Myths tech companies believe about the world
Lack of nuanced user experience raced to the extreme bottom.
There is an interesting genre of articles “myths programmers/designers/etc. believe about X”. The underlying idea is simple: professionals often make wrong assumptions. Many tech companies also seem to have some weird beliefs1 about the world and its human inhabitants2.
Everyone in a country speaks the same language
There exist bilingual or even multilingual countries, yet many tech products just pick one language and disregard the others. When it comes to the language of UI it’s often good enough to provide just one locale (e.g. most Swedish speakers in Finland can understand written Finnish, or the majority of residents of Switzerland can read German). But when it comes to content, things just don’t make sense.
Spotify presents country-specific content, which includes playlists, charts, podcasts and ads. If you are a Swedish speaker in Finland, you cannot enjoy a Swedish Spotify experience. But it exists! In Sweden.
There are 4 official languages in Switzerland, and the respective communities have quite distinct cultures. Italian speakers would rather have access to Italian Spotify than Swiss German. Or at least I’ve read many such comments in endless Spotify complaint threads on Reddit.
Oh, and what about the wild idea of people speaking an unofficial language? That’s related to another myth tech companies believe about the world:
Nobody moves to another country, ever
You speak English and you move to Sweden. The majority of movies and TV shows on Netflix and most other streaming services will offer you Swedish subtitles only. Netflix actually has subtitles in most languages, but offers them only in respective countries.
I bet there is a long, simultaneously boring and infuriating explanation that has to do with copyrights, licensing, MPAA, AGICOA and BDSM, which, in the end just makes things unnecessarily inaccessible. IANAL, but this sucks. (This is one of those occasions where pirated contents offers orders of magnitude better user experience than official channels).
The weirdest thing is that most Swedish movies on Netflix have English subtitles available everywhere except Sweden.
Browser and system language don’t matter
My OS is set to English, my browser is set to English, I open www.google.co.uk and see Finnish Google, because the IP address I got assigned overrides my personal thrice explicitly announced preference. Why won’t you take a hint, Google?
Generally, it seems like tech companies love to disregard any standards and protocols (including the human protocol described in RFC101 COMMON SENSE
) as much as possible, and create their own opaque layer of user logic.
People want "experience"
Ah, experience. Product designer’s fuzzy dream. Sorry to break it to you, but people don’t want to have an experience with your product. They actually don’t care about your product existing. They want the thing that the product delivers: movies, music, entertainment, file storage, photo backup, whatever. Ideally, your product should not exist, because ideally there is no problem to solve. But since the problem exists, then here is the deal: we pay you money for your solution, and you don’t overcomplicate our lives.
This whole idea seems so hopelessly old-fashioned. When Selfridges, a chain of high-end department stores in the UK, first opened in 1909, their revolutionary cool idea was to provide a retail experience ✨. Have a stroll in a store like in a museum. Nowadays, I don’t want to spend any time neither in a retail store, nor on your scrolling-hijacked website.
People remember your product
Every once in a while I receive a cheerful email about some SuperBloop.io releasing a new long-awaited feature of bidirectional transploading, and I ask myself: huh, what the hell is SuperBloop?
I guess I signed up there at some point, but today I can’t even be sure it was called SuperBloop back then. It’s not uncommon for a project to go through multiple rebrandings and owners, while assuming everyone is monitoring their progress rigorously.
Come on, unless you’re literally FAANG (which, god damn me, stands for Meta, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Alphabet), I won’t be able to remember your app. These emails make me feel like either I’m crazy, or you’re crazy, or everyone’s crazy.
(If you wait long enough, you’ll receive the “The end of amazing journey of Woobly (formerly SuperBloop)” email, at which point you can stop trying to recall what SuperBloop was.)
Engagement is measurable
Changes in UI and UX are often driven by company’s growth targets. This game they’re playing feels wrong on many levels. First, they collectively convince the investors that growth is better than profits (sure hope that interest rate hike puts an end to this nonsense). Then convince the shareholders that growth is driven by engagement. Then convince project managers that engagement:
is a thing
is measurable
Then they probably create some engagement metrics (engacoins? kilo-engagements? oh, I know, engagios!). And then they drive endless hours of development to make their website worse than their app.
But hey, iOS users are now, like, so engaged.
But Apple…
Maybe it’s rose tinted glasses, but I remember Apple being so refreshingly different to everyone else. How did they do it and what changed?
Yeah, it’s Steve Jobs. But not because he was some out-of-this-world genius. He was a dictator, and that seems to be the only realistic way to enforce common sense in a large organization.
But, business…
The world for which many tech companies are building their products is their “idealized” vision of the real thing. It’s averaged out, smoothed out, simplified. Processed by multiple levels of business, managerial and legal audits. Made inhuman, to an extent.
When a tech startup fails, it’s always “because we failed to gain marketshare” or “missed a critical opportunity window for international expansion”. It’s never “because we kept making our product worse to maximize an imaginary currency of engagement which we exchanged for investors’ dollars in order to pay thousands of developers to make our website look worse than our mobile app”.
Of course, companies are not people, so read “company believes in X” as “company behaves as if X is their business consideration”.
Yes, if you talk to any single person in the company, they will most likely agree with you. But somehow you group them together, and the resulting behavior is… strange.