Delightful Enshittification
Why joining a big tech company as a UX professional, is often not the dream job you hoped for
When fast-growth tech companies reach later stages of investment, two things collide:
- The user experience of a once loved product begins to slide in the name of growth and monetisation. This is called enshittification.
- The company’s once under-staffed design team begins to get funding to build out a fuller team.
The result of this collide is what I’ve come to call “Delightful enshittification”. Stick with me and you might recognise it in your own company or in the apps you frequently use. It might be why you’re struggling to enjoy a job you thought you’d love.
What is enshittification?
Enshittification might be a word you’ve not encountered yet, but you will and you’ve probably already noticed the effect it describes.
It describes the decay of platforms and apps, as they seek to exploit their users, and then their business partners, in an attempt to rinse ever increasing amounts of money from them.
Platforms seek to monetise user activity in a way that becomes increasingly separated from the value they deliver to their users. They then seek to charge business partners more and more for the same service, by making those businesses reliant on them.
This leads to a decay in the experiences those platforms and apps provide.
A classic example of an enshittified platform can be found in Amazon. It was once the case study for customer-centricity. Customers used to be prioritised above everything else, in a way that made it the default platform for shopping in many countries. The experience was so far ahead of rivals that customers were almost trapped into its convenience. But at that point in time, the company didn’t turn a profit. Instead it was channelling all its resources back in to growth.
Nowadays Amazon has a very different approach and it shows in its product. If you search on Amazon for a specific brand of product, the results you get will be based on whichever company is bidding the most to be top of your results. You often don’t even get the product you’re actually looking for anywhere in your results. Reviews of products are gamed to a level where they are next to worthless and you can very easily find yourself buying products with safety issues. Customers need to wade through multiple screens of upsells, when they were once able to buy in a single tap of their finger through one-click purchasing.
Enshittification is the cause of all this. Amazon shopping is now an advertising company when it used to be a retail one.
Similarly Uber simply used its investment funding to price taxi companies out of the market. They subsidised fares at a loss, until the existing companies couldn’t survive. Now that many of them have left the market, your Uber experience gets worse and worse. You’re now charged extra for many of the things that were a basic expectation of the original service. That pattern will continue.
Once a company has its users in a state of dependence, they can then begin to safely enshittify their platforms without losing their business. This begins with a shift of focus towards the businesses selling on their platform at the expense of those using it. But before long those businesses fall into a position of reliance on the platform too. The platform can then safely turn on those businesses as well.
The chances are that the long term goal of your favourite food delivery app, is to put your favourite food outlet out of business and replace them. But first they’ll make you reliant on their app, then make your favourite outlet reliant on them too. Then finally they’ll replace that business with one that makes them more money, and you’ll still order food from that same app.
This is why all of your favourite apps and platforms will get shit eventually. If you work in UX on those platforms, your work will at some point, be to help make it shit. It might already be.
The bloat of the design team
Tech companies often have to start life with a healthy level of user centricity. This is because they are trying to persuade users/customers to switch to using their platform. To do so, the platform/app needs to be better than the current solutions that people are using.
Working as a UX professional within the company at this time can be very rewarding. The biggest challenges you tend to have are:
- getting the company to value your way of working
- having enough UX people to do the work that needs doing.
At this time, the UX professionals often dream of a day when they have more colleagues and a senior level champion within the business. But they often don’t realise that they are already living their best life as a UX professional in that business.
In time they might get both of those things they desire, but they haven’t accounted for how everything else about the work they’re doing will deteriorate.
The company floats on the stock market or is sold to a larger company and the focus turns to enshittification. Now there is more budget to hire designers and researchers, but the focus on user centricity has shifted to ‘user rinsing’ instead. User centricity becomes an internal performance, rather than something that really makes much of a difference to actual users.
Rather than aiming to do more for users, the company takes their use of the product for granted. New projects aim to exploit their existing use of the product to generate more money. It doesn’t matter how much the company is making from its users, the aim will be to make more. Releasing new innovative products is a lot harder than trying to rinse more money from the existing one, so the focus tend to be on the latter.
The original UX professionals often leave the company around this time, as do many others. Some will hang on because they love(d) working there, but will be gaslit into thinking they’re not capable enough for the new version of the company. The irony is that everything this new version does, makes the product worse for users. And the truth is, these original designers are too autonomous (competent) and customer-focussed for this new phase of the company.
Sprinkling glitter
Now the design and research teams are well-funded, but very little of their work is devoted to making users’ lives any better. When your product experience is deteriorating, the language in the design team changes. The team that was once arguing to fix all the annoying bugs and issues in the product is now more concerned with ‘moments of magic’ and brand voice.
There is little they can do to make the actual product value any better, so they focus on how the product is decorated. The scope each designer has is miniscule compared to the work the original team had to do. But the designers with this ultra-narrow scope are often paid multiple times more than the designers who made the original valuable product that people loved. As a result, they need to make more of a performance of their work. So there are many more workshops to attend where little is decided and lots more discussions without any actual decisions.
Deceptive design becomes commonplace, but calling it out as such would be career suicide. A form of design doublespeak emerges, where the people charged with simplifying things for users (the design team) are complicating their own everyday discussions to mask what is really being said.
Spotify Smart Shuffle
I was prompted to start writing this post after a camping trip and an encounter with Spotify’s Smart Shuffle feature. The Spotify app seemed intolerant of my disinterest in its new feature, when trying to shuffle one of my playlists.
Despite turning this feature off (it should never have been the default), it slyly began introducing new songs into my playlist. I turned it off again, but it turned itself back on again later.
Our apps are now filled with features and approaches that promote the company’s agenda above our own. In the old days, technology sucked because of a lack of attention on usability and the processed required to improve it. Now the intent of the company is the bigger problem.
Working as a designer at a company that takes its users for granted, is only rewarding for a certain type of person.
Being aware of this lifecycle
If you’re applying for a job to work on a product you already love, the chances are the best days of working as a UX professional in that organisation have come and gone already.
There’s also a dichotomy around salary and job satisfaction. The best salaries will often be paid by companies who are enshittifying their product. You’re sometimes left with the choice between a role with a great salary and a role you’ll enjoy.
Tied to this, is the fact that design teams with lots of designers will often make more of an industry around organising themselves than they do around producing quality work.
The best UX jobs (in terms of satisfaction) sometimes exist within companies you’ve never heard of. If you want to read more about enshittification then this Wired post on the subject is a good read.
About the author
I’m David Hamill. I help organisations take better decisions through lean but meaningful UX research. If you liked this post, you can read some more below. I also write about UX a lot on LinkedIn
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