The Designer's Manifesto Against Enshittification: Designing for Portability and Exit

What Is Enshittification?

 

Enshittification is the gradual degradation of digital platforms that prioritize profit over user experience. Coined by author Cory Doctorow in 2023, this term describes a lifecycle many online platforms follow: they start by offering excellent value to users, then shift focus to business customers, and finally extract all value for themselves—leaving both users and partners with a deteriorating experience.

 

The term became so culturally significant that the American Dialect Society named it their 2023 Word of the Year. For UI UX design services professionals, understanding enshittification isn't just about recognizing a trend—it's about actively designing against it.

 

The typical enshittification cycle follows three stages: First, platforms are excellent to users, offering features and experiences that attract large audiences. Second, they abuse users to benefit business customers through increased ads and data exploitation. Third, they abuse business customers to maximize their own profits, degrading the entire ecosystem.

 

Why Should UX Designers Care About Platform Decay?

 

Every design decision either enables or prevents enshittification. When working in a UI UX design company, designers often face pressure to implement dark patterns, maximize engagement metrics at any cost, or create features that lock users into ecosystems. These choices compound over time, transforming user-friendly products into exploitative platforms.

 

The real-world impact is measurable. YouTube's evolution provides a clear example: what began as a simple video-sharing platform now forces users through multiple ad interruptions, employs aggressive recommendation algorithms that prioritize watch time over user satisfaction, and makes it increasingly difficult to find content without algorithmic intervention. This transformation didn't happen by accident—it resulted from thousands of individual design decisions.

 

Research shows that platforms with strong network effects—where value increases as more users join—face natural economic pressure toward enshittification. As economist Paul Krugman notes, businesses start by offering great value at low prices to build their user base, then inevitably switch to "ruthless exploitation" once users become dependent.

 

How Can We Measure a Product's "Enshittification Score"?

 

Quantifying platform degradation helps designers make evidence-based arguments for user-centric design. While no single metric captures the complete picture, several indicators reveal enshittification in progress:

 

Key Indicators of Platform Degradation

 

 

UX design services teams should track these metrics throughout product development. When the enshittification score increases, it signals that design decisions favor short-term business metrics over long-term user trust and satisfaction.

 

Consider a practical example: A social media platform that starts requiring six clicks (instead of two) to change privacy settings has significantly increased its Complexity-to-Utility Ratio. This friction isn't accidental—it's designed to discourage users from limiting data collection.

 

What Are Design Patterns for Data Portability?

 

 

Data portability empowers users to leave platforms without losing their information. This capability fundamentally changes the power dynamic between users and platforms, reducing vendor lock-in and forcing platforms to compete on quality rather than switching costs.

 

Essential Portability Design Patterns

 

One-Click Export Functionality: Users should access complete data exports through a single, prominent button in their account settings. The export should include all user-generated content, metadata, preferences, and interaction history in standard formats like JSON or CSV.

 

Product design services teams should implement export features that run in the background, sending download links when ready rather than forcing users to wait. This respects user time and reduces the technical barrier to data migration.

 

Standardized Data Formats: Exported data must use widely-supported, machine-readable formats. JSON for structured data, CSV for tabular information, and industry-standard formats for media files ensure compatibility with competitor platforms and analysis tools.

 

Incremental Backup Options: Rather than forcing users to download their entire data history at once, provide options for regular automated backups. This approach reduces the cognitive load of "remembering to export" and ensures users always have recent copies of their information.

 

Clear Data Dictionaries: Every export should include documentation explaining what each data field means, how it was collected, and how it can be used elsewhere. This transparency builds trust and makes exports genuinely useful rather than technically compliant but practically useless.

 

Implementing Interoperability Features

 

APIs for Third-Party Access: User interface design services should design APIs that allow users to grant specific permissions to competing platforms or personal data management tools. This enables users to gradually transition between services or use multiple platforms simultaneously without manual data migration.

 

Import Functionality from Competitors: Building robust import features for competitor data formats demonstrates confidence in your product's value proposition. It also reduces switching costs in both directions—while this might seem counterintuitive, it prevents the platform from becoming complacent about user experience quality.

 

Cross-Platform Authentication: Supporting standard authentication protocols like OAuth and OpenID Connect allows users to maintain consistent identities across services without creating new vendor lock-in through proprietary login systems.

 

Should We Prioritize User Well-Being or Engagement Metrics?

 

The tension between user well-being and engagement KPIs represents the core ethical challenge in modern UX design. Traditional engagement metrics—time on site, pages per session, daily active users—often conflict with genuine user satisfaction and long-term platform health.

 

The Problem with Engagement-Only Metrics

 

Engagement metrics don't distinguish between positive and negative experiences. A user spending three hours on your platform might be having an excellent experience—or they might be trapped in an algorithmically-generated rabbit hole of increasingly extreme content, growing more anxious and addicted with each click.

 

Research in UX measurement reveals this ambiguity: time on task can indicate either efficiency (completing goals quickly) or confusion (struggling with poor design). Without context, rising engagement numbers could signal either platform success or user exploitation.

 

Many UI UX design companies face pressure to optimize for engagement above all else. Product managers celebrate increased daily active users, but rarely ask whether those users feel better or worse after their sessions. This creates a dangerous feedback loop where design decisions optimize for addiction rather than satisfaction.

 

Introducing Sustainability Metrics

 

 

Sustainability metrics measure whether user engagement is healthy and maintainable long-term. These alternative KPIs provide a more complete picture of product health:

 

• User Agency Score: Percentage of sessions where users completed their intended goals without algorithmic derailment. This metric captures whether your product serves user intentions or overrides them.
• Voluntary Return Rate: Percentage of users who return without push notifications, emails, or other prompts. High voluntary return rates indicate genuine product value rather than manufactured dependency.
• Healthy Session Length: Rather than maximizing time on platform, establish research-based healthy session lengths for your product category. Track what percentage of sessions fall within this range.
• Feature Satisfaction vs. Feature Usage: Measure not just how many people use a feature, but how many people who use it report satisfaction with it. High usage with low satisfaction often indicates dark patterns or lack of alternatives.
• Regret Reduction Rate: Track how often users express regret about time spent on your platform through surveys or sentiment analysis. Design changes should decrease regret over time.

 

How Do We Design for Exit Without Designing for Failure?

 

Designing easy exit mechanisms seems paradoxical—why make it easy for users to leave? However, this approach fundamentally transforms the product development mindset from "trap and extract" to "continuously earn user trust."

 

The Psychology of Exit Design

 

Users who know they can leave easily actually feel more comfortable staying. Psychological research on autonomy shows that perceived control over situations reduces anxiety and increases satisfaction. When users feel trapped by high switching costs, their resentment grows—even if they don't immediately leave.

 

Product design services should embrace this principle: every barrier to exit is a tax on your product's quality. If your platform only retains users because leaving is too difficult, you're not building a good product—you're maintaining a prison.

 

Practical Exit Design Patterns

 

Visible Delete Account Option: Place account deletion in obvious locations within account settings, not buried under multiple menus labeled with euphemisms like "manage presence" or "update preferences."

 

Reversible Deletion Windows: Offer a grace period (typically 30 days) where deleted accounts can be restored with all data intact. This reduces user anxiety about making the "wrong" decision while still honoring deletion requests.

 

No-Hassle Cancellation: Subscriptions should be cancellable through the same interface used to purchase them, with no required phone calls, surveys, or retention dark patterns.

 

Download Before Delete: Automatically generate a complete data export when users initiate account deletion, ensuring they don't lose information they might want to preserve.

 

What Questions Should Software Houses Ask Before Implementing Features?

 

Every new feature should pass an anti-enshittification audit before development begins. UX design services teams working in software houses can use these critical questions to evaluate whether features respect user autonomy:

 

The Anti-Enshittification Checklist

 

• Does this feature increase or decrease user switching costs? Features that make it harder to leave—proprietary file formats, platform-specific integrations without export options, social graphs that can't be migrated—should raise immediate red flags.
• Can users disable, customize, or opt-out of this feature completely? Forced features indicate a lack of confidence in the feature's value. If a feature genuinely serves users, making it optional won't reduce adoption.
• Does this feature serve the user's stated goals or the platform's engagement goals? Be honest about whose problems you're solving. Features designed to increase time on platform without providing additional user value represent enshittification in action.
• Will this feature work the same way five years from now? If your feature requires continuous engagement from the platform to function (think about features dependent on active algorithm maintenance), it creates vulnerability for users when business priorities shift.
• Have we provided users with full visibility into how this feature works? Transparency about data collection, algorithmic decision-making, and feature functionality builds trust. Opacity protects exploitative practices.

 

How Can UI UX Design Companies Lead the Resistance?

 

Software houses offering UX design services have unique power to shape industry standards. By adopting anti-enshittification principles in client projects, agencies can demonstrate that ethical design and business success aren't mutually exclusive.

 

Building Ethical Design Practices

 

Establish Ethical Design Guidelines: Create documented standards for data portability, user control, and transparency that apply to all projects. Make these guidelines part of your company's public positioning to attract clients who value user-centric approaches.

 

Educate Clients About Long-Term Value: Help clients understand that sustainable business models based on genuine value creation outperform extractive models in the long run. Users eventually leave platforms that exploit them, regardless of switching costs.

 

Price Ethical Features Appropriately: Don't treat data portability and user control features as "nice-to-haves" that get cut when budgets tighten. Position them as fundamental requirements for any modern digital product.

 

Measure Success Differently: Present clients with sustainability metrics alongside traditional engagement KPIs. Show how user satisfaction, voluntary return rates, and feature satisfaction correlate with long-term retention and revenue.

 

Competitive Advantages of Ethical Design

 

User trust has quantifiable business value. Companies known for respecting user autonomy and providing easy exit options often see higher customer lifetime value, better word-of-mouth growth, and reduced customer acquisition costs compared to competitors employing dark patterns.

 

Research from the software industry shows that products with strong data portability features actually experience lower churn rates—the opposite of what fearful executives might predict. Users appreciate being treated with respect, and that appreciation translates into loyalty.

 

Summary: The Path Forward for Ethical UX Design

 

Enshittification isn't inevitable—it results from specific design choices that prioritize short-term extraction over long-term value. By implementing data portability features, measuring sustainability metrics instead of engagement-only KPIs, and designing products that respect user autonomy, UI UX design services professionals can actively resist platform degradation.

 

The practical framework for anti-enshittification design includes: measuring products' degradation through specific metrics like ad-to-content ratios and export difficulty indices; implementing portability patterns including one-click exports and standardized data formats; prioritizing sustainability metrics that capture user well-being rather than just engagement; and designing exit mechanisms that make leaving easy, which paradoxically increases user comfort with staying.

 

For software houses and product design services teams, this represents both an ethical imperative and a competitive opportunity. As users grow increasingly frustrated with exploitative platforms, demand for products that respect user autonomy will only increase. Companies that lead in ethical design practices today will build the trusted brands of tomorrow.

 

The choice is clear: designers can either facilitate enshittification through thoughtless implementation of extractive features, or they can actively resist by building products that empower users, enable exit, and prove that sustainable business models based on genuine value creation remain viable in the digital age.