Let’s start with an obvious truth – that for design to succeed it needs to think like the end user. Because every time it does, its impact is transformational. It benefits customers, clients and companies alike. ‘Good design’, we call it – what we want to achieve on every project we take on.
But you don’t get to the ‘good’ without understanding the ‘bad’. And the path to design success only uncovers itself once you understand the full spectrum of design failure.
We’ve all been there, and we all understand the landscape. On one end there’s deliberate manipulation – dark patterns, subscription traps, fake urgency. Red flags that are easy to spot, easy to stick into a ‘do not touch’ checklist, and just as easy to avoid in your workflow.
But on the other end there’s something else. Less obvious, less dark, but just as harmful. Something that is so intangible in its nature that it quietly slips into our process, silently compromising the end product.
Indifference.
Indifferent design is never deliberate in its misintention. It doesn’t follow any of the visible patterns harmful design is known for and yet it fails the user because it unknowingly commits one cardinal sin. It stops asking who is on the other end of the screen.
And it happens in spite of a designer’s best intentions. We put ourselves in the mindset of the end user, believing that leads to empathy, and a better user experience.
But the end user we imagine is just a reflection of us – calm, unhurried, informed, subconsciously servicing a brief.
That user is a fiction.
Real users don’t arrive fist-pumping to predictable scenarios, itching to click on every button. A lot of them arrive concerned, frightened, depleted, grieving, and overwhelmed – far removed from us as designers.
Our design was never built for them.
Chapter 1: The Wrong User
Good design comes with responsibility. There’s an unsaid promise we make to our users – to act in their best interest, and to do so transparently. Understanding and fulfilling this responsibility used to make me nervous in the early phase of my career. Perhaps because my definition of design was based on aesthetics, not purpose. But over time, experience turned into armour, and although the weight of that responsibility never lightened, I became more comfortable carrying it.
But even now, after all these years, there’s a certain kind of project that still makes me nervous – one that takes everything you think you know about user behaviour and flips it on its head. Because it deals with emotions that aren’t easy to design for – fear, grief and stress.
A friend of mine had a bereavement in his immediate family and found himself up at midnight, unable to sleep, thinking of how to plan a funeral. Not knowing where to start, he flicked on his phone and tapped on the first funeralcare website, expecting a simple, straightforward process. A few clicks into the website he was presented with a progress bar broken down into 7 steps just to fill up a form. A chatbot dressed in high-contrast colours popped up in the corner, promising immediate assistance if he would just click on one of three options. Exhausted, and incredulous, he closed the tab, but not before being slapped with a final popup – ‘Hope we were able to help. Please tell us how we did!’, followed by three clickable smileys.
He told me he laughed out loud, much to his disbelief. Feeling so helpless that you reach out for mirth reveals a whole different kind of tragedy – the unintentional demise of considerate design.
Here’s something the books and movies don’t teach you – there’s a thin line between grief and absurdity. And it comes down to the decisions we make as designers that dictate which side the user lands on.
We need to get comfortable with the idea of being uncomfortable. We don’t always design for predictable behaviour. Nobody plans a funeral until they have to. And when they do, they are likely sleep-deprived, emotionally depleted, having to make decisions they’ve never made before, often while managing an overwhelming amount of grief and supporting others at the same time. The user isn’t always rational, and they’re not always making a considered purchase.
This was the biggest lesson my design failure taught me – grief kills predictable behaviour, and it culls attention span.
The pattern is everywhere once you start looking. Financial hardship portals, medical results pages, workplace injury claims – designed for administrative efficiency, but delivered to people in crisis. The funeralcare website just happens to be the visible tip of a much larger iceberg, and the risk it poses is colossal.
People don’t always want templatised journeys. Sometimes all they want is a shoulder to lean on.
Chapter 2: The Designer Who Checked Out
Dark patterns are easy to condemn, because they are easy to predict and easier to spot. Indifferent design is harder – because it’s everywhere, and it’s unintentional.
In fact, indifferent design rarely starts as indifference. It starts as pressure – timelines, budgets, stakeholder priorities, the assumption that edge cases can be addressed in the next sprint.
The next sprint never comes.
Perhaps in a slightly different way, but designers face the same emotional states as the users they design for – burnout, deadline pressure, the whittling down of care that comes from shipping too fast, trying to keep up with unrealistic timelines whilst working in constantly shrinking teams.
And the irony is the more experienced you become, the more instinctive your workflow is, and the easier it becomes to apply a familiar solution without asking whether it fits a specific human moment.
Experience becomes a shortcut. The shortcut becomes indifference. The indifference gets shipped.
I have been that designer, and I only recognised this in myself once I stopped designing and started reflecting.
The wrap-up
If our first instinct is to default to indifference under pressure, what happens when the emotional labour of design is handed to systems with no capacity for empathy beyond instructions in a markdown file?
Imagine the friction a chirpy AI chatbot causes today – and now imagine such patterns operating at an unimaginable scale, without the possibility of a human noticing, questioning or intervening.
For better or worse, in good times and bad, we will always be humans serving other humans. And that is a standard worth holding on to.
Because good design shouldn’t focus on the average user, but the user who needs the product the most. And that responsibility is entirely ours to own.