State of User Experience Design

Tom Fishburne:

At one end of the spectrum, there’s been a lot of recent attention to “Dark UX“: “an industry term for sly design tricks that benefit the client’s bottom line. It ranges from creating defaults, such as a pre-checked opt-in email subscription or pre-selecting the most expensive options. It can also manifest in the form of interfaces requiring clients to supply their personal information before being allowed to look at the products on a website.”

At another end of the spectrum, in trying to protect the user, GDPR has added a few clunky hurdles of its own. Ben Davis at Econsultancy called the result “Kafkaesque UX”. He writes:

“Assess the following UX for signs of thoughtful design:

“You load up a mobile website and there’s a privacy message obscuring the content and telling you how much your privacy is valued and what your rights are as regards advertising and the sharing of your data. You want to agree to the terms of the message and hurry on to the content but for some reason the button to ‘continue’ is very tricky to scroll to and doesn’t seem to be tappable.

“Crazy, right?”