"Good UX" is Ruining the World

Capitalist systems have continually made consumption easier and easier, while demanding more and more from workers. We’re left exhausted, unable and unwilling to find more sustainable options for basically everything.

“Good UX” plays a bigger role in this than we like to admit.

As UX designers, we pride ourselves on creating easy, frictionless experiences. But too often, those frictionless experiences actively mask harm caused by companies, systems, and governments that benefit from our work.

What’s the problem?
Here’s a simple example: AWS.

AWS is wildly popular because it’s easy to set up and incredibly convenient. But when it goes down, it takes huge chunks of the internet with it. That’s not a resilient system—it’s a fragile one that we’ve all been nudged into depending on because it removed friction.

A more timely example: AI.

AI is extremely convenient. It’s also environmentally disastrous. And yet, because it’s so easy to use, most of us (myself included) keep using it anyway. Convenience overrides values far more often than we want to admit.

Here’s a smaller, more personal example. A local farm near me has an online store with pickup options. That’s amazing. But Walmart’s pickup is faster, smoother, and more reliable. So even though I know Walmart underpays workers and actively discourages unionization, I’m constantly fighting the temptation to default to Walmart because the experience is just… easier.

That’s the power of UX.

If you want more examples:

• Privacy: For years, companies tracked us relentlessly because we didn’t even fully understand it was happening. The internet was easy to use; surveillance was invisible.
• Social media: Platforms are explicitly designed to hijack our attention with endless engagement bait. It takes genuine effort to disengage—but staying sucked in is effortless.
• “Pay in 4,” AfterPay, Klarna: These tools make it incredibly easy to slide into high-interest debt for DoorDash. That’s not empowerment. It’s predatory.

Meanwhile, wages stagnate, work hours increase, and we’re left with less time and energy to meaningfully engage with our communities.

What caused these problems?
In the early days of industrial design, particularly in Nordic design movements, mass production was imagined as a way to make good things accessible. Not everyone can afford a handcrafted table—but mass production could mean everyone gets a nice table, not just rich people. 

But at the same time that manufactured goods became more available, the system optimized for profit above all else. Accessibility became a side effect, not the goal.

(Side note: I also have a pet theory that the stock market—and the gamification of wealth—has massively accelerated this. Success is defined as ‘big number go up’. Quarter over quarter. Year over year. Executives get pulled into this feedback loop, and every other consequence of their decisions becomes secondary. It’s classic gamification—and it’s incredibly effective at disconnecting people from real-world harm.)

What do we do about it?
Before you go ‘omg so we need to make everything more difficult’, no, no, listen. We can make things easy, but we need to understand the potential effects of doing that. We need to understand the larger systems we exist in, and be able to be like ‘huh, that might ultimately be bad.’ 

We gotta make it easy for people to support good systems instead of bad systems. We gotta do it, man. What if we as UX people could help small farms be as easy to shop from as Walmart? What if? What if??? Making something easy to use, and easily accessible, is very powerful and very easily misused. 

We need to fight harder for technology to be a net positive for humanity. We need to stop thinking about solving ‘users’ problems’ and start fucking fixing our stupid societies. I’m not saying that’s going to be easy, but it’s got to be done.

There’s also this ‘burn it down’ mindset among a lot of UXers. We see something with terrible UX and we say, throw it out and start over. I’m guilty of this. But that’s not how the real world works. You have to be willing to understand why the system is so fucked, and then you can start working on guiding it toward a better future.

Knowing is like 10% of the battle, but we gotta start there. So start knowing how your work is affecting the larger system. We need to hold companies accountable and understand what knock-on effects our ‘good UX’ is accommodating. We need to be systems thinkers, not just UI experts.

So how do we start?

Get educated. Talk about this stuff. Spread the word. Use your UX skills to make ethical choices easier—not harder.
Personally, I’m just deeply over the corporate bullshit. I want to do something useful for once.