Abuse of Design to Drive Engagement for Short-term Business Benefits over Long-term Business Goals

I recently came across a weirdly designed advertisement (color palette all over the spectrum and full of dark UX) for a company that I closely follow on a professional social media platform. I met the Business Head as well as the Marketing Head of the company — who are on my professional network — to check what is going on.

Being a Designer, I was curious to know what is happening here!

My eyes after seeing the erratic design on their performance ads

Following were the statements from the respective gentleman

All I care about is the number of clicks and business that comes from it !!!!

~Business Head

We try different colors every time they post on social media platforms to drive more clicks — We call it Growth Hacking #zing #growth-hacking #performance #kpis #pointofinflexion #gyan #brandkibandbajao

~ Marketing Head

Surprisingly, the Marketing Head speaks a lot about Branding on his professional network and strangely he is involved in literal abuse of his company’s brand.

BAND — BAND — BAND — BAND

I noticed that both gentlemen are blind to the damage that is being done to the company because the number of clicks is NOT business.

Data-heist manipulating data to show performance KPI

DATA-DRIVEN BUSINESS v DATA-INFORMED BUSINESS

This is called DATA-DRIVEN business where the company is chasing the numbers on the chart and in the process they are losing out on the company’s branding and long-term benefits and who knows also pissing off the potential buyers of the product, even in the short-term.

Their recent ad campaign of theirs also seems to be using dark UX patterns to drive more clicks. If it’s done intentionally, this qualifies as click fraud because the Marketing Head is showing his performance KPI to the company but hardly adding any value (in fact causing a lot of damage).

This is a FAKE button !!!

The key is to be DATA INFORMED instead of being DATA DRIVEN. This blogpost talks about the differences between Data Informed and Data-Driven decision-making.

Data-informed business is about driving business through business goals (not data goals) and guided by business fundamental and principles and evaluating the performance through data

Data-informed design (instead of Data-driven design) will lead to long-term business benefits