Read on Twitter
Interesting discussion about UX. In his newsletter, Mark writes "At the risk of repeating myself, let me state: A good user experience - let alone a great one - can't be exploitative." It seems crazy to disagree, yet some people do. Why? https://twitter.com/markhurst/status/1357431958503116802
To me, the problem in this discussion is the phrase "a good user experience." Where once, our field focused primarily on thinking about a single user, now we are forced to think in systems. So Uber, for example, has many different "user experiences."
There's the rider experience, the driver experience, the experience of the in-house users and admins, etc. In a limited sense, a rider can have a great experience within a system that exploits other users. This is key to understanding Uber's success (& Amazon's, & Grubhub, etc)
This is also why many people have argued that "UX" is no longer the right framing to use for our work. We need to get beyond "user" and think about multi-stakeholder systems.
This is not to argue in favor of systems that exploit people. Nor is it to excuse the UX designers (and product people, and engineers) who create these systems. It's only to say that our problems have outgrown our current language. Advocating for "the user" is no longer enough.
