UX Designers, you are ruining the internet

Use your powers for good, not evil.

I know half of Medium is coming for me, considering how many design professionals use this site. I am not a design professional. Just a user.

But look. You all gotta stop it.

Look what Microsoft decided to put in my Outlook inbox this morning:

An ad which looks JUST like an unread email. Atop the inbox. But worse that that — this one does not *behave* like other emails.

If I hover over the Quartz email, for example, I can delete it by hitting the trash can to the right, or by selecting the checkbox on the far left to batch-manage it. After years of using Outlook’s web client for my email, these behaviors have become entirely automatic. Microsoft’s marquee UX team knows this.

And so, when asked by the business leaders to increase the number of conversions to the paid version of Outlook.com, they intentionally subvert my expectations with their ad. It is an email which doesn’t behave like every other email. It is a trick. And yes, UX designers, you are responsible.

You know this, on some deep level.

When I hover over the ad, look how this message behaves:

The trash can has moved to the middle — a no-man’s-land of nonexistent…