User Health

Executives, product managers, UX designers, and developers have collectively done us a dirty one. They’ve all played a part in a systemic problem. If you’re one of these people, you can contribute to the solution, and together we can beat it. What is it?

Dark UX patterns.

• Infinite scroll
• Notification tabs that pretend to have notifications
• Addictive recommendation algorithms
• Outrage driven business models
• Abusing push notifications
• Emphasizing more engagement above all

This also includes purposeful omissions of health features like:

• Usage reminders
• Classifiers that detect harmful usage patterns
• Ways to escape from core usage loops
• Alternate business models for people who feel harmed by advertising models

These patterns all lead to an unhealthy user. If we continue on this path as technology becomes ever more entwined and impactful to our lives, eventually we won’t have users to use our products. There is a healthy level of engagement. To push past it is to create addiction. Every person I have spoken to lately about social media says it’s making their life worse in major ways, yet they can’t escape their addiction. Social media is the worst culprit, but these patterns see widespread use across mobile apps, video games, news websites, and even operating systems.

Imagine if your toaster made random chimes throughout the day to remind you to make toast? What if it played ads whenever you walked by to supplement revenue?

Our toast making engagement is high in the morning, but there’s an opportunity to increase engagement throughout the day. Let’s add more reminders for the user to make toast throughout the day — Some business executive

Are you morally comfortable with making your users’ health worse in order to make more money?

If you are a technical person, you need to take a stand. You are the one who can make a difference. Consider the difference between high quality growth (harmonious, value added), and low quality growth (extractive).

Instead of implementing that dark UI pattern, educate whoever is suggesting it about the long term value of healthy users. Instead of being complicit with growth through unhealthy engagement, suggest alternative patterns to build value. (For example, related or complimentary features. Revenue equals value * usage; focus more on value as opposed to usage.) Many of us set out to help people, but we get lost along the way, trying to chase easy wins and ignoring our users’ humanity. Try to improve your users’ lives. You need to care for them like you would care for a best friend.

For this reason, I’m proposing we shift our focus from user experience, to user health.

That is, unless we want to be complicit in contributing to unhealthy user experiences.