I talk a lot about how “empathy” in commercial UX is mostly a posture because in reality capitalism doesn’t care, but it’s important to consider the additional problem of people in charge who are too shallow to be capable of understanding “why” some people prefer, or need, to do things differently than they do.

This one time I was telling the ceo/founder of a startup I worked for that our react app was making my new macbook pro crawl and we need to fix that because it was a b2b product that would be used by people in finance offices decked out with dell opticrap machines. He responded with surprise “wow, steve. you really care about people don’t you?”

I was kinda floored. Anyway, here we are…

https://web.archive.org/web/20230727121010/https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1684491212219359232

  • Deborah@hachyderm.io
    2·
    1 year ago

    @fasterandworse He has probably fired every employee that has accommodations or visible disabilities, except for the one person he had to rehire because he enraged an entire country after firing him.

    I mean dark mode aside, the dude is a proud eugenicist, so I can’t imagine accessibility is one of his priorities.

    • Steve@awful.systemsOPEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      Yep, totally agree. I shared this link with no surprise that he’s like this. Just wanted to highlight one of those moments that are a giveaway to this kind of person.

      • Deborah@hachyderm.io
        1·
        1 year ago

        @fasterandworse

        I’ve successfully convinced front-end designers to have empathy in the past, especially younger ones who really hadn’t spent time thinking about other people’s tech needs. Hell, back when I was A Youth™️, I had my own boneheaded takes about people who use tech in a way I don’t (vi/emacs wars, lol, I’m old).

        But yeah, exactly, Musk isn’t in “assume good intent” or “teachable moment”. He has for years been 100% in “when people tell you who they are, believe them.”

    • maol@awful.systemsEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      “b-bht what good is it having the freedom to do what I want if I can’t force other people to agree with me?! I thought I was the king?!”

    • Steve@awful.systemsOPEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      nothing wrong with not having one. Having one and removing it because you like the dark mode better, on the other hand? He’s been told that every design decision has to consider light and dark. Just like he’s going to be told that the web app requires more dev resources for browser compatibility testing, accessibility, performance etc and more design resources for responsiveness and stuff like mouse vs touch.

      If he drops light mode he can cut more staff for sure. If he drops web, he can cut even more. He will do it.

      but anyway, light mode/dark mode are a great example of corps doing something good in the bare minimum way. Before apple or whoever branded black backgrounds and white text as “dark mode” implementing an alternative UI theme based on accessibility concerns on a major web app would have been impossible to get approved.