Categories: Technology

Honesty in user interface design

I liked the “Dark Patterns: inside interfaces designed to trick you” article by Harry Brignull.

Honesty in how we interact with our customers through our products is probably an obvious practice to most of us. Unfortunately, ill-conceived business thinking lead to products that place profit in front of users. Not surprisingly, as Bringull suggests, users will ultimately abandon the product.

I am not a user experience designer. Still, as an architect I aspire for the products for which I am responsible to be defined by their simplicity, elegance, predictability, and above all user empathy at their very core. Bringull says it really well…

Good design — and good business — is all about empathy with our fellow humans. In fact it’s not really limited to business — it’s society as a whole. It’s what defines us as humans. To understand the true impact of your designs, you have to work at a human level of focus.
[…]
A good brand is liked. A great brand is loved and respected.
(Harry Brignull, Dark Patterns: inside interfaces designed to trick you, The Verge, 2013).

The main message for me… “honesty in how we design our products”. It’s not only about user interfaces or user experiences. I think it relates to all aspects of how we design, build, deliver, and market products. In most likelihood, it’s all obvious stuff to most but a nice reminder from time-to-time doesn’t hurt 🙂

Savas Parastatidis

Savas Parastatidis works at Amazon as a Sr. Principal Engineer in Alexa AI'. Previously, he worked at Microsoft where he co-founded Cortana and led the effort as the team's architect. While at Microsoft, Savas also worked on distributed data storage and high-performance data processing technologies. He was involved in various e-Science projects while at Microsoft Research where he also investigated technologies related to knowledge representation & reasoning. Savas also worked on language understanding technologies at Facebook. Prior to joining Microsoft, Savas was a Principal Research Associate at Newcastle University where he undertook research in the areas of distributed, service-oriented computing and e-Science. He was also the Chief Software Architect at the North-East Regional e-Science Centre where he oversaw the architecture and the application of Web Services technologies for a number of large research projects. Savas worked as a Senior Software Engineer for Hewlett Packard where he co-lead the R&D effort for the industry's Web Service transactions service and protocol. You can find out more about Savas at https://savas.me/about