this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2023
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AssholeDesign
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This is a community for designs specifically crafted to make the experience worse for the user. This can be due to greed, apathy, laziness or just downright scumbaggery.
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Software Engineers and UX/UI Designers need a code of ethics, like yesterday.
Yes, business is ultimately to blame, but those folks are beyond saving - they will never ever ever put the brakes on an initiative that could make more money legally. Unless there's blowback from an ethics board / professionals in charge of implementing their dark patterns.
Why include software engineers in this? In the large companies I've worked for, the people with the title "software engineer" have absolutely nothing to do with the actual design of something like this; we just get handed a spec and are expected to implement it as is. In smaller companies I always did one-person projects where I handled every aspect of the development process including UX and UI, but my title was not "software engineer". Are you expecting the engineers to refuse to implement a "feature" like this on principle or something?
Software Engineers are workers and as such hold all the power
I see you never worked in a developer team. My current boss once in 1995 opened a geocities page about someones poodle and favorite girl-band. After 3 minutes on that page he proudly declared "I now know everything there is to know about HTML and user interface design, and never have to see another website ever again!"
Since then, he is making designs, and the tiniest amout of criticism or improvements ("maybe we should have a placeholder telling users what format we expect here.", "Can we use a date-input instead of a textfield here?") is shot down with a 5 minute yelling how "the users just have to learn this" and "we always have done it this way!" or "if the user is too stupid, he should read the manual" (which is incomplete and still features windows XP+IE6 screenshots). There is an option in the bug tracking system which says "user error/user training required", but if you read it it's really all huge usabillity issues because people cannot figure it out, and the system has no helpfull error messages...
We did something similar with our APIs. It broke every conventions and expectations of the product and the language, and of course didn't follow any logical good practices. Man did the boss love to tell me users had to read the doc anyway so we might just as well do whatever. Then later on when issues arose and I suggested making better APIs I was hit by some dull remark about how we shouldn't violate the principle of least-surprise by going a different direction. Bitch are you kidding me? You broke that very principe in the first place by making grotesquely alien APIs.