Ask HN: Why is today's Internet experience so user hostile?
What has led to this experience? On the top of my head I can see the following reasons:
* Release Often as KPIs for developers
The release often KPI for promotion and bonuses has led to constant changes to 'systems that are working fine' to become ever-changing user experiences. While daily users can gradually phase-in changes, most sites that are casually used will confuse users with completely new error-prone experience.
* Payment Security and Financial Regulations
At least in the EU fraud has led to various tech-related regulation calling as an example for separate apps for IDs and for transaction verification. While it is well-meant, it leads people to check bank statements less often and anecdotally in my family confuses especially elderly users to the point of introducing more opportunity for scams and fraud.
* Patch-work nature of ID & Verification
Captchas, Two-factor SMS, password rules and Authentication Apps have been patched onto the original user/pass system. The experience has become truly annoying with some clear winners: anecdotally more and more people simply use Google/Facebook OAuth as logins to sites. This is fine from a UI perspective, but lacks consumer regulation - what happens if you lose your access and who can you contact if your accounts get compromised/scammed/blocked?
* KPI switch from customer first to business model first
Having gained their audience share, Amazon and Google have switched from a 'customer is king' perspective to one which suits their business model most.
What are other reasons?
382 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 329 ms ] threadI recently went through a McDonalds drive thru for the first time in a very long time and felt a longing for the old menu boards that had items and prices clearly listed instead of these TV screens with all the items and prices scattered about like a teenage girls dream collage.
I walked into a new BestBuy store picked up an item and could not find where to pay, apparently checkouts and queues for customers no longer make sense to their business model. I had three people walk past me before one finally asked if I needed help, I said "yes I would like to buy this" they told me they were going on break but directed me over to what looked like a 1980s nightclub coat check counter, where I waited another 10 minutes before leaving the item on the counter and walking out.
The busses no longer accept cash in my city, you need to buy a prepaid card from a transit hub or from one of their partner retailers. So I need to get a ride to the store to get a bus pass?!?
Everyone knows about self checkouts at grocery stores but now with online shopping services, it is like running through a gauntlet with gig workers blasting their way up and down the isles with no patients for us analog shoppers that don't know exactly where our items are located on the shelves.
At the risk of sounding even more like a crotchety old man, people in public these days spend most of their time with their heads down looking at their phones. I took a couple friends out for lunch and was unable to have a meaningful conversation as they felt whatever was on their phones was more interesting than conversing with the sucker buying them lunch.
There was a movie where a guy got out of prison after a lengthy sentence and his words seem to ring more true to me each and every day: "The world got itself in a damn hurry and it seems there is no place now for a feeble old man like me"
*Regarding Your comment about 2FA I recently purchased a hard to find item from a website that only accepted ShopPay, they required 2FA through my phone which was fine but now every time I load a checkout page that does accept other methods, ShopPay hammers out another text message and has managed to become my default method of payment, it now takes me extra effort to change my payment method back to what I want.
Credit card numbers are constantly being leaked like crazy, and criminals have a hard time testing them by hand. So they rely on automating fake purchases on small shops so they can verify the number is correct.
Another common thing is criminals selling products via non-legitimate shops for very little to "launder" those card numbers. After a customer pays, they buy the proper product on a proper shop with another stolen credit card number. Any investigation takes long enough for those people to just disappear and get away with it.
We gotta fix credit cards as much as we need to fix the web.
Damn, I hate this too
I hate that. If you're expecting something important - fine, take a quick glance to check, if it vibrates. But don't start scrolling while I'm trying to have a conversation with you. Put it down for 20 minutes, you'll be ok - it will still be on there.
> The world got itself in a damn hurry and it seems there is no place now for a feeble old man like me
The Shawshank Redemption
People aren't interesting just because they are people. In fact, most people are boring as hell.
There is such a thing as manners, of course. But that's a two-way street. The other party also has to make an effort to not be boring, and that effort is rarely made either.
Would you please elaborate what you mean by this?
I am familiar with how conversations work or at least how they used to...
This looking at your phone and tuning out of a conversation seems to be somethin new and lacking as you said, manners.
I find demanding someone's attention more rude than not giving attention that's requested. Someone's attention is theirs to give, not something for others to demand.
As for how conversations used to work... When people were boring or uninteresting people would zone out and just uh-hu away. Just smile and nod. It may give the other the illusion that they're not being ignored, but they are.
I agree no one wants to listen to someone drone on and on, or brag about themselves but that is not what was going on in this specific case.
The truth is it was only a lunch and now that I know how going to lunch with these guys works, I just wont bother inviting them again. I just needed to vent a bit I suppose, and you are correct it would be rude to make my opinion of their conduct known to them and would have come across as a demand for their attention.
It's just that I see the sentiment repeated online rather a lot, while whenever I see the situation crop up offline, it's usually someone zoning out of an uninteresting conversation. I felt that observation and viewpoint needed some representation online.
Shawshank?
No logic or reasoning.
I havent moved for the last 2 years and my daughter has grown her first years by seeing her grandparents on Skype. Im not risking what a friend lived through, stuck 6 months in Europe unable to come back.
New people entering these days do so without their family and with the clear understanding they re stuck here for a while. 0-case policy is not even working so well, since the last week we had an "explosive" cluster of 5 cases (so far) because a now fired freight airline employee went out sick everywhere ...
The only potential exit will be China, maybe, if they dont get scared by our recent uptick, if you like to install their gps-based tracking system. And you better not be foreign-looking and sick while in China, you're never coming back :D
The best story was when they still allowed exceptions for diplomatic staff and families and the kids of a Saudi official decided they were too good for self isolation and created a mini cluster isolating entire buildings for re-test. Or the Dubai IT guy who's now in jail after he forced the city to retest 800k philipinos helpers because he lied and contaminated some going to a party (and slowed down tracking since he lied to protect his friends from quarantine) before leaving his 1-week long (+short quarantine at the time, he's the reason we have 3 weeks now) vacation...
So your 100 euros wasted, Im not crying for them :p
[0] https://fly.randox.com/
I do get the complaint regarding going back and forth from Ireland. The transit between NI and Ireland should be smoother and not require you to pay extra. However, if you’re coming from Portugal, the US, etc I think it’s entirely reasonable,
I was pretty happy to pay “only” 100 EUR for the next one, which was to go between two Schengen countries in August, yay borderless Europe!
First of all, private COVID test producing corporations are prolonging the pandemic by suggesting to gov't that testing be done to a higher degree than necessary? Why would governments fall for that? Oh, you mean they're all corrupt. Well, then you should call all government procurements corrupt, not just this one.
It would have been safer for people to take a rapid test outdoors.
I believe this is the result of the same thing that causes all the chaos in all human fields, lack of consciousness. We live in a very distracted time, COVID is still one more stressor on top of all the other things we have to manage in the world we've built to be inhospitable to mental health.
There's a shift happening in certain areas, but I think the old guard of tech is due for a revolution of some kind. My two cents, to start we need to stop building things with such low-level tools.
Interesting -- my take is more that we should throw away the ever growing pile of high level tools and architecture and cruft and start all over again at the low level (I think accumulated complexity -- and accumulated expectations due to complexity -- cause a lot of issues). Heck maybe start by writing an OS and some useful applications that run on a $1 microcontroller that you can hand-solder on a cheap two-layer PCB. 256kB of SRAM and four megabytes of flash ought to be enough for quite a lot..
That said I don't necessarily mean we should abandon all progress e.g. in programming languages and revert to assembly and C'89.
Edit; in the same vain: microservices etc are not helping either. When done well they are supposed to help, but in reality I only see systems that can work when all microservices are up and responsive; if one is down, the entire thing is dead. Why didn't you make a monolith? Now you have brittle all over the place and devops with 247 stress.
I doubt they rewrote it just for the sake of rewriting it in a new framework, it costs money for no benefit. What's more likely, which I have witnessed multiple times, is that the original codebase was an unmantainable mess, hard to support and extend, with abandoned/unmaintained third-party dependencies, and fewer and fewer developers on the market who know the stack. Sometimes it costs as much (or even less) to rewrite the whole thing than to refactor the original. And when the decision to rewrite the codebase is made, they choose the most popular tools/frameworks so that it was easier to find new developers, and today it happens to be react and the like.
It's like we're in a downward tech-debt spiral.
Is it going to take an Ever-Given-like or Covid-like disruption of e-commerce that shuts down society to cause us to wake up and take this seriously? (Or have government step in and set standards and requirements for e-commerce.)
One of the larger insurers is doing this now; I told them not to because it makes no sense. But they drank the koolaid and doing react to svelte rewrites for no reason besides a new cto.
The churn in companies is high and it is not good.
Nostalgia might be staining your view here… I don’t remember any airline or banking apps that have ever been “perfectly fine and fast”.
American Express, on the other hand, is the real WTF.
I cannot say the same of the website of my French bank and its multiple rewrite over the last 8 years, which still provides less features and make them harder to reach each time.
Or the website of the national lottery and its countless rewrites, each of them getting slower, more inconsistent, and displaying less information on each screen.
Or the website of the national weather forecast, which gets worse at each iteration: now there's a 'weekly' view that shows 5 days; and I cannot for the love of God find the curves of snow and other parameters from the automated altitude weather stations any more (at each iteration, they have become harder to find, but with last iteration there is no access any more; someone's got direct links to the pictures URL on a website, but for how long?). Each time they make an update, the site is completely broken for days or weeks, before they sort out their crap and return the new shit to a more functional state.
Or the website where I did put my bicycle recordings for years without a problem and without feeling the need for any extra feature, which all of a sudden cannot be displayed any more by my old browser.
In all those cases (except the last, which is probably more recent), the needed features have been implemented for at least 15 years. They were working 15 years ago. Yet they got rewritten multiple times, and not for the best. Oh yeah, sorry, for the weather forecast website (which is a public service belonging to the legal type which is the most integrated with the State), there is a new feature added at each iteration: more advertisement, and now more tracking too! The site has become unbrowsable without and ad blocker.
And BTW now, I am met more and more often with the infamous "your browser is not compatible with this site, please update to Chrome / Edge / ..." messages. I thought this kind of things were dead and buried. They were dead and buried, for 10 or 15 years, but now dreadful times are starting again and they rise from their grave.
There are different kinds of microservices, some are infrastructure critical (for example, we have an auth service, if it goes down the whole thing goes down because users simply can't login anymore - and it doesn't matter if it's a microservice or a monolith, the end result is same), others are not so critical, for example we implement additional product modules (purchased separately) as microservices which have their own SPAs so if they go down basically only one page becomes unavailable and the system as a whole is unaffected.
Microservices aren't necessarily about 100% SLA, they help scale teams and deployment (however I'd say it only makes sense in larger organizations).
You could make a monolith where the UI keeps working even if some of the monolith's endpoints don't work, and you can make a microservices architecture where the UI still doesn't cope if a microservice is down.
I think the pros of microservices are: - deploy smaller - you only update the parts of the system you need to when you modify something. - different technologies - you can use Ruby here and Go there if you like; very un-locked-in and you can maximise the value of any libraries you have. E.g. if you have a number crunching bit of your app you could make a Python microservice with numpy etc installed. - independent data stores - pro and con, of course, but it's nice if you can decouple bits of your system and again use mongo here, postgres there if you need to - as an microservices-based application grows in scope, the number of engineers working on different bits of it can scale, as they can deliver independently. It's harder to scale engineers working on the same codebase
overusage of SPA of SPA framework (Next.js etc) has caused a lot of problem for users who are used using browser, which is most of web users. It breaks open the link in another tab, back/forward flow. It is not SPA is bad, however if you chose to go that route then design the app with screen size mind and you got think it as an Application instead of a web page.
Next.js is amazing, and it could make any airline/bank website blazing fast. Are said banks hiring the same devs from Google that are building the newer version of Next? Nope, they're hiring 3rd party companies in Romania.
React et al is far from plug and play. Quality of implementation means a lot more than it used to in terms of performance
All to output something along the lines of
"select * from meter_readings where accountid = ?", $accountid "select * from bills where accountid = ?", $accountid
In the end I never actually got what I wanted.
React was open sourced in 2013. It's not that "new" - there are plenty of people who've been using it for 7+ years now.
> did a rewrite from php with js/jquery to react
The problem isn't the rewrite from php to react (or any x to any y), but the management saying "ok, we need to rewrite this thing in 'y'. You have two days to learn it. And you'd better show 40 productive hours of work on your timesheets in the meanwhile."
I updated one of my oldest saas app written 17 years ago to the latest php version from apache to nginx and the latest php and it works 100%. That makes me sleep well at night.
It has 60000 active users and costs $4/mo to host and has not had downtime in over 10 years. How is this new stuff holding up?
That's not really very long, IMO. There's a huge amount of churn in programming systems these days. Once upon a time, writing compilers and designing languages was something that nerds did for fun and instruction, in their spare time. People didn't get paid to write compilers.
Incidentally, I've never heard of "svelte".
And shareholders don't care who suffers. They care purely about profits.
The solution is to introduce laws to reign in "profits at the expense of others". When chemical companies were polluting the ground (superfund sites), we introduced laws to stop them for the good of society. In my opinion, Facebook is the new superfund site, it's just that this time, it is digital and psychological poison, not chemical. So we should just deny them the most user-hostile (e.g. most profitable) behavior through laws.
Every time I have to hunt for the "log in with an existing account" button (after mistakenly trying to login to what turns out to be the sign-up form) I want to punch a "UX "expert" in the face so hard it knocks the shitty dye job off their side-shave hairdo.
Now you have two problems.
None of the changes so far seem to be catching industry wide. Perhaps it’s time for a change that comes with teeth.
However, as the internet became mainstream and competitive, more successful players realized that they can employ dark patterns to increase their revenue by taking advantage of users (lock-in, difficulty unsubscribing, making cloud accounts mandatory, etc).
It's 2022 and I think all the companies everywhere feel like they have no choice but to learn from the best. The pricing tactics used by Apple, are now used by many other companies in different industries and even companies that were non-tech are now using tech with its dark patterns.
Who do I think is to blame? Investors of all kinds. They are making it harder for entrepreneurs who care about their customers to stay in business by throwing money and exploiting consumers weakness for deals/freebies. It's just the mindset of growth at all and any cost, that's what I'm seeing all around me on the internet and offline (by using the internet in some cases).
I'm not sure. It might also be the opposite: this might be the precise time for a new business that can cut out all the bullshit and give the users what they want. It's not just the HN crowd that is frustrated with Modern Tech.
This is 100% the root cause.
Without exponential growth targets, almost all the ills mentioned wouldn't have been required.
And specifically, without exponential growth targets for companies with market cap already above $1T.
I'm convinced we'd be living in a better world if MAMAA would have said "Okay, our core business is mature. We're going to run it as a cash printing machine but with lower growth. If you want growth, here are companies we're spinning off."
Unfortunately, the reality of the software dev and infrastructure economies probably requires halo behemoths. For the former, so they can be compensated in equity, and the latter, because there's only enough demand for a few at minimal-cost-per-unit scale.
Case in point: Windows. requires an expensive license, but still pushes ads down your throat on every occasion, collects too much telemetry, and keeps nagging you after every update until you accept having your data collected.
What could we replace capitalism with? Won't underlying human behavior remain the same?
https://dietsinreview.com/diet_column/11/no-fat-girls-allowe...
I am trying to be more positive and feel it is important to remember every comment on a forum is also not an invitation to an argument.
That means they can also now spend unimaginable amounts of money hiring people, which distorts the natural relationships between performance and pay for people working in software development. Many people have come into this industry who are relatively young and inexperienced and don't really know what they're doing at all, yet expect to earn many times the average wage for someone in their demographic on day one and then to increase their income still further as they rapidly job-hop.
Neither those people nor most of their peers or even most of their management teams have ever had to bootstrap a software product where the continued success of their employer depended on making something that users actually wanted to use and customers actually wanted to pay for.
Many of them never work on the same software product for more than a year or two so they aren't evaluated on the long-term benefits of any work they do either. Instead the path to career success often involves high visibility, short-term projects. That brings to mind the old joke that something must always be done and this is something so we're doing it. Or some less flattering comments on modern corporate management and focussing on the next quarterly statement because that's what your astronomically large bonus depends on as CxO.
In short, the reason user satisfaction is often a secondary concern if it's a concern at all in modern software is that a lot of the tech firms seen as highly successful and desirable places to work made stupidly large amounts of money early on and now the incentives for both the tech firms and their employees are heavily distorted because normal financial incentives just don't apply in this crazy little corner of the world.
So maybe it's mostly the USA.
Some of it has gotten better I'm told by friends and colleagues, but for my bank, there's still no built-in money transfer option between the same banks or others, there's a requirement to us some third party service (with a non-trivial transaction fee) Card to Card transfers aren't really a thing, again relying on third party services to do the transfers (at cost).
It's not so much that the US can't do good things, but a lot of infrastructure/convenience that the non-US world enjoys is certainly possible, but the way that a lot of the infrastructure is built up and supported simply is because of a preference to offload such services to third party providers that just introduce an extra signup/process/fee.
I don't know the full details of payment processing and why it seems like the card to card transfers within the bank app isn't really widely done, or why the confirmation codes for online purchases isn't a thing or even why contactless was such a struggle for the US for so long (when I visited in 2019, I think only at the Apple store did they have a reader that worked with contactless pay...)
Nobody is forced to continue using dark-pattern software, nobody was forced to use Apple and tie their credit-card to their "apple cloud account", yet normal users dont see a problem with it at all and just continue even paying for software which is hostile to them and their interests.
Your question is like, "Why does DRM exist it is actively hostile to buyers of content".
Previously the internet was better since the average internet user avoided scams, but now the users are seeking out scams to indulge in.
If anything it’s policy makers, investors and industrialists.
If you want to participate in society, you need a smartphone, and guess what? The whole world is okay with only 2 companies doing this….
How would users vote now with their wallet when everything is tailored for users having either an iPhone or an Android phone?
(Yes, I know alternatives exists, even alternatives not built on top of Android, but it's extremely limited and targets very tech savvy users, possibly requiring coding skills to use to their fullest).
I own a pine phone. It's all but un-useable in any meaningful sense of the word. I own a brick and motor and have just been mandated by the government to run their version of the vaccine passport app.
It's android OR ios.
What choices do I have here?
What about people that don't have a phone? Or a 'dumb'-phone?
Where I live any valid QR code works, be it paper or even just a picture of the paper. No need to use an app.
This small business is not allowed to let customers enter the shop if they can't validate their vaccination status. To do this one needs a QR code reader on a phone. Practically speaking there are no alternatives.
Also, they're not saying that your business needs to run this app, they are saying that your business needs to verify Covid certificates and offering these apps as one way to do it. But it's not the only way - for example, it may be less convenient, but you can do that QR code scanning + Covid certificate validation on any computer with a connected camera using a web service (https://app.digitalcovidcertchecker.gov.ie/ is one random example, there is also open source code to roll your own checks for EU Covid certificates in some custom system if you need to), and there you can use Windows or Linux or whatever, there's no need for a smartphone as such. In fact, if the parent poster's Pinephone can run a browser and expose a camera to it, then perhaps it might work out of the box on the Pinephone without needing a special app.
It's so ubiquitous now that even if you want to get out of this duopoly, you can't really.
Often choices are made for short term benefits that come with a long term negative trade off. ie choosing features like a phone camera even though the device also disregards the user’s privacy.
In other cases, choices aren’t even made by consumers directly. Like when a company acquires potential competition before they’re able to grow into a threat. Or even a company uses their growing economic power and position for regulatory capture.
Sometimes a company just breaks away from their competition and end up the only competitive choice in the market and are able To cement their position through the means above.
Especially following the previous cases, users sometimes don’t choose at all because there remain no meaningful choices in the ecosystem they purchase in.
Windows Mobile was a barely consumer-friendly version of Windows CE with a truckload of vendor-specific implementations (which made for a very inconsistent user experience) and the abomination called Windows Phone was completely incompatible on the app side with everything that existed on the Windows Mobile world and on the developer side with everything else.
Symbian was (effectively) a Nokia-only OS, which meant that developers were pretty scarce and again it was incompatible on the developer and user experiences.
Then came iOS as the first "disruptor" where the jailbreakers (!) of the first days showed just how sorely behind the competition was... the first iPhone was EDGE-only ffs and still it was radically different and better than everything on the market including the back-then flagship models with Windows Mobile from HTC. Android followed up and obliterated the competition, which was easy enough to do given Google's budget and Microsoft's complete inability to react - the iPhone was released in 2007 and the comical disaster of Windows Phone took until 2010!
The rest is history, everything not from Apple moved over to Android - the longest holdout was Blackberry with their moat of business users and the BlackBerry Messenger. And somewhere along the line, Samsung managed to destroy both HTC and Sony... what remains now on the market is Samsung, Xiaomi, BBK (Vivo/OPPO) and a bunch of low budget stuff fighting for the scraps. Very sad indeed.
Maybe the most remarkable part of all, that had nothing to do with corporate behemoths (AFAIK), was the speed with which society pivoted to embrace the smart phone (specifically, the internet more generally).
We live in a completely different world than we did just one decade ago.
But I feel a bit like the OP. Soon I may just grab some hardtack, my muzzleloader and head out to the mountains and spend the next decade collecting beaver pelts. Cookie settings be damned.
I presume your beavers also come with healthcare, and the stores where you'd buy anything will still take cash.
Society has always been fast to embrace new technologies, particularly if profits were to be made or economies of scale made prior luxuries affordable for everyone. Industrialization, the advent of the rail age or air travel as mass transit, and now the Internet.
We're using CPUs with more processing power than multiple million dollar 70s-era mainframes in disposable pregnancy or covid tests, and a modern single (!) GPU can blast a 90s-era supercomputer to pieces with GFLOP/s performance.
While the government is aware that there is a group of people who can't or won't use a smartphone or their app, there is no technological solution on the horizon, despite viable alternatives for 2FA existing (like WebAuthn). This is what I mean by “all but demanding”.
Because you do have a right to view your medical records, there is a fallback option which essentially means going to the healthcare provider and asking for paper records. This is behavioural nudging taken to the extreme.
1: Broader than just DigiD actually, supporting European eIDAS standards, but for 99% of citizens this means DigiD.
I think this just illustrates how much easier smart phones make things. If we didn’t have smart phones for example, all your interactions with the government would be as cumbersome and inconvenient as this fall back option.
In the EU this fortunately can be done trivially with a paper QR code as well.
So there is a requirement to scan a QR code and there is no option to enter the building for people who don’t have a smart phone?
“or need to display Vaccine status.”
You can’t display your vaccine status without a smart phone?
“My bank now requires I run their mobile App to be able to log in, even if I'm on a PC.”
Is your bank run by the government?
“Most OTP authorisation requires you to receive an SMS code.”
SMS is available on any mobile phone, not just smart phones. Also many SMS OTP implementations include the option to receive a phone call.
“Government departments are now only contactable via the Net, so a smart phone is the minimum unless you have a PC.”
Okay so the government requires you have a computer and internet access, but not a smart phone.
Speaking from my experiences in Europe and South Asia.
So effectively companies and the government are telling us that we need one of these to get avail conveniences and in some cases to be able to use their service at all…
With policies that mandate the use of digital vaccine certificates, apps and QR codes being ubiquitous, we’re effectively being forced to become a customer of Apple or Google one way or another
I cannot enter or place an order at most coffee shops today without a smartphone
Really? I wonder where you are.
I own a smartphone, but I don't carry it with me; I've never been to any kind of shop that doesn't accept my debit card, other than for small-value purchases like a bag of onions from a greengrocer, for which cash is sometimes required.
This is why desktop Linux never gets anywhere. Even if one distro was dominant in users, that’s completely decoupled from it getting the lions share of developer support and it wouldn’t give it any advantage in resources. There’s no feedback loop to elevate a dominant distro. Maybe that’s a good thing, perhaps the value in desktop Linux is it’s diversity and ability to address niche specialisation, at the price of market power.
There is a feedback loop in commercial server distros because that is a commercial market, hence RedHat’s dominance.
Only to a point then it crosses over into exploitation. If users could switch OS's more easily then there would probably be more of them in widespread use, like browsers. As it is most people have to buy a new device to change OS.
Websites themselves become sticky because of network effects and familiarity.
There's a chap from RedHat here, telling me that Linux is commercially viable.
Actually ChromeOS is arguably mass market. That's all beside the point though really. It doesn't change the fact that the dynamics that drive consolidation are actually in a very large part motivated by user self interest.
Users are conditioned to lower their standards, not unlike workers in a dangerous environment or citizens of an inept or dishonest (or worse) government.
Such users/workers/citizens rarely take a stand.
Usability (UX) is a hard commitment to maintain for a supplier with little compassion, and software security is just an interesting hypothesis given the prevailing tools.
Consumers have been sold a dream, and after the tech advances and sweatshoping can't go farther, they would rather eat skimpflation day after day than pay more. This is most evident online, where a good chunk of the population expect everything to be free.
They expect it for free but it's not like the product can actually be bought.
I wonder how many people over the past 15 or so years have been denied a job because a tech-savvy HR person combed through social media / forum profiles and read things they didn't like? And if you think that wasn't happening then, you're out of your mind. This was happening in World of Warcraft guilds, for God's sakes... players with "wrong" opinions were kept out of certain guilds by """""""well-meaning""""""" officers of those guilds, so I assure you, it was happening in the real world.
But today, as then, you never knew about it, so you had no knowledge that your employment was denied because most American states are at-will and it's not like HR would have said you have a "problematic" stance regarding <insert issue X>.
This is but one small example of the "progress" we've seen on the "modern web".
And all those online things are way easier once you're committed to the Clown® Computing, Clown® fatigue notwithstanding.
So you opt to not have those things, and for all intents and purposes you look like a digital hermit with a disturbing tendency for self-flagellation. "Why do you keep doing these things to yourself?"
So, yeah, so far, personal comfort beats the hostility. So far.
I think that's a great acceptable answer to OP's question.
You can't really fight against results. Putting an annoying modal asking for an email will give you lots of email leads. Sending newsletters will give more returns to the website. Sending desktop notifications whenever there's a new article works and gives more visits. A website that takes 20 seconds to load is not an issue. Advertisements give more than zero moneys.
The reason it gives positive results is because this is "fine" for enough people. Some people are totally okay with having 5000 unread emails. The web is slow because computer/OS/ISPs are greedy. Ads? Look at television. Just blame cookie banners on the government.
Why it's fine for a segment of people, I don't know. Maybe they have no choice, maybe they don't know better, maybe they are completely fine with it. All I know is that they are the target users and I'm not, and companies are ok with either losing me or forcing me to go trough this bullshit. Or maybe they don't even have to worry, since there's no competition.
You can fight against results - lying in advertising by saying that your Patented Snake Oil Tincture cures everything really does "work" and bring in money, but it was stopped by regulation; lying that this knock-off is really SuperBrandItem does work and bring results, but trademark laws significantly reduced it; selling things that look ok but break immediately are solved by various warranty and fit-for-purpose laws, etc, etc.
This is fundamentally a coordination problem that can't really be solved by individual users separately "voting with their wallets" (as past experience shows - none of the problems listed above were solved by consumer choices) but can be solved by coordinated requirements, with the users as a community voting in standards and regulations for commerce that are mandatory for every seller.
This is why I rarely use the same email address longer than 1 year now or try to manage different accounts for different spam. I just change the password to random crap and forget about that email account, while setting up a new one.
I think the sad reality is that, despite how people like to think of themselves as rational actors who consider the pros and cons of each purchase, these tactics work. The only way to curtail stuff like this is by interfering in the free market - i.e. regulation.
[1] https://business.time.com/2014/01/31/j-c-penneys-pricing-is-...
crickets
And no, average users have never avoided scams, email spam is older than web.
But anyway I agree with you that we need to organize. Voting with our dollars as atomic individuals works in limited ways but won’t change things on a large scale.
If you have a phone with open-source firmware for the modem, I will buy it immediately. Who is taking my money?
I am concerned about firmware because it is being used to take ownership of our devices away from us.
Oh, you could fix your device by replacing the chip, but we own the firmware and it's a crime to copy it. Also we can uodate the device at any time and add or remove fubctionality without you even knowing.
I can’t subscribe to any local newspaper without a digital opt-in and a phone opt-out…
…a bunch of these services are much harder to avoid than you think
that's how we got clean air and water. Just saying.
Of course not “intentionally” but if you manage to have an even slightly complex tax situation and not get tricked and report something wrong, props to you!
(I am not a tax lawyer nor an accountant, but I have done this 4 out of the last 6 years.)
The last time I ran into one (call to cancel for insurance) I also filed an official complaint and made it clear it was the sole reason I was dumping them in favor of a competitor.
It's not much of a punch back but it probably had an effect.
While technically true in terms of theoretical modelling of a market economy, I don't think that's a fair diagnosis in practice. Were early-19th century English workers forced to take jobs with 6-day working weeks and >12 hours a day? Technically no. But did they have a choice? And was there an adequate incentive to even provide such a choice?
Of course nobody "is forced" to use dark-pattern software, but as it stands today, normal users have no choice on the matter. I would argue that potential user-friendly-non-dark-pattern competitors are unable to break into the market of the Microsoft-Apple-Google oligopoly not because user hostility and dark-patterns are in of themselves a competitive advantage nor of any economic value as a whole. Instead, I think that the imbalance of power between consumer and industry, network effects, and the disproportionate capital investment needed to disrupt the current market mean that no alternative can take any significant hold.
The choice to not use shit software is easier than going on a strike and demanding 8h work day instead of 14h. Which our ancestors also did, some died for the cause.
I for one, do not use and have not used and especially not payed for user-hostile software, beginning since 2000.
It is possible, you dont really have to accept shit or keep on using shit. Everytime that click feels wrong, that idea seems off, dont click it, close that software suite and uninstall.
You do not have to accept that License.
The vast majority of people are not like you. Most people succumbed to these practices over a gradual period of a decade and as such are locked-in habit-wise to this with an attention span that is hard-pressed not to focus on the matter.
It's same for most of the user-hostile software. Alternatives are not as intuitive, easy to use, or easy to find. Also, free software is not guaranteed to be sustained or be in front of the pack.
I use Linux, and free software to the most extent I can use, but there are some closed source stuff which is expensive but is soundly ahead when compared to open source alternatives. I can break the sweat and write a similar code, but how can I make sure that it's sustained when it has a A/GPLv3 license?
I never had to justify it, nobody forced me or expected me to be using Office, they expected me to deliver a thesis or other document. When there was the "5% expectation", kindly decline, uninstall.
The road I picked, was not always success or easy, I got failed in high school "informatics" class because I could not show that I could use Office. Twice. I refused to learn Office because I had already learned to produce documents and presentations (websites) with a computer using free open source software.
> Alternatives are not as intuitive, easy to use, or easy to find.
Whats ease is what you have learned. Had you began with Linux since 1999 you would not even know how to do anything on Windows or MacOSX. I literlaly cant even scroll or type on a collegues macbook or find my way around anything. Very hard to use, not intuitive.
The "easy to use intuitive" eventually becomes the dark UX hell it is today, a slow descent. If you accept the software will think for you, well it will. Now you dont have to think, youre not in control, just enjoy the UX dark patterns and ads.
You had it easy it seems. When someone sends you a document which contains convoluted structures and only renders in a very recent version of Microsoft Word, and you have to fill it for work purposes, you have no other choice (We're a Linux shop, but not everyone we interact uses Libre Office, so yeah).
> Whats ease is what you have learned. Had you began with Linux since 1999 you would not even know how to do anything on Windows or MacOSX.
I started with a C64 in 1989, jumped to a 486 some years later and installed Linux in 1998, when there was no documentation, and dial-up was kinda hard without any. So I double booted Linux and Windows for a lot of years, and despised Windows since Windows 95. However, I can use all three without problems, making all other ecosystems work with my Linux systems (I adapt them to talk with Linux, not vice versa).
> The "easy to use intuitive" eventually becomes the dark UX hell it is today, a slow descent.
No, it's not. Automatically adding another bullet point is not. Marking the center of a shape and snapping to it is not. Having sensible defaults and intuitive key bindings are not dark patterns. Also fixing bugs in two days, getting direct replies from developers, your feedback taken seriously are not dark patterns. The bitter part is they can be all done in FOSS, very easily (I've developed such software for some projects, and it's well loved), but developers are not motivated or bothered by it.
You always, always have a choice. Throw away the victim and obey mentality. Freedom is taken, not served to you.
When someone send you a trojan horse.virus.exe you do not have to open it. Neither do you have to open a convoluted proprietary binary format requiring you to buy a license to read said binary. Politely decline, reject. You have that power.
You say how you've failed informatics classes for failing to pass MS Office test. If that's not "forced", I don't know what is.
There are many battles worth fighting when it comes to freedom, and choosing to fail a test to demonstrate freedom is quite admirable. And quite silly. I've done things like that too, and I am fully aware that they can be both. They make for good stories too.
Similarly, I could choose not to use Windows to file my taxes when the country has switched to obligatory online-filing and only provides Windows software: I am not "forced", but I could be liable for heavy tax fines if I don't do it. Or I could reverse engineer the code and develop tooling that works on free software. I could possibly even get that marked unconstitutional if I am willing to put a long fight in court (and spend a lot of money on legal representation too). Nowhere does it say in our constitution that I've got to use Windows to be a citizen.
Where we draw the line and what's the effort we are willing to expel to fight against the tide is each individual's prerogative.
We do need people to fight against the tide. But it's not wrong for anyone not to, because there are other things worth fighting for too! And some simply need to survive.
>I got failed in high school "informatics" class because I could not show that I could use Office. Twice
How curious.
By having a "--help" which tells you about the four different kinds of regular expression it can accept, and nothing about what regular expressions are. By saying "basic regular expression (BRE)." as if someone read somewhere in a textbook that they should explain an acronym before using it. Then never uses the acronym again except where to repeat "basic regular expression (BRE)", sounding like an alien trying to imitate good documentation.
By refusing (unless forced) to list files which exist and do important-to-the-user things like control settings I care about, because said filenames begin with a dot. Arguing that this is helpful to the user to hide information, but at the same time defaulting to showing file sizes in bytes and only showing human readable filenames when poked. By defaulting to showing files in columns which is better for a human to read and only showing file-per-line when asked. These are a mess of defaults - for a human, show files in columns, hide files, show sizes in human readable. For a machine, show file-per-line, size in bytes, all files. And if hiding files for user friendliness, don't hide my config files, hide OS files I never use.
By having so many options for controlling output formatting because the system refuses to do anything helpful (like have/enforce/encourage some platform standard structured format) such that every tool has to have this, and every tool does it differently. That's incredibly user-hostile. The idea that you have to learn something, isn't. The idea that no tool respects what you've learned and makes you learn a different way to do the same things over and over and over, is.
By refusing to match text case insensitively unless specifically told to; that default is the wrong way round for user friendliness, it's the one geeks want to be technically correct, not the one normal English-using people want to get tasks done conveniently.
Like the rejection of video and whining "Ugh is there a transcript anywhere, only normies watch video, I'm a superior text reader so I need a transcript" and willfully "not understanding" that looking at human faces and hearing voices has meaning to people, to demonstrate membership of the "I don't have a TV" superior group. And the related rejection of GUIs, the way GUIs seem to have come out of Xerox Parc, to macOS and Windows, then Linux gets GUIs which are cargo-cult copies of Windows and macOS designs. There's probably a reason why pinch-to-zoom started and got popular at Apple before being aped into Windows, when you'd naively assume that Linux with more ways to connect weird hardware to it, more access to source code, more culture of customisation, would have come up with all kinds of things like that earlier. I'm going to suggest that reason is the embarassment of using something a normie would use, with the forgivable exception of a tiling window manager for laying out terminal windows.
You're presumably going to ar...
The point I'm trying to make is, if you're exchanging files and doing collaborative work, you don't have all the freedom to do whatever you want to do.
Easy. I don’t want to give Microsoft money and libreoffice/notes are fine for all of the basic use cases.
What if some business partner sends you a completely loaded Office document to fill/work together/whatnot?
Most people I know still use spacebar to right aline the date in a word document.
We don't handle these files everyday, but it's a necessity. If the data inside a file can be transported with something FOSS, it's already carried with that software.
So, in my case, at least; I'd rather do my research and create more GPL software rather than trying to convince established companies to switch to LibreOffice.
Nor is commercial software. In fact it's more likely than free software to become abandonware.
I don't believe the lack of capital investment is a problem. There's mind-boggling amounts of capital being wasted on the metaverse and blockchain bubble that could be directed towards building a disruptive competitor to any of these companies' flagship products.
Rather, I see the problem being that any time a viable competitor appears, it just gets acquired so there's no longer any need for the incumbent to compete. Case in point, Instagram actually became the next hot social network after Facebook, but Facebook the company retained relevance and market share by simply buying them rather than competing. Google has also acquired a bunch of more niche search engines over its lifetime (that's a little more subtle in that none of those alone were going to beat Google like Instagram did to Facebook, but by nipping niche search providers in the bud, Google consolidated the market share around its product).
I think the second sentence contradicts the first. There's little capital being spent on building a Facebook or Google competitor. VCs are chasing "the next big thing" instead. The other reality is that VCs are going to want Google-like revenue and continuous growth from a Google replacement they fund - this means that eventually dark patterns will come into play to squeeze more money from existing customers.
Freee market delivers best results for the people, and if it doesn't, it's the people's fault!
I went Apple precisely because it was not hostile at all compared to Windows and Google’s forest of adware. The minute you give me a non-user hostile OS (phone or desktop), I’ll PAY $300/year for it.
But even Ubuntu returned Amazon results when I searched the local application (Don’t get me started on technicalities of “But maybe you want your start menu to display your friend’s most recent purchases? How can Ubuntu know? But they’ve recognized their mistake after going to production and rolled back parts of it!”)
It’s time to stop blaming the user and start blaming the EU for their badly-written cookie banner laws.
Are you saying that EU cookie law is to blame for software being hostile to its users? I can't see how that can be.
The problem with beating dark patterns there specifically is the sheer number of them...
The law doesn't call for cookie banners. It calls for consent. I'm willing to auto-consent, because I use a cookie blocker.
I think this plague of popups is temporary, and is going to abate; eventually the browser-makers will incorporate auto-consent, as they have incorporated cookie controls.
And I believe that a lot of those consent popups are an attempt to annoy europeans into lobbying for repeal of the law. Ain't gonna happen - we're quite pleased with it.
This is an intensely user hostile view point, ironically enough. "The dark patterns being foisted upon the average user are their own fault, they deserve what they get"
In fact, I think this attitude is how the developers and product managers responsible for this stuff sleep at night, "these people deserve this for their moral failings, so what I'm doing doesn't make me a terrible person"
How would my mom switch from her crappy bank app? That app that the bank is kind of forcing her to use by making the in person experience so terrible and, well, because of COVID. There is only one bank in her town, I guess she could start driving "to the city" for banking but, surprise, all those banks have equally shitty apps.
She could switch from Facebook to ... what exactly? Her extended family are all on Facebook, her grandkids are posting pics of the great grandkids on Facebook. Yeah, she deserves the disaster that is Facebook.
Surprise, after 20 years the developers and managers assume they are building software for retarded un-learnable "grandparents and mothers", the end result is well stupid software.
And when there’s money involved, there’s always incentive to cater to your lowest common denominator user.
I’ve watched many in-person and remote use testing sessions, some people just have no clue how to use technology, yet you still have to design apps and websites for them to use. These people aren’t necessarily dumb or anything like that, they just don’t understand technology.
With dark patterns those things actually become more complicated.
Dumbed down and user-hostile are independent things. Dark patterns are being introduced for nefarious purposes. No one is explaining away things like "click to subscribe, wait 3 hours in a phone queue to unsubscribe" as required for "grandmothers"
The software isn't stupid, it's intentionally and cleverly manipulative and user hostile.
It really is the grandmother excuse "you the user dont know what the unsubscribe button is doing, so we ask you to wait 3h and confirm 4 times because maybe you are clicking by mistake since you dont know where and what you are clicking".
Under the enforcement policy statement issued today, businesses must follow three key requirements or be subject to law enforcement action, including potential civil penalties:
[0] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2021/10/ftc-r...It is just a fact of life that a sizeable portion of users "accept" dark patterns, and PMs consider that as a sign of success.
However I strongly doubt users are doing it by choice. IMO it's actually because of lack of choices, lack of knowledge or learned helplessness.
That might be controversial, but to me the point is that A/B tests and KPIs are the wrong incentives, not that users are stupid.
The comment I'm replying to is LITERALLY blaming "normal users" for these problems.
The people making the garbage is still the ones to blame for the garbage itself. The reason people make such garbage is because a subset of people accept it. But nobody is saying the people accepting it are doing it out of an evilness (maybe they're saying it's out of "dumbness", but I would disagree with that too).
The comment however is wrong in that it is perhaps not possible for the users to keep themselves from being victimized, without some recourse to the law.
The mass, thus the normal user, is indeed the enabler.
But this isn't the fault of users, "normal" or otherwise; enablers don't make people abuse alcohol or whatever. Alcoholics who blame their enablers are deceiving themselves, and if designers try to blame users for their design errors, they are making the same mistake.
A lot of the crapness, AFAICS, is down to mobile. Mobile browsers and desktop/laptop browsers are different, and are used differently. And mobile browsers aren't all alike. Since most website hits are now from mobiles, designers are optimising for mobile, and then their employers stop the project before the desktop/laptop work is done. This really annoys me, because I'm too blind and fat-fingered to use a mobile as much more than a phone.
I think the crapness of the modern web[1] is going to eventually result in a rebellion. Like, the crapness seems to be snowballing. I mean, popups? What? I thought we got rid of them 15 years ago, because they were crap. How come people think they're now OK?
[1] The OP spoke of "todays's internet experience", but all he spoke of was the web. The rest of the internet seems to be working as well, or better, than it was working yesterday.
I've accepted many a dark pattern because of sunk costs and a lack of energy, time or options. I dont always have the energy to fight and punish.
Ultimately market forces are about collective power, not a collective representation of "what people want". A lot of people would like us to blur the two but they are distinct.
Everyone I know hates Comcast and the defacto monopolies in many areas with internet service. (Among many examples). But except in a few small areas, no one seems to even be effectively pushing back.
‘We’ve reached a hopefully temporary equilibrium point where corporate interests and ability to extract value vs user interests (and their lack of ability or interest in fighting for them) result in users hating life consistently’ isn’t any more explanatory I think, but says pretty much the same thing.
Users are relatively helpless/uneducated/captured and uncoordinated here at the moment, and the business interests are getting less pleasant as they fight each other in the absence of any other guidance/regulation as they try to grow and extract the maximum value they can.
At some point something with change and we’ll start shifting to another equilibrium point. Based on past experience I doubt it will be much friendlier to end users, but I have been surprised once or twice before.
And this isn’t (near as I can tell), ‘corporations bad’. Everyone always tries to get the maximum value they can get out of a system barring energy expended/concern about social judgement/blowback concerns.
From kids downloading warez to someone looking for maximum stimulation/emotional load from browsing instagram for free to a company getting the extra couple dollars from improving a signup flow.
Meaning what? Name-and-shame clearly won't do the job. The only solution I can see is for there to be laws against dark patterns. The profit incentive for user-hostile design isn't going to go away.
How many people installed a browser addon that just agrees to the GDPR popup just so they don't have to click on deny?
We use WhatsApp groups for this now. It’s perfect, no ads, only the content from people I want content from. No slimy Facebook algorithm. Between tiktok Instagram and whatsapp how is Facebook.com even still a thing?
If you don’t take responsibility for change, it doesn’t happen.
It's because it's the same kind of users that tolerated such bullshit on TV 20 years ago: 5 ads or more over a 30 minutes show.
The truth is: most people are brainlessly consuming any media (be it TV or the Internet or the latest crappy auto-tuned pop song) and are wandering hyperconsumerists souls.
20 years ago it was more complicated to go on the Internet, so your average "I'll sit in front of TV and tolerate 5 ads over my 30 minutes show" wasn't on the Internet. It's that simple.
It takes time and half a brain to not get abused by all these companies. People don't want to spend the time and certainly don't have half a brain.
The Internet adapted itself to the masses.
That'd be my rant.
It's not that the masses wanted that scenario. They would be completely cool with a non-user-hostile TV or web.
It's just that TV channels and internet companies are constantly trying to push as much garbage as they can, and the amount we currently got is the amount they can get away with.
Also do you really want to go around typing in credit card details into every app you pay for? for every in-app purchase, for every movie rental, every song purchase? How is that user hostile?
I try to avoid as much as possible from the user hostile internet but there is wee choice in an era of rapid cloning of UX with random tweaks for the illusion of novelty.
I go away immediately (for many many years now) from pages blocking the view with dialogs of subscription after 10-20 seconds or even less from arriving. I go away from randomly found unknown sites expecting me of configuring 30 cookie settings the 500th of time that month. I do not watch youtube because it is intrusive with ads, suggestions, autoplay (on the top of the usual strident but uninterestingly wicked content). I simply avoid discovering new content because 98% of the time it is just a struggle not useful or entertaining at all.
It is the exception that I get what I need instead of being pushed into something others want from me. There is unmanageable amount of content pushed my way and almost zero interest of serving what I need. It is a struggle to use the web. I avoid it more and more in fact only going for reliable locations when I need something.
Unluckily there is little choice to choose from approaches when I am determined to do something. Movie streaming sites all have the same intrusive and pushy behaviour. I cannot browse their collection in peace not only because they do not provide real choice but pour their preselected lists on me but when I stop the mouse in some random location an active content pops into my face distracting me from relaxing on entertainment content. Netflix, Amazon Prime and some other I tried works the same. It is not relaxing but upsetting, not entertaining at all. I more and more need to rely on my old collection of movies.
Same with music.
I am avoiding using social media sites due to the overload of useless content poured into my face following an obscure logic (no logic). Those just block me instead of being helpful or entertaining. LinkedIn is exception, I use it for job search, but don't get me started how sh*ty that is, oh my god! Like if clueless amateurs were given half the necessary time to come up with something whatever. Since Google and all the other job searching sites are even worse I cannot go elsewhere really after finished with know names and organisation and the direct search (which is the only reliable). When I complain about usability they respond nothing. Absolutely nothing. Which is also typical in parallel of the irrelevant empty responses.
Unluckily this whole unusable internet is a huge and painful topic that would fill days and weeks of discussions and summarising the negative but completely avoidable experiences, all the user hostility out there.
HN is one of my remedies with its reliable and simple approaches and interesting, easy to navigate content, with the lack of obstructive visual noise and manipulation.
Moreover, no one is forced to write dark pattern software. It's probably safe to say that most dark-pattern software is the result of a voluntary, monetary transaction between employer and employee. People are knowingly writing this software on purpose, for money.
Let's see a show of hands of people in this community who wrote dark pattern software for their boss instead of quitting. Where is this software coming from if not from a community of people like the ones here at Hacker News?
Come on. This is bullshit.
https://www.businessinsider.com/unredacted-google-lawsuit-do...
"When Google tested versions of its Android operating system that made privacy settings easier to find, users took advantage of them, which Google viewed as a "problem," according to the documents. To solve that problem, Google then sought to bury those settings deeper within the settings menu."
How long ago are we talking about? Because scams and hostile threats were on the internet as long as I remember. Phishing and carding was present in the 90s, Morris worm was in the late 80s.
Perhaps things are worse now because the stakes are higher. Ecommerce wasn't popular back then and computer viruses sent some spam or displayed funny messages. Now that the targets are more attractive (and there's more of them), scams are getting more sophisticated and increased in volume.
To be fair, that wasn't any kind of scam; it was more like "I started a joke that started the whole world laughing".
Are there downsides to Apple having control over the App Store? Absolutely. Is tying your credit card to your Apple account “user hostile”? I’m not so sure.
The piece of mind knowing that I’m not going to have to fight with some random company to get a subscription cancelled is worth it for me. (Looking at you, NYTimes, Comcast, etc.)
(Another example I ran into was Instructables (this one specifically: https://www.instructables.com/DIY-REFLOW-OVEN/), where you can see and enlarge four photos submitted by people who followed the instructions, but have to create an account for the remaining two.)
If someone offers a service that is useful, but does so in a way that is annoying, you can just say "thanks but no thanks" and be on your merry way. Few do, but again, it's a choice.
Humans are the livestock.
And as the corpos are huge, Conway predicts so will be the webpages. (=> 'Website obesity crisis' https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm)
What would replace those?
Abusive/Maniac users are the problem too
I've never worked at a startup that wasn't either in the middle of or planning a UI redesign.
However I believe the true reason is geopolitical. The entire digital market is simply the best espionage system. If the US govt had a better way to dominate other countries, they would use it instead, and the internet would improve.
Dark patterns in digital services are not just about greed. They give the US government greater power which translates to increased protection of its citizens.
What could be the solution? Tax loopholes to funnel money into open source code to compete at the govt's expense? Building a better geopolitical power system so they get off tech's lawn?
Realistically, it's probably to invest more in open source services and encryption tools, self hosting tools, proxies. Open source capital ownership governance model.
What?
Do you have any thoughts about it?
2. Attempts to regulate and attempts comply with regulations.
The rest are just forms of these phenomena.
At least for Google most of the time the end user is not the customer, the advertiser is.
This has various reasons, one of them being economics, another one being end user psychology.
Also for Amazon this is more and more becoming the case, as sellers and businesses using their services contribute much more to Amazons margin than an end user does.
The rest follows pretty much automatically from the internal incentive structures of those companies, which are dominated by share value increases.
There's a thing out there called "net promoter score." That's when somebody asks you "would you recommend our business to a friend?" It's based on a 2006 business book with the megalomaniacal title "The Ultimate Question." https://www.worldcat.org/title/ultimate-question-driving-goo...
In theory it's a great idea. In theory it effectively captures a user's attitude toward the businesss. Its inventor, Enterprise Rent A Car, used it to up their game in a competitive market requiring lots of personal service, and it worked brilliantly for them.
But, now the people deploying it in megacorps must have all gotten C- grades in business school. They use it to measure their SUPPORT REPS, not their BUSINESSES. They pretty much only ask it after a support call. So if you give a NO answer to the question because you're frustrated and needed support, the support rep gets dinged, not the product manager.
By the way, anything below a 9 on the 0 - 10 scale in the question means "NO, I would not recommend."
I once got one of those quizzes from my local ISP monopoly provider (Comcast) after somebody CALLED ME to try to sell me something. My answer: "Would I recommend you to a friend? You're a MONOPOLY! " Anyway, they punished the telesales guy for my NO answer. They should have punished the idiot who thought it was an appropriate way for a monopoly to measure customer satisfaction.
A plea to the people who run businesses: take those NO answers seriously. Use them to look for opportunities to improve, not opportunities to punish.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celine%27s_laws
See also Hyman G. Rickover on Quaker Problem Solving:
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28uxu6/more_hy...
<BOX type="soap">
The thing about a dependency frontend module, is that it often brings in some really cool stuff, like animations and attractive design elements, but also introduces inflexibility. You have to use the supplied design elements, and you can't modify the animations.
This gets compounded, when you aggregate dependencies.
Dependencies aren't bad. They are how we get big stuff done, with small teams. Done right, they can also enforce UI consistency, and improve quality.
Done wrong ... well ... not so much.
It's possible to have UI suites that provide a lot of customization options, but the customization comes at the expense of increased implementation complexity. There's usually a fairly significant learning curve, which isn't popular, when your boss is breathing down your neck, so many developers opt for the defaults (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as that can enforce consistency). It means that they are often using standard tools for specialized tasks (think using an English wrench on a metric bolt).
Also, developers and designers tend to hate (I mean sticking-pins-in-voodoo-doll-hate) usability folks, like Jakob Nielsen and Don Norman; which is too bad, because they have some great suggestions.
The backend can be a byzantine nightmare. Maybe it needs to be, but the frontend should be consistent, simple, and user-task-oriented.
That "user-task-oriented" is important. The deal is helping users to get stuff done. It isn't to impress them with eye-candy chrome, pretty design and fancy interaction. Good UI helps the user to get done what needs doing, and gets the hell out of the way.
The best user interface is the one you don't notice. That can be damn difficult to achieve.
This is often accomplished by doing rote, "cliché" UI. I write about that, here: https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/the-road-most-travel...
I am a fan of good interpretive SDKs (ones that don't just present the raw substrate to the programmer), and native coding.
</BOX>
But custom problems require custom solutions (for example, a Web shop for a customizable widget, that maybe also needs to have restrictions imposed by industry licensing standards), and that can be difficult to do, with standard stuff (I have had to do almost exactly that, and have the scars to prove it).