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UX designers are not designing interfaces, they design personalities
UX designers are subtly encoding human behavior through metrics, essentially designing the personality of the digital environments they create.
What: Designers choose which metrics (e.g., follower counts, streaks) are emphasized, which dictates user behavior and self-perception. The author argues for leaving space in interfaces for unquantifiable human experience.
Why it matters: Product metrics are often mistaken for objective reality; designers hold significant ethical influence over how users interpret their own value based on gamified feedback loops.
Deep dive
- Digital metrics are subjective choices that influence behavior.
- Quantitative feedback loops (streaks, ratings) often override intuition and qualitative experiences.
- Designer bias dictates what users perceive as 'success' or 'status' within an application.
- There is a responsibility to avoid over-quantifying human activity to preserve nuance.
- Designers must consciously choose which parts of reality to omit when designing interfaces.
Original article
Digital products increasingly translate human behavior into metrics such as sleep scores, ratings, streaks, story points, and follower counts, which can gradually influence how people understand themselves and behave. These measurements expose only selected parts of reality, yet their apparent objectivity can give them greater authority than unmeasured experiences, relationships, and intuition. UX designers therefore shape more than interfaces and experiences: by deciding which metrics products emphasize, they influence how people perceive themselves and should deliberately leave room for realities that cannot be quantified.
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