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
You guys are speaking in the sense that he wants to keep Twitter as is, but consensus is that he wants to create a super app from Twitter, so the developers will need to design and redesign a lot of what is currently done. If you remove a light scheme from the equation and just develop everything for dark mode development (design, coding, etc) will be faster.
I’m speaking in the sense that he’s a desperate idiot trying to make twitter cost him as little as possible. He’s walking around that hell hole asking for ideas on cutting costs.
For sure he wants it to be profitable ASAP. Cutting development costs will help on that.
Except if you cut development costs your app will suffer, and thus be less profitable. If people don’t want to use your app because it’s a pain to use, then you’re cutting out a part of your userbase… and thus a source of profit.
Not scaring off advertisers with fascism could also work.
but fascism is a core functionality!