Con-Centric Circles or Why There’s No Such Thing as User-Needs Centric Design

There is no such thing as a user-needs centric service... There I said it, and I'm not even saying it for clickbait! I believe that my assertion is true, and I’ll try to persuade you that this is the case in this short post. It is is my belief that our so-called "user-needs centric design" is just a refined con, it’s actually victim-centric design.

Introduction

By way of disclaimer, this entire post is the product of a random thought I recently had at 3am due to a particularly bad bout of insomnia. As such, this article does not represent my employer or anybody/organisation beyond my over-active imagination. Maybe I'm wrong (and maybe you'll vehemently disagree), but I fear I'm correct, which means that we should reconsider our approach to design. But in reality, it's all a little tongue in cheek, because if you don't laugh, it all gets a little bleak. We live in a capitalist world, it's just how we are.

What I hope to cover in this article is why user-needs is a disingenuous term, the types of ways we're abusing them and what we can to to be more honest to both the user and ourselves. If you agree, disagree or want further clarification, please do comment and/or re-share as I'm interested in people's opinion on my febrile 3am reasoning.

Why there is no such thing as user-needs centric design

The industry believes and espouses the fact that there are "user needs" that should be the core of any Digital Transformation. However, if you think more deeply about it, our basic needs are rarely (if ever) serviced online as part of a fancy Digital Service. Also, "need" is a much misused term, as users almost always have "wants" and rarely have "needs". How many times have you heard a toddler screaming that they "need" something that's just an immediate want? How many things in our lives are actual needs?

What’s worse is that these "wants" are often manufactured and manipulated to be increased or reduced by the service provider depending on the context that the service is provided in. These wants are often not even real wants, the user receives the service and has immediate buyers remorse when they realise that the need/want was just a moment of "magpie madness" seeing a shiny thing on a shiny website.

I believe that the irrefutable reason user-needs centric design cannot exist, is that no service is truly free, therefore it can logically never be centred completely around the user/customer. Services have to be centred around what the provider can make/save from providing the service in a curated way that maximises the service provider’s organisational aims.

Further to that, any 100% user-needs centric service would go out of business, almost immediately. There’s no such thing as online altruism, except maybe by individuals, certainly not organisations. This made me think that the whole Service Design/User Needs movement is actually a kind of con, but that it's one that we're pulling on ourselves and it’s one of the largest cons ever pulled. As history and experience has shown us, if there’s something we know about cons, it is that in every con, there’s a con-artist and a victim (a.k.a. the mark), the trick is knowing when you’re the former and when you're the latter, because you'll fill both roles in your lifetime.

They say that “you can’t con an honest man”, this is mostly true, although urgency scams exist e.g. fake emails claiming a family member is in jail and needs bail. As a colleague pointed out, there are many social engineering examples of urgency cons or appeals to kindness (oh, just change my password for me please, it's Mick in Accounts, you know me, right, it'll ruin my day otherwise!). But beyond that, most online interactions are there because the victim believes they need something from the online world to enhance their meatspace world. Spoiler alert: They usually don’t, they just want something.

Already, jumping from satisfying a need to a want makes you feel less comfortable, doesn’t it? Or it should, unless you’re a horrible person.

What's worse still though, is that a lot of these slick designs can draw in the more vulnerable groups of society. This is getting dangerously close to selling crack to schoolchildren. While you can put a date-of-birth checker on something, it's much more difficult and expensive to genuinely identify somebody on the internet than in real-life.

Without further dalliance, what are the kinds of cons we’re pulling with our online services in the name of “providing an excellent user-needs centric experience”?

You want the victim to spend money to create an illusion 

This is where you’ll spend most of your effort in your alluring design. This design isn’t there for convenience or utility, it’s to create an illusion and as the con-artist, you want to create one or more illusion(s) that:

• They’ll save money with your con
• They’ll make money with your con
• That your con will somehow make their lives better
• That your con will somehow make others’ lives better

Of course, this will certainly involve some kind of “victims who bought this also bought that” kind of functionality, that isn’t good UI, it’s just up-selling. Even on something like Spotify or Netflix where there’s no up-selling per-se, the perpetuation of the victim’s use of the service is the up-sell. Just one more series of Black Mirror and I will cancel my subscription, honest.

This classification of con works best where there's no physical product to ship. Video on demand, PDFs/eBooks, CFDs (or other non-concrete "financial products") or other online information are perfect, as returns are easy to deal with, the amount of product is near infinite and you don't have to rely on a middle man to produce the physical aspects of what you're peddling.

The cons where you’re promising that the victim will save or make money are a direct appeal to the ego, to greed. These are the most successful and insidious and these are the oldest tricks in the book. The closer to "illegal" it looks and the more "secret" this technique to make/save money is, the more that greedy part of the ego starts to scream. Unfortunately, this seems to work best on those most desperate, those who need the money to stay afloat, those on the breadline who really don't need to be conned.

Cons where you think you're helping others are almost the worst of all, as they appeal to altruism. Do you think those chuggers (charity muggers) do it for free? No they do not. Unicef made it a really easy and polished experience for me to sign up any pay money to buy blankets and a square meal of three bottles of Buckfast a day for children in war-torn Glasgow, but then their service turned into a constant omni-channel DDoS on my patience until I blocked them on all platforms and media.

You want the victim to go away because they’ve already bought into your con

Unfortunately, disappearing as an online business is expensive, you’re not the salty dude in the rented Mercedes selling “￡900 watches for ￡50 today only” who can quickly drive on, so you’re duty bound to deal with the fallout of your con, which to the grifter is inconvenient.

You have to handle those who have bought into your con and:

• Want to change the deal
• Want information that comforts them (usually that they haven’t been conned)
• For some reason want more of your snake oil
• Or worst of all, might want to complain or request a refund

All of the above would traditionally be called “the self service portal”. If you’ve ever tried to contact somebody at eBay, you’ll see Machiavellian “victim-centric” design at play, you have to loop through the options several times before a phone number appears. They want to be really sure that you won’t just help yourself out of your problem, because.... money.

As for online refund processes, I’ve yet to see one that wasn’t designed by Swiss Tony himself and they're usually hidden behind broken pages in a cellar in a disused toilet with no light bulbs and a big warning sign saying “beware of the guard puma”.

You want to provide content or a service, just with a little ad revenue on the side for you through distraction

These sites, sometimes nicely designed, include some of the most cynical ways to con the user:

• Clickbait sagas
• Fake user controls
• DOM switcheroos
• Prominence of information

Clickbait news sites that make you click through endless pages to get to the point. Each is a page reload (usually slow). My record was the other day where (after manipulating the URL, it took 27 pages to get to the start of the actual point. I didn't even bother making it to the end.

Fake next buttons on adverts. This bugs me no end, your page looks all slick with a well placed next button, only it's an ad, so you get ad revenue, I have to close a window. This makes me pretty angry.

Rendering that makes you click on things due to late DOM reflow - Paypal do this, you click on "pay now" and as you do it, the "Paypal Credit" button magically loads just in time for you to click it. YouTube had this problem for a couple of weeks where the "cast to screen" icon magically got replaced for a couple of seconds with an advert link. The thing here is that YouTube cut that nasty behaviour out after a couple of weeks, Paypal have (to date) left that cynical feature in.

Have you ever noticed how the free option or the skip button are often hidden away somewhere, in a 0.1pt font, printed in a low-contrast manner or sometimes actually rendered with a suspiciously slow pause. That's not by accident, it's just cynical.

You want the victim to perpetuate your business

The smart business plays the infinite game, it has no “end-state”, it exists to perpetuate itself, so often the con isn’t to directly take money from your victim, it’s to use them as an amplification attack. Remember the old adage if you’re not paying for the product, then you are the product.

How do you do this through “victim-centric” design?

• You’d like your victim to be a free walking advert for your business and enrol further people (c.f. Younique)
• You’d like your victim to find new needs through your service that you’ll get a kickback from (c.f. Facebook)
• You are acting as a man in the middle attack to take money from both parties in what would otherwise be a fair trade (c.f. eBay)

The MLM style services are the most directly unpleasant, promising money if only you'll con your own friends, but the Facebook/Youtube method of advertisement is most insidious. The cases where Facebook's algorithms have accidentally radicalised people by taking more of what they like and then ratcheting up the extreme nature of the content rather than providing content chilled me to the core. Intentional, probably not in this case, but scary? Very!

The services that force you to share/spam your social media also make my blood boil, mainly because I don't want to be the Typhoid Mary for a service that turns out to be malware or a scam.

You’re providing a “free” mandatory/public service

This could be healthcare or banking where the government has stepped in and slapped some kind of regulations around what you do meaning you have to provide a nice “user needs first” offering. But, let’s be clear, these are not free services (see my opening statement, none of them are!), you’ve pre-paid for them (e.g. national insurance!) so the aim here is to reduce the “need” (or in many cases want). 

This usually boils down to getting the victim in and out of the door so quickly they won’t know up from down, in as cheap and barebones way as possible, This isn’t always a bad thing if they actually get the service they wanted. But I’ve seen too many excellent ideas around signposting to better services go into the bin, because… money/effort.

How can you be somewhere approaching "user-needs" centric?

The bottom line on this is, if you think about it and it makes you question your ethics and moral codes then it's probably not quite right. However, we don't have to bin the whole of the internet, we're all taken for a bit of a ride through life, so here are some ways we can do it in a way that's less impactful to the user.

• Make your description fully explicit (for those less savvy and the neurodiverse)
• Make your terms and conditions mandatory to read through, don't just allow a "yeah yeah I've read it" button you can click the second the page has loaded.
• Never use render quirks to get ad impressions or clicks
• Stop making people bulk message your service on social media on signup. If I love your service, I'll tell people myself!
• Stop endlessly recommending more products when people have just purchased, save that for later, over email, with a decent air-gap of time between spending
• Do not cynically target the poorest with promises of improving their lives (unless you're one of the vanishing few who actually will)
• Stop assuming opt-in to raises in prices, make the users take action
• Be very clear where any money is being spent and how much you're taking off top, don't hide it
• Be even clearer still on risks and costs to their investment
• Do NOT ever violate expectations, don't up-sell, don't demand extra spurious data late into the process

In Conclusion

Try getting a reservation at The Dorsia now!

We currently need to operate in a capitalist society, and as IT professionals we need to build services that make money for the organisations we work for, but don’t live under the illusion that they’re truly user-needs centric. We can however ensure that we minimise our own flexing of ethics and values systems. We can minimise the impact to the victim while maximising what they get from their “need” (want) being met. We live the con, all of us, but we can minimise the fat that is being skimmed off the cream of our lives.

One must, in my opinion, most of all avoid conning the vulnerable i.e. the young, the old or those who have other processing issues (e.g. the neurodiverse). I think you can in reasonable faith lead those who are informed and capable of making financial decisions down a certain path as long as you don't lie. Those cynically targeting vulnerable groups through a "great user-centric" experience should be excommunicated from the business, they draw my ire in ways that are difficult to explain without my screaming invectives at the screen.

In reality, the only user-needs centric service you’ll ever get is one you build yourself, because you’ll be both the producer and the consumer of this service. But you won’t do that unless your need is niche or urgent enough, you’ll just muddle through being the victim, the mark, the patsy, because it’s just what we do. The shadows on the wall of the cave are safer than the scary light coming in from the door marked “exit”.

In closing, I was about to write “and of course, you wouldn’t con yourself, would you?”...

But, we all know that’s simply not true...

So, I’ll just end with the wise, nihilistic, words of Patrick Bateman:

“there is no real me: only an entity, something illusory. And though I can hide my cold gaze, and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable. I simply am not there.” - American Psycho