When Design
Even after that emergency story did not hold up, shake-to-open ads still leave me sad: once metrics outrank safety and dignity, we are losing the idea of putting people first.
I recently came across a piece of news that left me unsettled.
The report said that an elderly woman had a stroke in the early hours of the morning and collapsed in the bathroom. Her husband was not in good health either. In a panic, he picked up his phone to call 120, but somewhere in the process he entered a screen filled with commercial content, and in that panic he could not even find a way out. In the end, the woman had to drag her already unwell body from door to door, asking neighbors to help call for an ambulance.
I later checked. The account given publicly by the person involved does not hold up; its truthfulness is in question. I had named Honor in a footnote, and written words far too heavy. That was me crossing a line on the basis of an unreliable narrative. This I need to correct.
Correcting the facts is not the same as changing my position. I am still firmly against shake-to-open ads. Turning an accelerometer from something that can protect a person into an entry that throws up an advertisement when the phone is shaken is already over the line. It does not need a verified emergency story to deserve criticism. Seeing that kind of design still makes me sad.
What, exactly, is our design serving?
Starting with Dark Patterns
When I was studying UX, I came across a concept: Dark Pattern.
It is not “dark mode.” It refers to designs that deliberately exploit human cognitive habits, making it easier for users to choose what benefits the platform, even when that choice may not match what they actually want.
Make “Agree” huge and bright, and hide “Decline” in a corner. Unsubscribe through five or six screens; subscribe with a single tap. Shrink the close button as much as possible, and expand the ad’s tap target as much as possible. Take a perfectly natural gesture and turn it into an entry point for a commercial jump.
These designs are often very “clever.”
Clever enough to be nauseating.
Because designers of course know how a hand will move, where attention will land, what a user will tap when they are in a hurry, what older people will have trouble telling apart, and where a button is most likely to be tapped by mistake.
That is what UX studies.
The only question is whether we use that knowledge to help people, or to calculate against them.
The accelerometer in a phone has always struck me as an especially bitter example.
On its own, it is a neutral sensor. It can detect motion. It can take part in fall detection, collision detection, and other safety features. It can also become a foundation for certain accessibility and emergency scenarios.
Human beings spent enormous engineering effort so that a piece of glass and metal held in the hand could notice that we might have had an accident.
And then we thought:
If it can sense motion, why not use it to decide whether the user has shaken the phone a little—and then throw a shake-to-open ad at them?
The same technology tries to protect people at the most dangerous moments, and works just as hard to hijack their attention at the most ordinary ones.
Technology has no moral nature.
What is worth asking is this: why are we more and more willing to spend our intelligence on the latter?
We Already Know How to Do Better
If these miserable experiences existed only because we lacked the technical ability to do better, I might not feel so sad.
What I cannot understand is that, much of the time, we already know how.
The international edition of a product, the English edition, or the version aimed at a different market can be remarkably restrained. No dense splash ads. No stacked pop-ups. None of those coercive entry points. The interface even looks suddenly clean.
What does that mean?
It means that, often, this is not a matter of “we can’t.”
It means we know what a good experience looks like, and we choose not to give it to certain users.
I have never believed that commercialization itself is a sin.
A company has to pay salaries, keep servers running, and keep building the product, so it has to make money. Ads, subscriptions, and paid extras can all be reasonable business models.
The question has never been “why make money.”
The question is: for this extra bit of money, how far are we willing to go?
Is there a line that must not be crossed, no matter how much the conversion rate would rise?
Are there scenes in which an ad should never appear?
Are there forms of human autonomy that must not be put through an A/B test?
Is there a basic agreement that when a commercial goal collides with a person’s safety, the person comes first?
If even that boundary does not exist, then so-called “user experience” is finally only a commercial technique. It studies people not in order to understand them, but in order to use them more efficiently.
That is what I find frightening.
How a Society Treats Those Who Cannot Fight Back
I am more and more convinced that design does not exist in isolation.
We can of course criticize product managers, criticize designers, criticize the programmer who wrote that piece of code. But if we dump all the responsibility onto a single executor, we also step around the real problem.
Why can such a requirement be raised again and again?
Why can such a proposal pass review?
Why does someone who knows it will cause accidental taps still write “how much the jump rate increased” into the weekly report?
Why does everyone find it annoying, and yet no one actually has the power to stop it?
Behind this is a whole ranking of values.
When an organization only rewards revenue, growth, retention, click-through rate, and conversion, “do not harm the user” becomes a sentence with no weight.
And when that ranking of values spreads far enough, what we see in the end is not just a few ugly apps.
We begin to grow used to a relationship of mutual extraction.
A boss thinks that, having paid a salary, they should squeeze as much of an employee’s time as possible. A platform thinks that, since users cannot leave the service, it should squeeze as much of their attention as possible. A merchant thinks that, as long as the rules do not explicitly forbid it, costs can be shifted onto someone else.
Each person, within the little power they have, tries to take a little more from the next.
In the end, everyone feels like a victim, and at the same time becomes a perpetrator somewhere else.
This may be what I have long felt as so-called “mutual harm at the bottom.”
It does not necessarily come from anyone being born cruel.
On the contrary, many of the people involved may be perfectly ordinary. They have a mortgage. They are afraid of a bad performance review. They know the ad is annoying. After work they curse the pop-ups in someone else’s app.
The next morning they still shrink the close button they are responsible for by another two pixels.
That is the part of alienation that feels most uncomfortable.
A system does not even need villains.
It only needs everyone to tell themselves:
There is no choice. This is the job.
What a Designer Really Owns May Be Only a Little Refusal
When I work on small projects of my own, there are almost no real users. Much of it is closer to amusing myself.
I still like to carry certain design principles all the way through.
Accessibility, for example.
Can a page actually be used on a phone? Can it be operated fully from a keyboard? Does the layout collapse when the text is enlarged? Does the interaction depend on only one sense? Can the users I cannot yet see use it the way I can?
In terms of practical return, these things can even look a little “not worth it.”
If only ten people use the thing, perhaps not one of them needs those features.
I still want to do them.
Because I have slowly come to see that this may be where design is actually valuable.
Design is not making something look pretty, and it is not researching how to get the user to tap one more time.
Design means: when you have a little power to make the rules, how you treat the person who did not take part in making them.
Especially the weakest person.
Someone with poor vision. Someone who is older. Someone using a smartphone for the first time. Someone in a panic. An old man at four in the morning trying to call 120 for his wife.
Real design should not require them to be clever enough to escape the traps we have laid.
Of course, an ordinary designer cannot change an entire industry.
A product manager may not have the final say either. A programmer who refuses a requirement may only be replaced by someone else who will build it. We cannot demand that everyone resign the moment they disagree, or morality will become nothing more than an expensive personal privilege.
That does not mean the individual has no responsibility at all.
At least in the places where we do have a say, we can ask:
Does it really have to be this way?
Does this button have to be hidden?
Is this permission actually necessary?
Is this motion helping the user, or deceiving them?
What is the cost of this metric going up?
If one day it appears in an extreme situation we never imagined, would we dare to bear the consequences?
We may not be able to stop every piece of bad design.
But we can at least refrain from helping it get worse quite so eagerly.
Civilization May Hide in These Unremarkable Places
We love to talk about grand things.
Technological progress. Industrial upgrading. Artificial intelligence. Global competition. The capacity to innovate.
These things matter, of course.
But sometimes I think that whether a society is civilized is not only a question of how advanced a machine it can build.
It is also a question of how that machine treats an ordinary person who, in a panic at four in the morning, picks up a phone.
Does it clear the way as much as it can, or is it still thinking about that one click?
Does it realize that, at this moment, the other side of the screen is not a DAU, not an ad impression, not a node in a conversion funnel that can be calculated.
It is a person.
I do not believe that companies abroad are naturally noble, and I do not believe that changing societies would abolish commercial profit-seeking, manipulation, or exploitation. Any company can go bad. Any system needs constraints.
That cannot become a reason for us to lower our own standards.
When others emphasize health, the environment, accessibility, and emergency rescue, we can criticize how much of it is marketing, how much of it is PR.
But before we mock those values, we should at least ask ourselves:
Have we ever done these things seriously?
Do we truly believe that a product, besides making money, should also bear a little responsibility toward the people who use it?
Do we truly believe that people themselves are worth respecting?
I think that is also why this still makes me sad. Even after it turned out that the specific details in that news story did not hold.
What saddened me was not only a particular advertisement, or a particular company.
It was that I suddenly saw, in a moment that should never have been interrupted, that our products still have the capacity, and still have the motive, to extract commercial value from a person—and may forget that he is, first of all, someone who needed help.
If design cannot even see that, then the problem has long since ceased to be a matter of design skill.
It is a question of what kind of world we want to create.