Destroy Your Interface is a Chrome extension that, well, destroys your Interface.
Download Zip or clone this project. This will only work with Chromium based Browsers.
- Go to
chrome://extensions/ - Enable Developer mode
- Load unpacked and select the destroy folder from the unzipped project.
- Activate the extension by toggling the button.
- Visit a new page and enable the extension from the dropdown
- Suggestion: Visit Facebook/ Twitter and try sending a message to a friend of yours, good luck:)
In the autumn of 2020, the American docudrama film The Social Dilemma was published on Netflix and instantly became a huge success, being watched in 38.000.000 homes worldwide within the first 28 days of release. It’s concerned with the way in which social media is consciously designed for being addictive, manipulating people and even governments and the role it plays in nurturing conspiracy theories and misinformation. In other terms, it’s about everything that’s wrong with social media today. As Jaron Lanier puts it in the documentary, the product is not our data but it’s us, specifically it’s our behaviour that changes over time. The social dilemma portrays this with the example of the teenage son being radicalized over time through his YouTube feed, a classic example of filter bubbles, which ultimately leads him to join a right-wing rally. While this presents a fundamental error at the core of the platform YouTube and its profit model, the malicious design features the movie focuses on are mostly in the realm of dark UX patterns, often nudging the users to perform certain actions and spend more time on an app. The Social Dilemma is focused on how virtually every design aspect of big social media platforms is unethical, as it deceives the user, but it leaves untouched some of the basic principles of UX design that propagate harmful patterns.
While User Experience Design started out as a niche industry in Silicon Valley’s early startup scene, it has now grown to a force that architects and governs our digital lives. This results in problems that the Social Dilemma rightfully captures. As Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google expresses in his Social Dilemma interview: “Never before in history have 50 designers made decisions that would have an impact on two billion people.” It’s fair to say that user experience design is heavily responsible for modeling human expression and self-identity, and enabling social interaction and participation online. But by failing to criticize common design practices or form cooperative relationships with other fields in technology, user experience designers are often refusing to recognize and respond to the harm that’s being dealt to users. One of the core tropes in UX design today is the notion of frictionless design, expressed in literature like Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug. In it Krug argues, that the more tools make people think, the less likely they are to actually use the tool. With quotes like “get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what’s left”, it became somewhat of a UX design bible over time. (Krug, 2000, p. 4)
But online security isn't convenient and doesn't ship at scale. Also in regards to creating more ecologically sustainable models, user experience design will have to abandon it's desire to be frictionless and polished. Users will be required to think, and more importantly, designers and developers will have to think not with their users convenience in mind, but with their safety. Designers need to stop underestemating users capabilities and their will to compromise for a more sustainable and secure future.
This is a fun little experiment that distorts the beautifully crafted User Interfaces of todays Websites and makes navigating them a real challenge.