An egregiously ignored UX standard that exposes a tech industry scam
One might say it's hiding in plain sight.
The thing Craigslist does better than Amazon
This is the motorcycle listings page on Craigslist. It is similar to other content listing UIs out there except for one major difference. Do you see it?
Take a closer look.
See the little trash can icon? That is pure UX gold right there. Not the icon itself, but what it does. It hides that particular listing from your search. That’s it. Simple, right?
But what a difference that makes when you are trying to narrow down a search. When you are shopping on Craigslist, you may only have a vague idea of what you’re even looking for. That would be me every time I’ve looked for a motorcycle. I don’t really know what a realistic price range is for the level of quality I’m after. Nor am I always even sure what kind of bike I want to get. This means that the more well-known means of narrowing down a search—filters—is useless.
The thing about filters is that they are useful only after you have a clear idea of what you’re after: category, price, specifications, condition, seller. But in many cases, the consumer has no idea what they are looking for. Those granular filters can prove just as overwhelming as the vast mountain of products they are meant to pare down. Any user who attempts to use the filters too early in the process will more than likely select the wrong variables, leading them to the wrong products while filtering out the right ones. Even more likely, the user just won’t bother with filters at all.
The reality is that, we spend the majority of our lives much further up the decision funnel. At any given moment, we don’t fully know what we’re looking for. We have a general sense, but not a concrete picture. This means we keep our options open, scanning the possibilities, looking for patterns and themes. Only after spending enough time in this exploratory phase do we start to narrow down what we want, and only then do filters become useful.
That’s what makes the Craigslist “hide” function so powerful. When you are in the exploratory phase of classifieds shopping, you may have only a faint notion of what it is you want. It might be as specific as “a used motorcycle” or as vague as “a great bargain on electronics”. But you definitely know what you don’t want. We define what we want as least as much based on what we don’t want, so eliminating those things helps get to our decision faster. I know I have no interest in the rusted out Harley-Davidson Panhead. Hard pass on the Chinese electric scooter with a burn-your-house-down battery pack . The Ducati with 200 miles on it is way out of my price range. And just like that, I can cut out the noise until a signal starts to emerge.
Once the “absolutely nots” have been filtered out, interesting things happen. I might discover something that I hadn’t even thought of, yet didn’t trigger my “absolutely not” response. The pristine condition UJM for only $900 would never have occurred to me, and I would have filtered it out if I had used filters. It might prompt me to filter for similar bikes. All this because of a simple feature that took probably an hour to program and QA.
The mountain of crap
As you are well aware, 99.9% of everything online is crap. And of the 0.1% of stuff that isn’t crap, 99.9% is not relevant to you. For any given need you may have, there may be only a handful of things that will adequately meet the need, and that handful of things will be hidden in a pile of things that don’t meet your need, and that pile will be buried beneath a mountain of crap that doesn’t meet anyone’s needs.
In the past, when the world was a simpler place, there was just less stuff. That means fewer options to sort through, and a greater chance that you would find something that met your needs, even if it wasn’t perfect. This applied to consumer goods, TV shows, restaurants, and romantic prospects alike. Nowadays, while the likelihood of something existing that meets your needs perfectly is higher, the likelihood that you’ll actually find it through mere perusing is lower.
The only way to get to the thing that meets your need is to dismantle the mountain of crap, which means eliminating options. And since we have established that, in most cases, we don’t know enough about what we’re looking for to make proper use of filters, we need to eliminate the options manually, with a “hide” feature. Unfortunately, that feature is almost always missing.
Food delivery
When you are using platforms like DoorDash, GrubHub, or UberEats, chances are you don’t have a laser-focused idea of what it is you want to eat. The one thing you might know for sure is that you don’t want to cook and you don’t want to drive. Other than that, you’re unsure. You could easily spend 30 minutes, even an hour, trying to make up your mind about what to order, during which time some places might even close for the night. If these platforms gave you the ability to hide restaurants, or even entire cuisines, you could more quickly narrow down your options and find something you want. Instead, though, you have to wade through crap like Taco Bell and 7-11 to even see stuff you might consider.
Online shopping
Amazon has a lot of stuff. No secret there. But most of it is crap. Also no secret. You spend more time wading through Chinese products from brands with names like VROOKSAM or SLNDOKTG and duplicate products from different sellers than you do discovering new stuff that you might actually want. And given that most people browse Amazon with only a nebulous idea of what they’re looking for, the many filters Amazon offers are pointless. Hiding unwanted stuff could ultimately increase the probability that interesting new things show up on your Amazon homepage and recommended products. But, of course, there is no ability to hide a product.
Social media
Have you ever tried to find someone with a common name on social media? You’re basically SOL. If there are hundreds or thousands of people with that name your chances of ever finding them are slim. If you could set up a search and then hide any profiles from the results that aren’t who you’re looking for, you might ultimately be able to get to the person you’re looking for through the process of elimination, but without that, you have to keep track of every profile you’ve looked at, so you don’t click the same one twice. Simply tallying all the pages of search results you’ve gone through won’t work because the order of the results might change. The person you’re looking for might be on page 35 of the results one day, but then a change in the software might put them on page 2, where you’ve already been. You could block everyone who isn’t whom you’re looking for, but that causes other problems.
The worst way of doing things
So, in the absence of clearly defined parameters, is the “hide” function the only option?
Well no. There is another option. And it sucks. A big one.
I am referring to the dreaded algorithms.
The thing that both filters and targeted hiding have in common is that they are user-driven. They give you control over what you don’t see, and thus what you do see. For the average intellectually and socially stunted techbro, that simply won’t do. The tech companies must hold absolute control over your decisions, and that means they must control what you see and what you don’t see. For this, they use algorithms.
Everything you see online is mediated by algorithms. Your LinkedIn feed. Your TikTok “for you” screen. The restaurants displayed to you on DoorDash. The videos that YouTube surfaces when you do a search. The products on your Amazon homepage. It’s all controlled by algorithms. Giving you the ability to hide content would take away the control that the algorithms have over your decision making. The same could be said for filters, but these companies know full well that you won’t bother with those.
Things have gotten so bad that even the most deterministic method of getting to the content you want, the search bar, has been ruined. Time was, the “quotation” marks were a sacrosanct syntax that instructed the search engine to return only things that match your query verbatim. But, one by one, the major tech platforms are beginning to blithely ignore your quotes. I’m pretty sure Spotify never even did acknowledge them.
This is all very, very, very bad.
Water, water everywhere…
We live in an era of unprecedented abundance.
You are no longer limited to the news which was curated and approved by major TV networks and newspapers; you can be informed by millions of independent sources.
You are no longer limited to the mainstream MPAA-rated movies that play in cinemas or the pablum approved by the FCC for network television; you can stream any video you want on demand.
You are no longer limited to the mass-produced products found at your local Walmart or Target; you can go online and find specialty goods and have them delivered to your door within a few days, if not the same day.
You are no longer limited to the friends and romantic partners that you would meet in your daily life; you can use the internet to connect to new people who might mesh more closely with your personality and identity.
These are all unalloyed blessings in and of themselves. Or, at least, they should be unalloyed blessings. All that abundance has created three problems.
Not everything is good. 99.999% of everything online is crap. Even things that might be good for someone else are effectively crap to you if they don’t suit your needs. So, abundance does not mean that finding things you want is easy.
Even if you filter away the 99.999% that is crap, there is just so much stuff that the remaining 0.001% of stuff is still too overwhelming. The number of desirable options is itself too great. This leads to decision paralysis. If you have ever been at a restaurant with a big menu, and found yourself struggling to decide because everything looks good, then you will understand.
The tech companies who have enabled this abundance are run by unscrupulous charlatans who don’t believe that you, pleb that you are, should have a say in how you sort through the abundance. They believe it is their prerogative to decide on everything for you, giving you only the illusion of choice.
This is preventing us from actually experiencing the benefits of an abundant world. In fact, the adult infants that have somehow managed to squat in positions of leadership at tech companies have turned abundance into a liability. That’s really quite an impressive accomplishment, when you think about it.
Considering that what stands between us and full access to the fruits of abundance is as flimsy as the mere absence of a feature that should be mandated by law, should we be encouraged or enraged?
Can I still be Garth?
What a good segway into the value of "hide" vs "delete", especially in a shopping task like this one.
"We live in an era of unprecedented abundance."
To paraphrase Buckminster Fuller: As tech advances, we will do ever more with ever less, and the standard of living will continue to rise for every human on Earth.
Instead, we have "As tech advances, robber barons will steal ever more with ever less difficulty, and the standard of living will continue to decline for every other human on Earth".
Always follow the money, and never forget that the mega-rich are not human. They are a different, predatory species.