A growing uneasyness

I love software, I love digital tools, I love the internet. They enabled me to be creative, to connect with people, to access all the knowledge in the world. However, I still feel a lot of frustration when using modern platforms, digital products and devices and it has grown over the years.

Of course, this feeling isn't explained by a single cause alone. Greedy companies, disinformation campaigns, the advertising industry and a lot of other malicious actors are overly present in the digital sphere.

Let's explore what factors lead us there and how we can fix it. Product developers and users can play a crucial role in fixing these problems.

Building great digital products

Technology has always helped us to enhance our abilities and enabled us to do things not possible before. Digital products and tools are no different, there are some we never want to miss again.

A great piece of technology is useful and enjoyable from the beginning and enhances your abilities or experience. Ideally you don't need to think about the technology itself, but can rather enjoy to using it whenever suitable.

For digital products we normally speak about user experience (UX) and how this needs to be at the core of product development to create amazing digital products.

To me UX is the allencompassing view at how users experience a product over the full lifecycle. To design and provide great UX, we need to deeply care for the people using our products (user centricity).

Poor UX by accident

However, the real experiece is often far from this ideal. Of course, realizing a truely user centric product is much harder than it seems. Additionally there are many factors we cannot control or which only manifest through a combination of real world issues.

Compromises might be necessary to match resource and time constraints or balance interests of different user groups against each other. Combining vastly different user groups and lack of user understanding will lead to poor trade-offs and result in a degraded user experience.

But even highly successful products can long-term cause frustration for users. Users can start depending on the product so much, that quality and reliability expectations are growing significantly. Users are exploring the limits of a digital tool and start using it in unintended ways. This puts pressure on developers to adept features in ways that do not work well with the original intention. Issues with the formerly beloved product are now overshadowing the experience.

Poor UX by lazyness

For people developing digital products there are usually many complex constraints, conflicting requirements and problems with technology. Short term it can often seem easier to ignore the users perspective and rather address existing challenges. Including the user's perspective requires time and effort. This makes it harder to match all other requirements and continue innovating with the product.

Each discipline involved in the product development process primarily focuses on problems within their area of expertise. Software developers might care to reduce technical complexity or want to work with technologies with the best developer experience. Many of these decisions have an impact on user experience even if it's not obvious from the start.

Often teams do not even have UX experts to advocate for great UX. This is either results from a lack of understanding of the importance of UX or is purposefully ignoring the user's perspective and experience.

And even UX experts cannot guarantee a great user experience. Everyone building a product needs to keep the users needs in mind. Every decision contributes to the overall experience. Especially technical decisions are not always reviewed through the lens of user experience, but end up having a huge impact on the future direction:

• How will users be able to work offline if we build a cloud based collaboration software?
• How can users transfer their data if our company goes bankrupt?
• What if the programming language and the chosen frameworks stop being maintained?

Calling the cause for these issues lasyness might seem harsh, but ultimately it's about ignoring the users perspective. I even think lazyness is a friendlier explanation than assuming ignorance towards the users wishes.

Poor UX by design

While the former problems can be overcome with good product development practices, there are many user experience flaws, which are caused intentionally by business requirements or strategic product decisions.

Many business models depend on user engagement, because they generate revenue from advertising. There is the whole field of persuasive technology trying to engange users beyond their original intention. While this makes digital experiences addictive, it doesn't contribute to the long-term satisfaction of users.

Even if business models are not about user engagement, there is an incentive to keep you as a paying customer. Therefore products are often designed to make it harder to stop using them (lock-in effect).

Companies naturally aim for recurring revenue to be able to cover their continued expenses. Unfortunately this can have a negative impact on their product quality.

Planned obsolecence is mostly found in hardware products, but for software a similar pattern is applied. Software licensed with a perpetual license would often run out of compatibility and not receive updates after a while. While this license model has lost it's popularity, subscription licenses also have a lot of downsides. You will ultimately lose access as soon as you stop paying.

Additionally cloud based software often stores it's data in the vendor's cloud in proprietary non-disclosed formats. This requires users to continuously pay subscription fees just to keep access to their data and files.

How to develop better products

I don't want to downplay the contraints for digital product development. Being paid to build products is essential for most people. Having a viable business model is essential for companies to keep existing. However, there is a fine line between acceptable trade-offs and self-serving advantages.

The importance of user centricity cannot be overstated in this respect. It's a constant and tough challenge to not compromise. Business needs, technical needs or individual stakeholder requirements can easily lead to compromises with negative impacts. Therefore you will need to go the extra mile to defend user centricity and embed it so deeply in your organizational culture that everybody does so.

My ideal for great digital products follows the idea of creative commons and open science. Digital products and software are mostly knowledge products, i.e. once created they can benefit the world at little-to-no additional cost. Any usage restrictions are done for the self-serving benefits of individuals or companies.

While not the silver bullet, Open Source business models can be a guardrail to make sure you cannot hold your customers hostage. If you don't stay true to your values, you're risking the community to fork your project and continue without you.

Another such guardrail are the use of open standards and APIs. While making your product interoperable, open standards also allow users to have more control over their data and ultimately migrate away in case your service stops meeting their expectations.

Cloud services and cloud business models are especially vulnerable to malicious practices, because they by default assert more control over the user's data. Ensuring good practices and resisting lock-in patterns is something many companies have seemingly given up on.

While in revenue optimization terms bad practices can sometimes seem plausible, I believe it shows a lack of trust in the organization's ability to innovate and create long-term value for users. I refuse to understand how giving users more agency will not be beneficial in the long run.

Building great software tools and digital products needs to seek inspiration from fields which are much more long-term oriented. Cathedral thinking can also be applied to how we build software. On the other hand, we often build software with a temporary mindset, i.e. thinking that after at some years it will be replaced.

While technological innovation is progressing at incredible speeds, some foundations are there to stay for decades if not longer. CPUs still work according to the same principles as in the early days, Windows (developed from MS DOS) is still a major operating system and web standards keep being relevant (and are being extended rather than replaced). While those might not be your every day examples, there's also a lot of proprietary software in companies which has it's roots more than 50 years ago.

Certainly, a lot of parts are being replaced more frequently. On the other hand, the software components and libraries that power our modern world, are often fairly stable and the rate of change is very slow compared to their adoption. After all, there's no need to reinvent the common nuts and bolts every year. And if you do need to reinvent it, try to make sure the next generation will also work for multiple decades.

How users can take action

By far the most important action you can take is to start caring. We have to grow up from being passive consumers who use whatever is convinient. Caring and engaging in discussions is paramount to request change. We have to hold the companies and projects accountable for what they create. Individually we might choose software products which hold up to our standards. As a society we need to set guardrails for the digital world.

You can start by supporting services which are not only offering convenience, also follow good principles, like openness, privacy and allow participation. Don't accept malicious practices, and stand up against it. Any company locking you into their ecosystem should loose a significant number of users/customers. Any company selling user data should immediately loose trust. And any digital product not offering open interfaces should not be handed any of your relevant data. Make sure you don't become dependent on a company or project that can choose to exploit you.

Consumer protection is something we take for granted, but it was fought for and had to develop over decades. In the digital world we still lack the majority of consumer protection and we have barely translated existing laws to apply in the digital realm. Aspects which require vastly enhanced protection in the digital world are even less covered. Think about anonymous threats, doxxing, behaviour targeting, platform monopolys, targeted misinformation or service lock-ins. Those do not have relevant equivalents in the pre-digital era.

Governance for digital services needs to be democratized. Just like being able to participate in your local community and government, we need to able to organize in our corner of the digital world (e.g. social media platform). Currently we allow companies to fully control social interaction and design the way we communicate digitally. Why not mandate companies to open up their platform governance, especially if they are quasi-monopolies?

Of course, voluntary engagement is very asymmetric to corporate interests, but granting users rights over digital products will enable them to prevent malicious practices going against their interests.

Some problems are emergent and can only be seen from a higher perspective when negative effects have cumulated. Attributing the real costs on society and our collective user experience to individual products can be hard or impossible. Therefore digital products (especially platforms) need to be regulated in a way which prevents them from exploiting users and cause damage to society.

On the other hand we cannot expect everything to be solved by politics and regulation. We need be active participants in building the digital world we use. Everone can do so with tiny or big steps.

From contributing to Wikipedia articles, to being active in open forums, to building open source software, there is an infinite number of ways how to shape the digital world. Voluntary content creators do so every day, but we often allow big platforms to take advantage of our contributions without granting us any influence in return. An automated email congratulating you for 1000 likes is worthless and no substitue for influence on the platform itself.