TerribleMachines

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Firstly, if I can interest an academic with my writing, that’s definitely a win for me. Thanks for this considered feedback!

I don't promise to be a good academic 😂 but I'm glad my comments were helpful 😊

I often wonder how necessary it is to qualify my position with some indication of who the fuck I am/think I am.

It's mainly that I found it hard to place where your experience was coming from without a concrete idea of your job experience (e.g., the article reads a bit differently coming from a front end developer vs a UX consultant, etc.)

That said, I didn't at any point while reading think "who the fuck does this guy think he is"—your expertise and knowledge come through really clearly just from the quality of your ideas.

“The Fake Aura of Care in UX”

I gave this a read and thoroughly enjoyed it! Really got me thinking about what'd good for the user not being the same as what the user enjoys the most. A videogame example: grinding for loot on World of Warcraft is worse for you than doing chores, but it is easier. I wonder if software that's difficult to use for ethical reasons is always going to be at a disadvantage in the market. Probably not, because absolutes are rarely true, but the conditions for the sucess of ethical software over easy to use software are interesting to think about.

Thanks again for the great feedback. It is appreciated. I’m still the only one to post anything on here but it’s already proven to be a valuable forum.

Honestly I think the forum a great idea, also an actual antithesis to the site the name is a pun on—the more positivity on the net the better. Thanks for making it!

Now I just need to figure out what I can get away with posting myself without compromising my anonymity. My academic writing is generally meant for publication so that's out, but perhaps I can get away with some of my fiction writing for the D&D games I run—height of sophistication I know 😏

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (5 children)

I'm an academic and probably not your intended audience but here's my thoughts in case they're useful!


Is this a thing?

I think so, the broad idea makes sense to me, and your examples really stood out to me for driving the point home. ("one-click purchases of crypto shitcoins" is particularly delightful.) As you flesh this out more, I would as an outsider love to see further examples and exposition about the domain your expertise is coming from.

I'm especially interested to leaen about what kinds of scenarios people use this phrase in response to your UX critique. (It's not 100% clear to me whether folks would be using the phrase to reject your critique or in acceptance of it; or if both happen.)

Challenging perspectives

So I see the phrase as depending a lot on what the speaker means by "good for the user" and "good for the business." I like how your arguments cover how the intended meaning of "good for the user" changes what the phrase means. However, maybe a bit naively, I feel that "good for the business" can be meant in a few different ways. Even just in terms of making profit, maximising short term vs long term profit can look very different, but more widely I think businesses are driven by a lot more than just profit incentives. (E.g. Twitter/X as an example of vanity) Some people might think of "good for the business" as being morally charged, in which doing good to the customers would make the business "good."

This perspective is definitely tinted my being in academia where we thoroughly suck at optimising for profit!

General opinions

Silly opinion from my maths background, but I'd just call it a diagram rather than a cartesian plane diagram! The cartesianness and planeness of the diagram aren't really important to point out.

Title tweak suggestion: "What is 'good for the user'"


All offered very much in the spirit of take or leave it. To end: I think its an interesting topic and I enjoyed reading your outline!

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hello, lurker from ye olde sneerclubbe. So glad to see this place continue! Huge source of comfort when I broke with the rat community after realising how crazy cultish they are—thanks sneeple ✨️

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