Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by eluketronic 850 days ago
In my experience, Dark UX is often a symptom of a myopic, revenue-focused product team. Tricking users with dark UX patterns will almost always have a more profoundly negative effect on the company’s revenue in the long term than whatever the incremental, short term gain may be. I work for a DTC company as a FE engineer and I’m frequently having to try convince product people that implementing & maintaining dark UX patterns erodes our users’ trust in us and puts more of a burden on our customer experience team.

Dissecting the event handling of Feedly’s UI isn’t revealing the crux of the issue here. Engineers (in my experience) want to build things that provide a respectful user experience, things that they themselves would not be frustrated using. I absolutely despise seeing these types of dark patterns in the wild. I would be surprised if an engineer suggested this Feedly feature. But maybe I’m more sensitive to Dark UX than most and as a result have a more aggressive hatred for it in my work ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

2 comments

I think it has to be some kind of ethical void in the brain of decisionmakers who think they can trick their customers into paying them. Some kind of perverse manufactured business survival tactic driving their "close at any cost" mentality.
Yup, this is EXACTLY what I wrote about.