Diminishing UX Returns! Dynamics of Judgment and the Impacts of Wasteful Innovation

We’re witnessing a cascading retreat from the promise of building technology with people in mind, a promise partly pursued and never fully kept. The impetus behind this retreat stems from diminishing returns in design implementation and a fading need for human involvement in software development.?

Rather than focusing beyond the interface, or on execution, or taking account for missing the mark, tech pushes forth to the next big thing.

The new promise is that we can automate without the burden of involving people. Training AI on AI-generated data is so hot right now. But when primary use cases are prohibited by poor design, how should we interpret level of care? Is it even care? Ignorance?

Tech and bootcamps bolstered the movement, and now have all quietly started walking back their UX efforts, education, recruiting and management. They didn't bother to envision how the industry would grow. And instead of making strides to recommit, they’re replacing teams with LLMs.

Improving User Experience (UX) Means Building Judgment of Systems and People

The simplest concept of UX has famously been visualized by a Venn diagram examining business and human needs. It’s behavior and economics—what value can we offer that will drive action? In theory, this applies to business of any size.?

Startups often adopt a trial-and-error approach until a viable MVP is found. Once there's something people will pay for, innovation helps refine or expand. As companies grow, so does demand to iterate and validate their concepts to align with evolving user requirements.

To improve the experience, you focus on improving flow and focus toward key behaviors and interactions. Making the right decision, quickly, requires good judgment.?

When companies respond to need with thought and a nuanced understanding of the system, people notice. People also notice when they don’t. Typically the latter doesn't last, but once you have monopolistic reach, you can make people believe you know better. Big tech has promised to solve human problems in innovative ways, but they're encouraging more wasteful contributions than helpful ones. Forget the carbon footprint and societal shifts, I'm talking about poor judgment.

Dynamics of Judgment and Thinking

As cognition goes, judgment and thinking happens both fast and slow.

We make quick judgments by pulling from intuition, built from previous insight. We’re also able to be rational and analytical, in more deliberate decisions. We’re either moving towards better understanding or on cruise control.

At least that’s a simplified theory. Attention, perception, memory, biases, reasoning all contribute to judgment.

Sometimes there’s conflict in thinking. Sometimes we think back on something we did or said and realize it didn’t match. We’re human. But behavior change takes recognition and work. For self, reflection may be enough. For others, empathy can't be imagined, it must be investigated. So we make test assumptions and learn. That’s judgment building.

As people, we make countless subconscious decisions regularly. And the more we engage in a behavior, the less of the slow thinking is required. For efficiency, we create heuristics, or mental shortcuts, for reference.

If we’re thinking about systems, these concepts are consequential. Judgment comes from and requires responding to change. Feedback and examination are integral for optimization.

This is being agile, in a sense. We work collaboratively toward marginal gains, we test theories about solutions, and we push updates as a means to improve or test new concepts. It's a commitment to continuous improvement; growth mindset.

Judgment with experiences and people systems is two-way.

Products are typically built around human needs that innovate on a problem—that means judgment for the user’s existing needs, and also curating system judgment for the user. The more alignment and less ambiguity we can produce, the greater chance we convert action. By this case, there’s legitimate value in improving usability. We hypothesize, test, analyze KPIs, and revise.

Somewhere along the way, we completely lost focus. Instead, it became about building flashy websites and ‘an app for that.’ But we’ve exceeded our capacity for phone-based world-changing apps. Now what?

Instead of merely coming up with ideas, we need to refine them. And for the good ones birthed by startups, we need more than an acquisition-centered exit strategy.

For those who have the resources to do great things, we need them to help us think faster. They need to be more deliberate and informed on our behalf. Where they have, it’s been for things that matter to them. As if it were difficult otherwise.

Back Buttons are Bonkers, and Other Dark?Patterns

Designing for behavior means recognizing patterns and using familiarity to reduce additional slow thinking.

New experiences can seem huge. When you’re trying to establish focus, it’s about finding the thing that brought you there, or the thing that gets you to the next step. Familiar things may already seem known, what to focus on, and what not to.

But the middle ground, we’re sensing and iterating on both knowledge and judgment, exploring constraints, and optimizing flow. That's where deeper, meaningful innovation is born. For experiences, it’s where we show users that we understand their needs, and also have a vested interest in improving.

But we can’t get too ahead of ourselves.

Consider the back button. Something so historically instrumental for digital experiences. It’s one of the most standard and conventional patterns in the world. But when it comes to physical remotes controlling software, you never quite know where you’re being sent back to.

‘B’ on Xbox might take me to the last screen in-app OR to the last game; same with AppleTV. How is it that software can’t consistently judge between going back a page,?back to the app home,?or going back to the main screen? Context is lost in these finite systems.

When we press back, we’re choosing to return. Maybe we’ve made a mistake or decided to revert. We have recency and recall in our short-term memory that is silently mapping our steps. When it doesn’t go to where we expect, cognitive dissonance and friction happens. Not all friction is bad, but when controlling machines, it feels disjointed.?

When humans mix up order, it’s because of challenges with distraction, attention, or memory. Those are human problems.

But for some reason, tech can’t seem to get it right. Somebody programmed, or didn’t counter-program, for ‘back’ behavior. Still, someone chooses to let those bugs persist.

And that’s only the half of it, how many times in a day can we feel a retreat from good judgment: Trying to connect to AirPlay; getting Alexa to play to a group; using an iPhone to control Google TV; unresponsive Hue lights. Continuity between devices in a multi-user family is beyond tricky; If I ask it to pause, it may tell me nothing’s playing. If I ask it to play it may start something else.

Even worse, when it completely gets it wrong there’s no 'go back' feature.

Don’t get me wrong, these companies have contributed and acted advocates for users, they’ve shown there are things they care about and care to change. Apple champions privacy; Microsoft continues to build access and inclusivity; Google aims for digital well-being, great—I'm not trying to discredit, both parts are true. And they’re responding to problems that they also helped manifest.

Sure, human behavior isn’t that simple, but that’s why we’re paying an unbearable amount for these devices, for the rest of our lives. It’s not too much to ask that we get these things right before trying to do more.

Don’t Make Big Tech Think

The idea that we’ve accomplished user-centered tech, or done enough to try, is kind of absurd.

Companies resisted UX just long enough to turn around and now insist it wasn’t worth it. We’ve allowed marginal returns for services riddled with ads or products barely maintained. We’ve accepted the weekly ‘under-the-hood’ releases as signs of progress, when many tech products follow very conventional patterns, or have unwieldy amounts of data to make decisions.

Instead of having a nuanced understanding of our needs, they don’t really care to know. They’ve been dealing in guesswork. Throw enough backlog features while the next product is in development and it’s easy to overlook what’s missing. They don’t put out quality, and growth takes months and years. They’re not any better equipped to push the needle on society's greater challenges. Yet they want to take part in our most intimate experiences.

But for what reason? Don't confuse this for inability.

They have more people, capital, knowledge, and resources than you could ever imagine. They don’t know what to do with it—and we enable them.

Within the walls of these tech monoliths are people charged with their take on innovation accounting. Basically, everyone is asked to come up with ideas for the company. Many even hired in exchange for ownership of existing ideas. They acquire leading talent and companies to make better on the promise of making something world-changing, only to squander.

How’s that going?

When was the last time you saw something come out of tech that was uniquely valuable and innovative? We’ve watched too many great companies fall to giants, acquired and sunset without any return to the consumer.

Keep in mind that innovation doesn’t always serve the user directly, but it should have some impact on their end-experience—be it access, production, utility, or ease of use.

Yet the only things that continue to grow are prices, waste, and dark patterns.

And as layoffs become an increasing part of the narrative, tech eagerly champions more automation to displace talent and human insight, furthering the divide.

For years they’ve had capacity to understand and do something.

When tens of thousands of people are tasked with coming up with ideas, and without a means to develop, it’s reckless and unsustainable. The bigger the company, the more difficult to facilitate change, and these companies and teams are so large it’s impossible.

It should be fast and slow—it’s okay to encourage an economy of ideas, but there has to be mechanisms to move things forward.

Companies don’t mind though, it’s less competition or worry. And the money keeps coming in. People believe they’re doing important work, but for ideas that go nowhere, or that they may never be able to share. They’re all so far disconnected from end-users that they’ve lost good judgment. And when they leave or get pushed out, they bring that distorted idea of culture elsewhere.?

Once More Unto the Tech Breach Dear?Frans

So what’s next for UX?

Just as dangerous it is to rely purely on ideas to grow business, it’s even more deadly to stifle them altogether.

After a decade of convincing people to hire UX designers without an idea of what to do with them, talent partners and bootcamps are wondering why they didn’t do more to set themselves up for progress.

They haven’t been nearly innovative enough, and instead discourage it. At least, they haven’t gotten to the point of figuring out maturity, implementation, or what comes after junior roles. Most employers would like to know what to do with them, if they're even hirable. But people are paying people in the know because they don't, and they're getting taken advantage of by people pretending that they do.

It seems like we’re just accepting that bad business is okay and poor judgment is tolerable.

Well, I think it’s time that we start holding companies to account.

As teams diminish and AI grows, we need to start regulating and demanding more. Also, before we accept the next shiny thing, we need to take stock in companies that care about their consumers. The best thing we can do is be more deliberate in our consumerism, and more respectful of each other's dignity.

We have to do better.

We don't need new phones every year. We don't need to make people feel less for opting out. Instead of a blue or green chat bubble dividing, experiences should embrace diversity of use cases before marginalizing with inaccessible UI. We don't need intrusive information required in forms. We don't need to collect so much data, especially when it's not managed or used responsibly.

We need commitment to fixing the things and better stewards.

In lockdown during the pandemic, the world rallied to get generations online. Large populations were separated, couldn’t work or connect. Internet slowed, and isolation grew. Many tech companies capacity, whether by resources or talent or ideas on hand, weren’t ready to lead.

But players like TikTok and Zoom showed users they were listening, flexed majorly to re-up and invest into the experience. Not perfect, but responsive. Regularly they pushed features, based on need, replying to user feedback. They've led the zeitgeist for years, they're verbs now, and their audiences grew accordingly.

Not to say that it’s a simple process, but the concept is. Help people do what they need, and align it with your business. We don’t need a metaverse or bespoke interfaces to advance humanity. Continual feature enhancement drives user growth when it is focused on actual use. Loyalty isn’t merely about discounts or deals, but trust and connection.

For tech, both are waning, at least for me.

Much of what can be done is going to take time, and also society to figure out. But there are things that people can do right now. For one, stop spending.

As bootcamps and institutions continue to teach tech, so should the push for them to make good on their promises. Students need to demand more from admin, who historically have not understood nor do their companies practice the very things their faculty teach. Demand transparency, clarity, and to learn things like ethics, workplace training, business, systems thinking, freelancing. Demand help and hold them to what they promised. They have the money, and that's what you're paying for. Demand alignment with employers, and proof of it.

Employers should also be asking how to implement beyond training or hire. Most B2B tech partnerships dry up because there’s nobody who knows what comes next. They’re training teams for projects that doesn’t exist, managers they won’t hire. It’s easy to tell someone to spend a budget, but it’s not so easy to onboard new lines of work. That takes more than a salesperson or can give. If you’re spending money on talent, make sure there’s a path and support after.?

Junior tech needs mentors, and not just folks who are trying to network. There’s been no such pathway past graduation, and that standard is consistent with college and university grads. But as people get into the workforce, they haven’t built judgment for navigating those skills, let alone a new career.?

And for those who have the privilege of a FAANG callout on their resume, don’t mistake that experience as expertise. There’s been too much posturing around what it means to work in that space, and what is known or not of others, or what it takes to be. The world doesn’t all work the same, and it shouldn’t. We have real problems to solve, and people to help. There’s plenty of that work to go around.

Big tech’s talent future is TBD, but it’s not out of our hands. They don’t have another plan, except to fast track automation and alternate realities. We need to be thinking more about this reality.