User Indulgence is the new ‘UI’

Twitter doesn’t have an edit button. Despite a chorus of protest over many years, the company has declined to bow to user demand — indeed, as Covid-19 raged, Twitter trolled its 330 million users with this taunt.
This absence of edit mirrors a range of controversial Twitter innovations — including switching the “validation” button from a star
to a heart; re-ordering the timeline from chronological to “relevant,” despite promising not to; and (merely) adding warning labels to President Donald Trump’s inaccurate and inflammatory statements.
Although redesigns and feature tweaks are predictably unpopular (and early outrage usually fades), motives seem to matter. Indeed, their importance may bode ill for Facebook’s latest iteration of Instagram, which replaced the “Compose” button with its TikTok competitor, “Reels,” and the “Activity” button with its e-commerce venture, “Shop.”
Much like the supermarkets that re-order shelves to disrupt our well-worn routines, by monkeying with the position of Instagram’s most popular buttons, Facebook is abusing years of muscle memory to wrong-finger a billion users into clicking more lucrative features. The reaction to these self-serving changes was swift and harsh.
The look, layout and actions of app interactions are examples of what designers call the User Interface (UI), which is one element of the broader User Experience (UX). So central is UI to the success of modern products and services, the field has spawned a library of books and articles, as well as a burgeoning academic specialty.
However, as customers become increasingly sophisticated, demanding and vocal, the designs that succeed in the future are likely to be those that reimagine UI as User Indulgence.
The power of user indulgence lies in its recognition of our whims, weaknesses and inherent contradictions. Indulgent design allows products and services to dovetail with life as it is actually lived which, in turn,
enables brands to form genuine and lasting customer connections.
Consider the snooze button. People have long debated whether alarm clocks have a standard duration of snooze and, if so, why it seems to be nine minutes. But the button itself,
popularised in the 1950s, is more intriguing for what it represents.
Even the cheapest alarms deliver an accuracy that horology’s pioneers could never have envisioned, yet all of them feature a button that should be labeled: “Thanks for waking me to the nanosecond I requested … but now I want to doze.” And this feature is seldom shy. Compare the size, colour and position of the iPhone’s snooze button with the button that stops the alarm.
The snooze button is a perfect illustration of user indulgence, where sophisticated functionality is
modified — or entirely contradicted — to accommodate human frailty and whim.
Indulgence is everywhere.
Steam irons, water heaters, electric blankets and Christmas lights incorporate “auto switch-off” timers to indulge our absentmindedness and reduce the risk of fire. Kettles have “keep warm” functions to save us from endlessly re-boiling the same water.
—Bloomberg