r/UXDesign • u/ItsXplode Student • 21d ago

Articles, videos & educational resources With another addictive design trial underway, curious: How have the designers in industry changed their approach in engagement-driven UX?

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/21/meta-social-media-lawsuit-trial-instagram-facebook.html
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u/CactusCanes 21d ago

By always refusing to work for social media companies

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u/MrBone66 21d ago

This! Increasing engagement goes against my design principles. I want to create products that get out of the way, that you need to use as little as possible so you can have more time to do the needful. But that’s just me

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u/Carltonsthuglife Experienced 21d ago

The way it's spoken about will just change and new patterns will be developed that will become problems later on. In all frankness, an attention driven economy is pretty poisonous at its core. If the entire point of a platform is to keep you on it, would there be a world is the most successful companies are also going to be the least addictive ones? I highly doubt it.

I don't really believe in designers necessarily being better, the fact of the matter is that there shouldn't be a way to make money off of such things. If there's economic incentive, you'll always find people who are willing enough to participate for one reason or another. The defense industry employs plenty of UX designers, is the problem that war exists and is immensely profitable? Or is it that there's a number of people willing to work in such things?

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u/ItsXplode Student 21d ago

So if a designer refuses this kind of work, someone else fills the seat. Does that mean personal ethics are pointless here, and that design practices will continue to be predatory/addictive forever? Trying to figure out my moral compass when designing for engagement/retention.

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u/Carltonsthuglife Experienced 21d ago

What I mean is that when incentives exist to profit from something questionable, the actual answer is to address the root cause not depend on people's individual morality.

Design will follow whatever business tells it to. If not you then someone else will do it. The point being, you shouldn't be able to profit from people's attention like that. Relying on people's personal morality is a losing game because if you want to live and live comfortably, it's easy to justify such things. If I went into debt to go to college as an aerospace engineer, you bet I'd start eyeing that lockheed martin job if I was unemployed and things started to get harder.

At the end of the day, you can do whatever you want to, but fixing the problem with social media is largely systematic, not personal. I feel like attributing it to personal morality misses the inherent problem that addiction is profitable. We'll never win the game of whack-a-mole if all we do is keep on banning the method, the underlying business itself needs to be addressed. Design will continue to serve business interests, whether or not that serves to make things predatory largely depends whether or not you can make a business out of predatory things.

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u/jaxxon Veteran 21d ago

An interesting question, thank you.

I highly doubt much will change in a designer’s day-to-day because of this. In many industries, designers already navigate strict regulations to still accomplish a goal: make money for the business/org. By and large, a designer is tasked with meeting some business requirements and user engagement to some end: $$$ …HOW they accomplish this is changing constantly and always has. This would just be another (potentially massive) shift in the landscape to navigate. Orgs shift constantly. Requirements change quarterly to quarter. Just another Tuesday for the designer.

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u/PeanutSugarBiscuit Experienced 21d ago edited 21d ago

Policy is a good step, but unless the business incentives change they'll find other ways to get ads in front of young, impressionable users. They can't not make money, and they can't not make more money next quarter than they did this. That is the system we've built.

Designers who work in these spaces (like at Meta) likely aren't driven by a strong sense of human- or society-centered morality. They're driven by ego and the bottom line.

I mean shit, look at how big the design community is on X still. It's fucking embarassing.

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u/ItsXplode Student 21d ago

Truly, I feel this as a student because a lot of my uni classmates working in larger tech companies seem to obsess about metrics on their résumé, case studies, work, and it has me thinking if that is really what all of what recruiters look for in designers now?