Empathy and delight mean nothing when the software is disrespectful

# Empathy and delight mean nothing when the software is disrespectful Source: [https://productpicnic.beehiiv.com/p/empathy-and-delight-mean-nothing-when-the-software-is-disrespectful](https://productpicnic.beehiiv.com/p/empathy-and-delight-mean-nothing-when-the-software-is-disrespectful) Welcome back, picnickers, to what is shaping up to be a loosely connected series of posts\.[Last week](https://productpicnic.beehiiv.com/p/trust-is-not-built-on-craft-alone)we talked about how tech weaponizes empathy language to insulate decision\-makers from users\. But I’ve come across a few more articles since then that helped something click inside my head\. The reason empathy has failed to produce better user experiences is the same reason that a decade of “delight” has only made apps more frustrating\.*Respect*is entirely missing from this equation\. And empathy without respect is nothing more than pity\. The lack of respect permeates every layer of this system, but it starts with us\. Designers’ passion for helping users can quickly curdle into a[messiah complex](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/avoiding-messiah-complexes-martyrdom-human-centred-design-ray-newman-lbxve/): a belief that we are the*only*ones who can help users\. In this worldview, the users themselves are helplessly waiting for our genius to help them\. Our colleagues cannot be user\-centered because they are not designers\. Even[other designers](https://bsky.app/profile/erikahall.bsky.social/post/3mq5gus6ivc2e)become reduced to hangers\-on following our unique, individual brilliance: ❝ We still suffer under this delusion that design is the work of lone geniuses or "individual contributors"\. Systems of any complexity require the sustained attention and interaction of several\-many people to and with each other\. ## Our systems do not respect the user by design I try to avoid quoting articles more than once on the Picnic\. There are enough links in here as is\. But there are pieces I come back to, because of how rich they are with meaning\.[The Turing Complete User](https://contemporary-home-computing.org/turing-complete-user/)is one such article\. It traces the journey of a well\-meaning idea across over forty years of evolution from “computer users are busy and their time is valuable” to “computer users are stupid and must be sheltered from complexity\.” ❝ There is nothing one user can do, that another can’t given enough time and**respect**\. The problem is that friction is inextricable from control\. Being exposed to the complexity was the only thing that gave users agency for how to deal with it\. The “automagical” computer championed by the likes of Jobs and Norman is frictionless but also texture\-less; there is nothing to grab on to, no way to steer it\. Which is fine \(sometimes\) as long as it’s working\. But nothing works forever, and a frictionless product is also one that the user cannot course\-correct or fix\. Indeed, the very experience of dealing with an error is[infantilizing](https://web.archive.org/web/20260102013949/https://www.joanwestenberg.com/uh-oh-the-infantilization-of-failure/)— oh no, the page did an oopsy whoopsy\! Unfortunately, taking away user choice is*efficient*\. This extends beyond products, into service design: soft and squishy human relationships don’t fit neatly into boxes, so the software must first standardize everything into one type of transaction\. And the easiest way to accomplish that standardization is to[push the associated bureaucratic work down onto the user](https://buttondown.com/justenoughinternet/archive/forms-dont-love-you-back/)via endless sets of forms: ❝ Our phone screens hide and dehumanise the people who make the platform economy tick, reducing them to push notifications, status updates and star\-ratings, making their hard work seem magical, efficient and faceless\. I get to just\-about\-manage in an extractive, constantly optimising society because forms and digital technologies have made bespoke services cheaper and more accessible, but they’ve done this by putting forms between people \- minimising interactions so we don’t have to deal with the guilt, maximising productivity so we can’t imagine life without access to these time\-extending services, and tiring us all out\. Rachel Coldicutt,[Forms don’t love you back](https://buttondown.com/justenoughinternet/archive/forms-dont-love-you-back/)\(as an aside, this is the best thing I’ve read all year and if you click one link in this issue it should be this one\) ## LLMs generate disrespect at scale Instead, I want to talk about how LLMs are productized; what uses the*design*\(both the chatbot UI and the model’s reinforcement training\) of the tool affords\. I have long observed that these tools primarily scale up existing systems, so it is no surprise that we see them propagate all of the issues I mention in the previous section\. The lack of control is almost entirely the point; LLMs*will*do it for you[whether you want to or not](https://bsky.app/profile/b-cavello.bsky.social/post/3m3pg7pc6k22a): ❝ I was in a workshop on Human Flourishing with AI\. My team focused on “cognitive offloading” in particular\. We found that even if you prompt LLMs to help “think through“ something or signal a desire for friction, they often just default to the “do it for you” pattern\. The errors that a model produces \(an[inherent aspect of LLMs as a technology](https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.05746)rather than anything labs can “fix”\) are brushed away by the cutesy term “hallucination\.” While we are ostensibly supposed to check LLM outputs for these hallucinations, the effort to do so inevitably exceeds the effort required to just write the words yourself in the first place\. Indeed, much of the process*around*AI product use is designed to[shift the error\-checking burden from bosses onto their employees](https://tante.cc/2026/06/30/trying-to-manufacture-permission/)\. It’s a form of arbitrage: the cost of producing text is now far lower than the cost of consuming it, even though length and detail still*feels*like a sign that more thinking and more work had been put into something\. This imbalance[encourages long\-winded texts that carry little meaning](https://intenseminimalism.com/2026/words-are-cheap-use-fewer/)\. This too is a form of disrespect\. Unfortunately, the incentives of workplace systems are such that this disrespect is perpetuated and encouraged\. The designers of these systems pay lip service to human judgment, and immediately[design systems that shut this judgment out](https://nooneshappy.com/article/appearing-productive-in-the-workplace/), for the sake of nothing more than volume: ❝ Parkinson’s Law states that work expands to fill the time available\. In the era of AI, workers now have a tool that expands to fill whatever a large language model can be persuaded to generate, which is to say, without limit\. … In every**recommended**use, the human supplies the judgment and the tool supplies the throughput\. This is a stronger position than human\-in\-the\-loop\. The tool sits outside the work, contributing where invited and silent otherwise,**which is the opposite of what most agentic systems are now being built to do**\. ## The disrespectful product roadmap This disrespect inevitably trickles down to users\. Without the friction of collaboration, ideas hit the roadmap before anyone can ask if it’s a good idea\. Strategy is diluted into soup, prioritization falls apart\. In the same way that it’s cheaper to generate outputs than check them,[it costs more to push back against slop PRs](https://jakub.kr/writing/less-is-more)than to just accept them and pass the pain onto the user\. ❝ When you remove something, you have to be intentional about it and think all the implications through\. Adding is different\. With agents it's easy to close your eyes, add things and hope for the best without thinking about it\. The features that make it through this pipeline are nothing short of baffling\. Generating[podcasts from a PDF](https://pdx.social/@patc/116857419881554592)is merely the tip of the iceberg; it’s*just*a waste of developer hours and UI real estate\. Some of these ideas instead lead to grievous and extremely preventable harm, as Meta learned when[a feature designed to deepfake everyone on Instagram](https://deadline.com/2026/07/meta-removes-muse-image-ai-feature-backlash-1236979605/)somehow made it into production without any employee stopping it\. Google, of course, has taken this one step further, by[blowing up its entire product](https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/new-google-ai-22279112.php)\. Not only is the experience of actually using web search[comically painful](https://mastodon.social/@devolute/116851590471182341)for end\-users, it’s also been ruined for publishers\. Google’s crawlers simultaneously index pages for search and scrape them for training data — ensuring that no user will actually visit the page that the content was lifted from\. Cloudflare \(which underpins a full one\-fifth of the entire internet\) has been forced to make a stance: knock it off, or[we block your crawlers](https://www.adweek.com/media/publishers-opt-out-google-search/)by default\. ❝ Beginning Sept\. 15, all new websites signing up for Cloudflare, as well as all the customers on its free tier, will have the default settings in their bot management protocol set to block “multi\-purpose crawlers” … While a handful of crawlers fit this description—Apple and Bing, among others—the primary, unnamed target of this action is Google, which infamously uses one crawler to both index sites and train its AI models\. ## Thoughts on respectful software I’ve previously written about the ubiquitously hated interaction pattern of nagging: your “accept cookies” banners and “remind me later” update prompts\. The answer for how to make those touchpoints more respectful is obvious: honor the user’s choice properly\. But “how not to do it wrong” and “how to do it right” are two different questions\. Making software that is inherently respectful, rather than merely not disrespectful, is not easy\. Accessibility is one high\-profile area where even[noble intentions often fall short](https://www.nicchan.me/blog/wishcessibility/)\. For folks interested in doing better on that front, Laura Kalbag recently open\-sourced her book,[Accessibility for Everyone](https://accessibilityforeveryone.site/)\. The notion of respect also crops up in another place that’s not immediately relevant to user experience: Grice’s Maxims\. While they are not immediately related to UX, the maxims cover the cooperative principle: how conversation creates mutual meaning between two participants \(note how LLMs break each of these rules\): - **Quantity:**give as as much information as needed,*and no more*\. - **Quality:**do not give information that is false/not supported by evidence\. - **Relation:**say things that are relevant to the discussion\. - **Manner:**be as clear, as brief, and as orderly as you can\. One need go no further than Erika Hall’s fantastic Conversational Design \(now[also free](https://www.mulebooks.com/conversational-design)\) to link these back to software interfaces, or indeed to[systems design in general](https://www.muledesign.com/blog/the-principles-of-conversational-transformation): ❝ Adopting technology and managing change must start with the simplest system that works for people: the conversation\. If you take care that your product is both accessible and a good conversation partner, you’re most of the way to achieving respectful software\. — Pavel at the Product Picnic