🌱 Creative Good: Why I'm losing faith in UX

I remember a moment in 2014, right in the middle of Decade 2. I was giving a talk on my book Customers Included to a large company in the travel industry. The UX team, charged with managing the digital presence of this travel giant, pulled me aside afterward for a private Q&A. They were not satisfied with my talk: sure, they said, we can do the research, listen to customers, and make recommendations for improvement. But what if leadership not only ignores our recommendations but tells us to do something different? I’ll never forget one comment. “We’re lying to our users,” one anguished UX designer told me, explaining that leadership regularly ordered the UX team to create designs that were intentionally misleading. Apparently it helped boost profits.