this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2023
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AssholeDesign
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This is a community for designs specifically crafted to make the experience worse for the user. This can be due to greed, apathy, laziness or just downright scumbaggery.
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Software Engineers and UX/UI Designers need a code of ethics, like yesterday.
Yes, business is ultimately to blame, but those folks are beyond saving - they will never ever ever put the brakes on an initiative that could make more money legally. Unless there's blowback from an ethics board / professionals in charge of implementing their dark patterns.
Software Engineers and UX/UI Designers had a code of ethics. Digital Research specifically created a code of ethics. (I think it was Gary Kildall who did it.) The code of ethics recommended companies that make OSes should stay separate from companies that make applications. It was Bill fuck-the-community-I-want-money Gates that ignored all that stuff in order to seek market domination (and monopoly power).
A combination of regulatory pressure, hackers, and enshittification from within has done a lot to keep Big Mike from seizing the whole market, but it's gotten pretty brutal multiple times in the last two-plus decades.
We do, and it really depends on the entire team being ethical to make it effective. If you have an unethical boss, they'll just go find someone else to implement their ideas.
Why include software engineers in this? In the large companies I've worked for, the people with the title "software engineer" have absolutely nothing to do with the actual design of something like this; we just get handed a spec and are expected to implement it as is. In smaller companies I always did one-person projects where I handled every aspect of the development process including UX and UI, but my title was not "software engineer". Are you expecting the engineers to refuse to implement a "feature" like this on principle or something?
I see you never worked in a developer team. My current boss once in 1995 opened a geocities page about someones poodle and favorite girl-band. After 3 minutes on that page he proudly declared "I now know everything there is to know about HTML and user interface design, and never have to see another website ever again!"
Since then, he is making designs, and the tiniest amout of criticism or improvements ("maybe we should have a placeholder telling users what format we expect here.", "Can we use a date-input instead of a textfield here?") is shot down with a 5 minute yelling how "the users just have to learn this" and "we always have done it this way!" or "if the user is too stupid, he should read the manual" (which is incomplete and still features windows XP+IE6 screenshots). There is an option in the bug tracking system which says "user error/user training required", but if you read it it's really all huge usabillity issues because people cannot figure it out, and the system has no helpfull error messages...