Once upon a time, there was a consensus about the design process: we would do research to understand user needs, and then we would do design to satisfy those needs. That consensus, it seems, is gone. From Cory Doctorow’s thesis on enshittification to Ed Zitron’s Rot Economy to the no-consent culture of AI, the trend is clear. “Users should be thankful for what they get,” say our corporate overlords. “Any problems are their own fault, and nothing to do with us.”

Google has wholeheartedly embraced this trend by cutting every researcher under Staff level in its Cloud division. Constantine Papas has a very good analysis of this layoff and the broader industry trend here, but there’s one key part of his analysis that I want to highlight:

The one point on which I disagree with Papas is that designers are safe (or at least safer) from this trend because they can “point to a beautiful interface” as proof of their value. The actual thing that keeps designers safe is not the beauty (because no one cares about taste except for us). The same (stupid) question responsible for the cuts to researchers has haunted UX design for its entire existence: “what is the ROI?” In response to that pressure, the field has capitulated in two important ways:

Which brings us to the second important headline of the week, which illustrates just how much “revenue impact” deceptive design practice really brings in: Amazon is now on the hook for $2.5 billion dollars in settlements over making Prime so difficult to cancel that the process was internally termed “the Iliad flow.” This interview with Harry Brignull (of deceptive.design fame) goes into all the detail you could want on how deceptive UX contributed to this sleazy scheme.

Other regulators are also taking notice of deceptive UX. The European Union has banned a list of design patterns (false urgency, guilt-tripping, and so forth) that have become omnipresent on the Web despite being universally hated by users. And there are voices within our industry also calling out for change, envisioning malleable software and fair patterns as ethical alternatives.

But deceptive design isn’t the only design that costs money. One of the few ways in which the US regulatory environment is ahead of Europe on users’ rights is the ADA, which applies to websites as well as buildings. Companies have been trying to weasel out of doing accessible design for years; Adrian Roselli has been documenting the five-year saga of overlay company AccessiBe’s legal woes, ending this year with a million-dollar fine because its product does not actually satisfy the legal requirements for accessibility.

In fact, website accessibility lawsuits are trending up year-over-year, with courts ordering many six and seven figure fines. And with companies lining up to push out half-baked AI tools like Figma Dreamweaver (sorry, I meant to say Figma Sites) the accessibility nightmare seems like it is only going to continue.

(As an aside, it would behoove designers railing against accessibility guidelines as the reason “all websites look the same” to take a look at how LLMs are being used to produce the mathematically most generic UI designs possible, instead.)

Just like with deceptive patterns, the march of progress continues. WCAG 3.0 is nearing completion, with great improvements over the 2.x version of the guidelines such as outcome-driven criteria instead of binary yes or no compliance. The thought leadership around accessibility is also elevating its perception from “oh it’s just text sizes and contrasts.” Tero Väänänen has written about the necessity of thinking about accessibility at the user journey level, rather than an interface-level afterthought. And Jack Garfinkel has created a list of criteria for accessible content to pair with your accessible experience.

Since good design prevents these kinds of high-visibility failures, it can be hard to prove the value of this work to corporate bean counters. These lawsuits provide an excellent example of the kind of expensive disasters that investing into proper user research and design can prevent.

— Pavel at the Product Picnic