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The Naive Designer
Any designer can fall in one of several categories. So, you can be a designer who’s very excited about what you’re designing, but who is not highly attentive to the humanity of the people for whom the design is intended. And there are many designers who are in that category. They’re wonderful designers, but they’re not attentive to how human beings deal or interact with things.
And the idea of sludge is a kind of entry point into seeing what human beings often struggle to handle. They might think that human beings are completely going to understand the design because I do. Now, it might be that their customers are every bit as smart as they are but just aren’t acquainted with the particular design that the designer has come up with.
And that might make the designer produce something that’s opaque, or it might make the designer wildly over-optimistic about the likelihood that customers will enjoy or feel equipped to deal with the design. There was a great basketball coach a number of years ago who said, “It’s not what you say, it’s what they hear.” It’s not what you do only. It’s how they perceive what you’ve done.
And it may be that what you’ve done has a message or connotation or obstacle associated with it to which you were oblivious and which you would be horrified to see you’ve created. So to “see users as they are” sounds a little bit like a cliche, but on the ground, it’s anything but that. It’s often essential to the achievement of the designer’s own goals.
The Human-Centered Designer
The best designers are acutely attentive not only to the product itself but to the foibles and imperfections of the people with whom they’re dealing, often with a kind of humor and delight and never with a sense of condescension or superiority. They might know, for example, that human beings have limited attention. And there are things that really matter to how their lives will go that they won’t focus on unless you make it clear to them that that’s something that is relevant to the situation.
A way to make money is to have satisfied customers. And a way to have satisfied customers is not to drive them crazy with sludge or frictions that make it hard for them to interact with the company or use their product. And we can think of companies, can’t we, that are minimalist with respect to sludge in the sense that it’s just really easy to deal with them.
If you want to buy something from those companies, if you want to return something to those companies, if you want to make a complaint to those companies, they make it really easy for you. And those companies are very sharp in knowing what people like and hate. They’re very aware that a little bit of sludge can be very damaging to their reputation, and they act accordingly.
For example, the company Apple is very alert to what human beings are like and how they think. And the level of sludge associated with Apple products is typically low. The products are easy to use. They’re very intuitive. The level of sludge with respect to purchase and repair tends to be quite low. And the company appears to be very self-conscious about the adverse effects of sludge on its business.
The Manipulative Designer
Then there’s a third kind of designer who are very alert to the humanity and imperfection of our species, but they use that not to benefit them, but to kind of steal from them by using sludge to make it very hard for people to extricate themselves from a product or service, even if it turns out it’s not very good for them. Or by having features of a product or service that aren’t visible to people, but that people are going to have to pay for. It’s sometimes called shrouded attributes.
So maybe there’s a warranty for which you’re going to have to pay monthly or twice a year. Maybe there’s an add-on product that they’re going to send you for a certain amount of money. And to figure out those terms requires you to navigate sludge.
There are cases in which the authorities have tried to intervene against those manipulators. And this is very much a work-in-progress in many nations, where the authorities are grappling with a new form, let’s call it, I guess, of fraud, where it’s really not fraud in this sense of lying exactly. But it’s exploiting people’s human foibles to try to trap or trick them to lose money or sacrifice health and safety.