Tragic Design

Chapter 2. Design Can Kill

When designing for digital mediums, it’s easy to become detached from how design decisions affect the end user. The word “user” itself can be a vehicle for that detachment. When the “user” doesn’t have a face and a name, it becomes a formless concept, blending in with other quantitative metrics and taking on any assumed needs to justify business decisions. It quickly becomes a number on a crowded dashboard, and its reaction to the product is just another metric to consider in an effort to increase revenue.

Increasing a company’s revenue isn’t an issue per se, the same way that tracking success metrics isn’t necessarily problematic. But because of their dry nature, quantitative metrics often lie on the opposite end of the spectrum from empathy. They can contribute to objectifying and depersonalizing users. They also conveniently prevent us from feeling the discomfort of empathy, the shame and guilt if users get hurt. Historically, metrics have been underused by UX designers. We think that owning them might help in ensuring they aren’t used as a way to objectify and depersonalize the users. Therefore, it is important to find a balance between qualitative and quantitative metrics. Research shows that it’s easy to feel strong emotions for a close group of people, but it’s harder to scale that care out to thousands of users whom we have never met.^[5] This isn’t an excuse to shed responsibility, though. The potential effects of our work should constantly be on ...