Thoughts on UX
Carl wrote a blog post on the state of user experience in today's web and I have a couple of thoughts on the subject I want to share. I agree with pretty much everything he expressed in his blog post and I do believe that if we wanted to fix this issue we could easily do it tomorrow. But we won't. And when I say we I mean the collective group of people that create content that lives on the web.
Ads won't go away, pop-ups won't go away, fucking newsletters modals won't go away. Why? Because unfortunately, they work. That's just the reality.
Sure, removing all the annoyances would be the most sensible and respectful thing to do but marketing and business people are not paid to be respectful. They're paid to achieve results. And there are many talented individuals that are lending their skills in order to improve those obnoxious things that are ads on the web. That's just the reality of the world we live in.
The web is mostly a clusterfuck because human beings are a clusterfuck. We live in a society where people are stupid enough to litter the place they live in. Do you think these people will care about ads on the web?
The web is and will continue to be a mess because people are messy. Some of us care about our environment. We try to be discrete, try not to make too much noise, try to keep things clean and we do our best to be polite and respectful. Others couldn't care less about any of that stuff. They'll litter, be loud, rude and disrespectful. And that's the way it is.
I don't think there's a tech solution to this problem because it's not a tech problem. It's a human one. And you can't fix human behaviour with more tech.
What we can do is celebrate the people who are fighting the good fight, visit sites that are trying to be respectful, try support companies that are doing things the right way. We can only encourage good behaviour and hope for the best.