearly usually make decisions in good faith, and generally fuck with the user less often than the competition. Unless it's a core strategic goal in which case they're arguably the worst.
"It's good design to provide a worse experience to your customers?"
Define "worse". People will complain about doing all sorts of things that are better for their long-term interests.
If you're building a product that provides greater value to users with greater user engagement, then it's in everyone's best interest to promote user engagement, even if that means upsetting the people who would rather gain the benefits of your product without actually using it. You can't make all of the people happy all of the time.
> Define "worse". People will complain about doing all sorts of things that are better for their long-term interests.
It's telling that you're comfortable deciding on your user's behalf what is better for their long-term interests, in a way that just so happens to benefit your perceived interests.
> If you're building a product that provides greater value to users with greater user engagement, then it's in everyone's best interest to promote user engagement, even if that means upsetting the people who would rather gain the benefits of your product without actually using it. You can't make all of the people happy all of the time.
If you're building a product that provides greater value with greater engagement, then it's in everyone's best interest to drive engagement by giving users value that makes them want to be engaged, rather than playing tricks like annoying them with e-mails that contain no content.
This is quite ironic, since I'm pretty sure Apple is the king of deciding what's in their users' long-term interests in a way that's actually better for their interests.
Some examples: removal of the floppy drive from the iMac, removal of the optical drive from the Air, removal of "Save As" from MacOS, removal of Google Maps data from the native iOS maps app, "you're holding it wrong" response to the iPhone's antenna issue.
Just because you agree with these decisions or the mental gymnastics required to justify them, doesn't mean they can be ignored.
Clearly I hit a nerve by praising Apple. You can argue that they're doing things contrary to what some user's might want, but I have a hard time seeing where they're doing it for self-interested reasons.
As far as I can tell, the people on the ground there genuinely believe what they're doing is what's best for their users. That's quite a bit different from knowingly sacrificing user experience for something you know isn't best for your users.
It's a shame that the leading comment on hacker news is that smarmy and user-detrimental business behavior is a good thing. Then again, the audience is as much "startup hustlers" as it is hackers, if not more so.
Take the email case for example - while it's mildly annoying to the user to have to click on the link to read the message, it may be proven by data that by doing so they're improving their experience with the product in the long run.
Take a dating site as an example - you click on the link to read the message, which causes you to browse more profiles, which causes you to message a few more users - improving your chances of success overall and creating more interactions for other users. For a service whose goal is to get as many people interacting with potential partners as possible, the slight bit of anti-user design serves a greater purpose and improves the end experience not only for you but for the userbase as a whole.
> Take a dating site as an example - you click on the link to read the message, which causes you to browse more profiles, which causes you to message a few more users - improving your chances of success overall and creating more interactions for other users.
So you don't think users are capable of making that decision on their own? There's no other way to provide a fair exchange of value so that users want to visit the site, other than holding their message(s) hostage?
They're perfectly capable of making that decision on their own.
But they won't, because the amount of knowledge transfer required for them to make that decision is beyond what they're willing to invest.
Take the dating site example - for the user to act optimally (view many profiles and message many people), they'd have to understand not only the full mechanism of the website (pretty simple to do), but also usage trends, psychology and attitudes towards online dating, social attitudes towards dating in general, and a slew of other topics.
All in all, the "here's what you should do and here's how we know" conversation is several hours long. If there was a Matrix-like way to jack your users' brains in and explain the full scope of why they should be behaving a particular way in an understandable, absorbable way, I'm all for it.
But alas, we can't do brain-downloads. Yet.
But what about simply informing them without the messy explanations? Well, it turns out this is what we did in the infancy of consumer websites - and it never worked. "You should message more users" falls on deaf ears - even after many, many attempts to reframe the message in more compelling ways.
This occurs for many reasons, and differs depending on the exact message being conveyed. For dating sites one persistent trouble is getting your users to upload good photos of themselves. We know from an insane amount of data that people make online dating decisions in a highly visual way, and that anyone without a picture is basically shit out of luck - but yet you wouldn't believe how many users think that rule applies to everyone but themselves. Even explicitly throwing up big warnings about not uploading a photo only convinces a small chunk of users to do it - and in the end you'd resort to tactics like holding their search results hostage until a photo is uploaded. And it works. And it improves their experience dramatically because no one replies to someone who doesn't have a profile picture.
I can keep rambling and naming examples like these. There is no shortage here.
I don't think you'll find anyone who thinks that hiding your users' data behind a mouse click is the best thing in the world, but you will find many people who have actually been in the trenches, who have done it the "right" way, and in the end found that the "wrong" way is a necessary (and very minor) evil.
You've also made the assertion elsewhere in this thread that people who work on these products don't care about user satisfaction. This is pretty far off the mark - user satisfaction is one of those things that's pretty easy to measure... and the unfortunate truth is that, in most circumstances, the minor loss in satisfaction from having your message hidden behind a link is more than made up for by the overall improvement in experience.
It's a somewhat common stance from people who haven't worked in consumer web before to assume that these strategies are the result of arrogant people looking down and disrespecting their user base. The reality is that no one I know assigns any value judgment to any of these observations - but we will follow where the data leads us.
> It's a somewhat common stance from people who haven't worked in consumer web before to assume that these strategies are the result of arrogant people looking down and disrespecting their user base. The reality is that no one I know assigns any value judgment to any of these observations - but we will follow where the data leads us.
You can either target the high road, and the customer base (and margins) that come with that, or target just the data while aiming only for mass appeal. I've always worked for companies that target the high, but to each their own.
This is why I've always enjoyed Apple products. They don't perform these kind of ridiculous mental gymnastics to justify doing a worse job for their customers.