I love this piece. I philosophically agree with most of it (in fact I wrote a previous HN front-pager* called Disrespectful Design).
But a bunch of the advice is just not practical because of, well, human psychology. For example, there's a lot of research showing that in competitive markets, people lazily choose the product with the most visible brand (or that is most accessible, ie in your face at the shelf on the supermarket—you can draw analogies to virtual products).
Or, for products with infrequent use-cases, users won't remember to come back and use your product when the time comes. Zillow is a good example of this. The real value is when you are buying, selling, (or renting) a house, but that happens so infrequently. So they've built other ways to keep their app on your phone and their brand in your mind, like the Zestimate score (where homeowners or potential home buyers will check that score on a more frequent basis).
Also, engagement tracking _is_ kind of critical to developing/understanding your product.
So it's not so much about what you do and don't do, it's more about _how_ you do it. Do you track engagement AND solely optimize it?
In any case, loved the article and agree with most of the discussion... just would encourage people to take a more pragmatic method to avoiding the engagement trap.
It's pained me to listen to people who have elaborate ideas of promoting disengagement with their web sites (e.g. apologizing for having ads) in the context that engagement is such a precious thing because it hard to get.
If there is an "art of seduction" there is also an art of driving people away and the two are closely linked. Søren Kierkegaard wrote his notorious Diary of the Seducer to drive away his fiance Regine Olsen who never quite fell out of love with him despite Kierkegaard demonstrating what an awful person he was to come up with that text.
I never said it's a stand-in for actual user studies. I said it's critical. You need both. User studies will never give you the broad, hard data you get from engagement tracking. They also won't give you as fast feedback. People have all sorts of biases in how they present themselves in user studies, and you should get that data and try to sift through it, but it's not a substitute for actually seeing how people behave.
Also, engagement tracking is actually really hard to do well, so it's definitely not lazy. But it definitely is shallow.
But a bunch of the advice is just not practical because of, well, human psychology. For example, there's a lot of research showing that in competitive markets, people lazily choose the product with the most visible brand (or that is most accessible, ie in your face at the shelf on the supermarket—you can draw analogies to virtual products).
Or, for products with infrequent use-cases, users won't remember to come back and use your product when the time comes. Zillow is a good example of this. The real value is when you are buying, selling, (or renting) a house, but that happens so infrequently. So they've built other ways to keep their app on your phone and their brand in your mind, like the Zestimate score (where homeowners or potential home buyers will check that score on a more frequent basis).
Also, engagement tracking _is_ kind of critical to developing/understanding your product.
So it's not so much about what you do and don't do, it's more about _how_ you do it. Do you track engagement AND solely optimize it?
In any case, loved the article and agree with most of the discussion... just would encourage people to take a more pragmatic method to avoiding the engagement trap.
*https://somehowmanage.com/2020/09/13/disrespectful-design-us...