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The accidental tyranny of user interfaces

uxdesign.cc · 2,613 words · saved by 1 readers

My thesis here is that an obsession with easy, “intuitive” and perhaps even efficient user interfaces is creating a layer of soft tyranny. This layer is not unlike what I might create were I a dictator, seeking to soften up the public prior to an immense abuse of liberty in the future, by getting them so used to comical restrictions on their use of things that such bullying becomes normalized. A note of clarification: I am not a trained user interface designer. I am just a user with opinions. I don’t write the following from the perspective of someone who thinks that they could do better; my father, a talented programmer, taught me early on that everyone thinks that they could build a good user interface, but very few actually have the talent and the attitude to do so. As such, all the examples that I shall discuss are systems where the current user interface is much worse than a previous one. I’m not saying that I could do it better; they did it better, just in the past. This is not n

The accidental tyranny of user interfaces The potential of technology to empower is being subverted by tyrannical user interface design, enabled by our data and attention. Oliver Meredith Cox 11 min read · Oct 29, 2020 -- 3 Listen Share This article was originally published on WonkBridge . My thesis here is that an obsession with easy, “intuitive” and perhaps even efficient user interfaces is creating a layer of soft tyranny. This layer is not unlike what I might create were I a dictator, seeking to soften up the public prior to an immense abuse of liberty in the future, by getting them so use

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