Unrestrained, raw technological possibilities are scary. That it is why it is the duty of the corporation to package, sanitise, file down and finish with a coat of beige (or the current Pantone colour of the year, if we're being extra fruity), lest "users" hold them in the wrong way.
Of course in the interests of maximising profits/access to capital, and on a personal level, advancing careers, the "user" cohort is interpreted to be the largest segment of the total addressable market stakeholders can barefacedly get away with.
This of course has a number of interesting implications: the first is that the requirements now demand a sort of universal accessibility. "User" "Experience" designers typically attempt to achieve this by heavily optimising for the "happy paths"
This is where the first tension and battleground comes in: defining what exactly the happy paths actually are. "User" centric design would argue that the happy path is one that allows the user to achieve their intended goals under normal circumstances. Unfortunately this view is heavily disincentivised, due to the ruthless logic of extractavism. Increasingly instead the happy path is determined to be the goal the business wants to achieve by manipulating and exploiting the "user's" available resources, data, and ultimately time.
This is where the second implication comes in: the push towards universality means that there is a tendency to adopt a sort of minimalistic approach, lest "users" from a diverse bevvy of cultures, languages, and contexts, become overwhelmed by the volume of information required to interact with the heavily curated "experience".
This reveals a second battleground: this minimalistic approach by necessity means that the interaction surface is constrained despite an increase in pixel density and computing resources available to "users" year after year. This leads to interfaces that radically change over time as corporate fiefdoms gain or lose prominence and executives helicopter in with the latest strain of brain worms.
Which brings me to the third implication: We live in an attention economy. Business compete for eyeballs and endless growth. We are bombarded with adverts, and call to actions and increasingly desperate attempts to monopolise our time and energy. This is a units game—cattle not pets.
"Users" are a commodity, a hot one perhaps, but like any other commodity, can be bought and sold. In such an environment, goes the line of reasoning in the mind of the average executive, does it not make sense to heavily prioritise onboarding alongside user acquisition so that users won't immediately give up or get distracted, or gasp, go to a competitor?!
This line of reasoning continues, smirkingly, disturbingly, that like any abusive relationship, the "user" is locked in, or if not that, drained of any conceivable value. These shambolic souls are forced to work around sharp edge after painful sharp edge, cutting themselves on easily fixable issues continually postponed to the next quarter in favour of the latest shiny fad.
That this is a house of cards and that user grievance spread by word of mouth can ultimately bite the corporate personhood in the proverbial buttocks is of little matter to the average executive, given typically precarious leadership tenures and of course the wad of fuck-you money hidden under the mattress, no doubt some of it due to self-dealing and a little bit of securities fraud on the side, as a treat.
This short term thinking, where even the value of loyalty is calculated to the cent, means that the ability to develop mastery over one's is derided as a design goal, and that statistical models, often times ones that are poorly conceived, drive the evolution of the "user" "experience".
This thinking is also self perpetuating : "users" are manipulated, forced to confront a constantly shifting, destabilising landscape and treated poorly once they've passed the onboarding phase. They eventually "churn", the preferred industry term for an agonising, oftentimes downright violent assault on our digital sanity, followed by a forlorn, sometimes futile, search for a less abusive alternative. This opens up room for "disruption" in the form of smaller competitors which are eventually engulfed by the corporate behemoths, run out of suckers to front their operations, or increasingly so, are legislated out of existence.
I of course am not the first person to remark on this process, a term for this has been gaining some traction: enshittification. However I am not writing this in order to retread the same points but to ponder what comes next.
Because it is clear that our epistemological lenses are cracked and that "user" "experience" design has failed us.
"User" is abstraction, homogenisation, commodification, interchangeability, and ultimately manipulation. It is a word laden with unpleasant connotations to addiction and of course conjures the spectre of colonial exploitation via gunboat diplomacy and the sale of opiates to the masses.
Meanwhile "Experience" implies something sterile and dead, a curated natural history museum filled with captured specimens and the nauseating smell of formaldehyde, aimed at "delight" (titillation), instead of a deeper, more respectful relationship with the people that are living through the numbered days of the torment nexus.
As an angry aside, "Accessibility" is a co-opted buzzword that prioritises metrics over disability justice.
How can we work within these types frameworks when they are so broken?
I don't claim to have any definitive answers, but I have a few ideas. They all entail killing the "user".