Not all "bad design" is accidental

United States v. Skrmetti + drawing with pen (Issue #359)  
  
## Not all “bad design” is accidental

#### United States v. Skrmetti + drawing with pen (Issue #359)

By The Medium Blog ∙ June 23, 2025 ∙ 3 min read ∙ View on MediumAs we’ve discussed in past issues, “deceptive patterns” in UX can manipulate user behavior by using strategies like “compulsion loops” or “default” options that are anything but neutral. Not all “bad design” is accidental. Sometimes, friction is the point.From luxury fashion houses that alienate online shoppers to social platforms that erode mental health in the name of engagement, design always sends a message. UX is never neutral. It encodes power, values, and priorities, one click at a time.Digital experience writer Rita Kind-Envy takes aim at the UX of luxury brands like Hermès, Chanel, and Balenciaga. Their websites are clunky, opaque, and borderline hostile: broken filters, disappearing contact fields, and images so inconsistent you can’t compare products. The experience feels like a test. If you’re confused or frustrated, the websites suggest, maybe you weren’t meant to be there. Friction becomes a tool for exclusivity. The worse the interface, the more prestigious the access.Design professor Martin Tomitsch shows how designing for scale can lead to a different kind of exclusion — one where long-term harms like mental health and environmental impact are left out of the UX equation entirely. In his analysis of TikTok, he traces how small design choices like scroll speed or engagement loops create ripple effects that extend far beyond the interface. He calls this the “butterfly effect” of UX: minor interactions that lead to unintended, often invisible outcomes across social and environmental systems. Because the platform is designed to maximize watch time, anything that doesn’t serve that goal simply doesn’t get built.Together, these pieces ask a hard question: When design rewards one kind of outcome — status, clicks, scale — what gets sacrificed? Both the exclusivity of luxury and the stickiness of social media succeed by making something harder, not easier. And both show that UX isn’t just about usability. It’s about what a product is really for.— Anna Dorn

### Recommended reading

  * Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors to take effect (United States v. Skrmetti). Civil rights lawyer Sam Ames shares optimism amid grief, encouraging trans rights supporters that “we cannot predicate fighting on winning.”
  * Pallabi Dey Purkayastha movingly writes about how she was denied access to a literal “head of table” seat reserved for men at family meals, and encourages other South Asian women to consider the insidious ways patriarchal norms prevent them from empowerment. “I firmly believe that revolution begins with the smaller things in life, and we must always start with our own homes.”
  * Tim Tobitsch provides an ultimate guide to classical music by listing how to listen to each song, which instruments to pick out, what emotions they convey, and even how they’re used in modern songs and movies and commercials. Complete with Spotify playlist and YouTube links!



### Your daily dose of practical wisdom on drawing with pen

Check your assumptions — as Anne Kullaf explains, it’s a much more forgiving medium than you might think.···

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