4. UX is the villain

As a UX practitioner
I called UX a naive villain at the end of the introduction, and the phrase deserves a longer answer because the rest of this series rests on it.

None of us in the field set out to hurt anyone, and most of my colleagues advocate for users with real care. Yet we keep proving the old line from W. Edwards Deming, No amount of care or skill in workmanship can overcome fundamental faults of the system.

The system has to optimize against numbers, and with massive data volume, dating apps get pulled toward whatever the large numbers say (qual runs alongside, but mostly to back up what the quant already claims)

But each human, each connection is qualitative. Not everything that counts can be counted. So the strategy is substituting what is measurable for what is meaningful.

Three Stanford professors call this the problem of proxies, and warn it leads to a success disaster: their success in solving for one particular task has wide-ranging consequences for other things we care about. — Rob Reich, Mehran Sahami & Jeremy M. Weinstein, System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot (Harper, 2021)

That’s why I write from the outside.

Still a user, still obsessed with human connection, naming what the metrics leave out. Naive, maybe, but biased toward action.