[ryandrake]

I'm not sure when it happened, but there was a definite inflection point some time in my software career, where we all stopped asking "What does the user want to do with their computer?" and moved over to "What do we want the user to do with our software? And, it's been downhill since then. We stopped treating the user as the driver of the car, and pushed him into the passenger seat. Now users are just along for the ride and they're going where tech companies are driving, whether they want to or not. User need is no longer a driver in product decisions. Users are just the denominator in all the metrics everyone is chasing.

[munificent]

> I'm not sure when it happened

I know exactly when it happened: when people stopped buying software.

When you had to walk into a store, pick up a box, read the bullet points on the back, and pay a decent chunk of cash for that program, you were incentivized to do at least a little research and ensure you were getting something useful. You would be stuck with it (and with exactly it in the form you bought it, without hope for an endless stream of updates).

That in turn incentivized software companies to make products that were worth real money to people and to care about their reputation.

Once everything because free (sorry, not free, ad-driven), that whole calculus went out the window. What it was replaced with has a lot of upsides. If every app on my phone cost me $50 with another $20 for every upgrade I've ever gotten, I surely couldn't afford half of them, and I'm in a better income bracket than much of the world.

But it has as a huge downside that it no longer centers the experience of individual humans with agency. Instead, users are treat as a sort of aggregate stream of fungible attention units. A software change that alienates a million users but garners you 1.1 new users is a net win.

Companies are longer trying to maximize users, they are trying to maximize usage. You exist only to be a drop in a bucket of liquid attention.

[DrScientist]

> Companies are longer trying to maximize users, they are trying to maximize usage.

I think this is an important point - so making the software less effective, so tasks take longer, increases 'engagement'.

There is a separate problem I think and that's who is now designing the UI.

As software shifted to the web - where early web apps were very simply interactive documents - designers from the print sphere moved over. This changed the focus from task based workflow thinking in UI design to a much greater emphasis on the visual layout/design of the page, and it seemed like a whole generation's learning about UI design got replaced with a whole generations learning about typography and visual impact.

[priorcod]

This is it. When software was built to provide legitimate, tangible value to the user.

[vjk800]

> I know exactly when it happened: when people stopped buying software.

Things are not, however, much better for software that people actually buy. That is, paid-for apps in Android and Apple app stores.

[everdrive]

network effects from how the rest of the industry has reorganized itself.

[exmadscientist]

I think it's not so much about the money as the "When you had to walk into a store... [and] be stuck with it" part. That is, the problem was actually automatic/Internet-enabled updates.

With the physical model you chose your software and it didn't stop working. (It might stop being useful, but that's a different story.) No option to patch later meant a company couldn't ship trash: word would get out and people just wouldn't buy it. (Windows ME, anyone?) Now you can get the rug pulled out from under you on all of your tools, and things "ship" as garbage with a massive "day 1 patch" (and a "day 2 patch" and...) and honestly often never get finished. At least not before they're "retired" and you're "updated" to some dumpster fire that's nothing like what you wanted, and still doesn't even work, and you can't do anything about it.

[Yeask]

And today many programers have only used that kind of software, so when they design one, they use the same dark patterns, even when getting paid.

[vitally3643]

We stopped considering the user as a human being and started thinking of them as a spherical wallet in a vacuum. The user exists purely as a source of revinue and absolutely no other consideration is given.

[rapnie]

> We stopped considering the user as a human being

Imho once you say "user" you are already halfway on that path. Look how impersonal your sentence is. Users are an abstract concept that belongs to the app, which in turn is created by the developer who has all kinds of dreams for that app. Just keep calling them people, persons, or specific stakeholder names that correspond to the role they have, and their identified needs. The app serves people, and not the other way around. Not calling people users is a step towards avoiding their disempowerment.

[jknoepfler]

Try starting your user stories "As a human being fully endowed with creative and critical faculties who yearns for purposeful, reciprocal engagement within my Lebenswelt..." and see how it goes?

[sebastiennight]

My understanding of user stories is that they specifically are NOT supposed to start with "as a user", but instead, should start with what you called an "empathy sutra" in a sibling comment.

E.G. "As a single mother of four, I want my children to have a nutritious lunch but have very little time to prepare it" might be the first phrase of a user story for your foodmaking robot.

neither "as a user" nor "As a human being fully endowed with creative and critical faculties..." help the product and tech team understand the constraints and yearnings of the person this feature will serve.

PS: I used to have a PO who would write "As a product owner, I want a feature that does X" and it drove me crazy

[rapnie]

So you choose "user" then? If you don't have more information than "user" in your user stories you are already on the wrong path. How about "As a person" for a general case, "As a buyer" in your webshop app, "As a solution developer" in your low-code design studio. Etcetera. (You did not add the /s so I'll answer seriously).

[jknoepfler]

I agree that personification has value, and there's a happy medium to be struck. I don't know that we need to recite a compassion sutra at the head of every story, although I guess it couldn't hurt?

[carlosjobim]

I wish! Most companies try to make it extremely difficult for visitors to actually purchase their product online.

[thewebguyd]

That's not unique to tech either. Before my career in tech, I went through school doing retail jobs. The verbiage then was "how do we capture our share of their (the customer's) wallet?" Not how do we provide what they need, a good experience, or whatever else. As if the company was entitled to a portion of the shopper's income.

I found it completely disgusting, and this wasn't unique to one retail chain either. It's how the capital class views people, as a resource to be extracted.

[osjdiwnfiwjfi]

It started when computers (and the Internet) became more affordable and widespread.

No money in the “computer hobbyist” version of reality, but all the money in the world in the “everyone is a potential customer” version of reality.

[austinthetaco]

Thats because the user stopped becoming the customer from the point of view of the development team. The customer is now people who deal in data collection and analytics and gates and funnels.

[Am4TIfIsER0ppos]

> I'm not sure when it happened, but there was a definite inflection point

I know when. 2007 January 9. Steve Jobs announcing the iPhone.

[marcosdumay]

It's when Apple made an image editor with less functionality than everything else, and it became popular because it could do less.

[listenfaster]

Yep absolutely agree. I’m saving this comment in my journal.