Why Do We Only Empathize When It’s Profitable?

I’ve been designing digital products for fifteen years now, and lately I’m wondering if we’ve all been complicit in a massive lie. We talk endlessly about “user empathy” and “don’t make me think” philosophies, yet the world is full of confusing interfaces that nobody seems to care about fixing. Why?

Let me start with something that bothers me almost daily. I run on a treadmill, and there are two digital displays side by side: one shows time, one shows distance. The interface presents two identical numbers with completely different logic: one rolls over at 60, the other at 100. Just a tiny label of “time” and “distance”, but no hover states, no contextual help. A user seeing “58” on the time display has no way to know it will jump to 59 and then reset, while “58” on distance means 42 more units until the next kilometer. I get confused when I glance at these displays occasionally while running and I assume many more must be 💬 (4) . Yet, we’ve normalized this confusion and called it acceptable design.

Then there are elevator buttons. Nowhere is it written that the up arrow means “I want to go up” versus “call the elevator up to me.” People constantly press the down arrow when the elevator is on an upper floor, thinking they’re summoning the elevator downward to their location, not indicating their intended direction. It’s a design flaw so common that most people have experienced the confusion firsthand, yet it persists across virtually every elevator installation globally.

The Selective Application of Design Principles

Here’s what’s starting to make sense to me: these design flaws persist because they don’t affect anyone’s bottom line. Treadmill manufacturers aren’t losing sales because people occasionally confuse time and distance displays. Elevator companies aren’t hemorrhaging money over directional button confusion. So the sacred principles of user experience, the ones we supposedly live by, simply don’t apply.

But watch what happens when user confusion threatens revenue. E-commerce checkout flows receive obsessive attention. Social media feeds are engineered for maximum engagement. Dating apps manipulate psychological triggers with surgical precision. Suddenly, every cognitive load principle gets weaponized in service of business objectives, but all under the garb of “user empathy”.

This isn’t coincidence. It’s revealing the true nature of what we call “user empathy” in the modern UX industry.

Empathy as Market Research

I’m starting to think that when we talk about user empathy, we’re not talking about understanding people we’re talking about understanding how to influence them. Most “user empathy” research I’ve encountered has been focused on increasing engagement, reducing bounce rates, or improving conversion metrics. We study users the way marketers study consumer behavior: to drive specific outcomes, not to genuinely serve human needs.

The empathy is tactical, not authentic. We map user journeys to identify friction points that hurt business goals. We create personas to better target messaging. We A/B test emotional triggers to optimize for desired behaviors. This isn’t empathy. It’s sophisticated manipulation disguised in humanitarian language.

Think about it: if user empathy were genuine, wouldn’t we fix the elevator buttons? Wouldn’t we add simple labels to treadmill displays explaining that the time counter resets to zero after reaching 59 seconds, while the distance counter uses decimal increments that continue past 100?

These are easy problems with obvious solutions. But they don’t drive quarterly results, so they remain unsolved while we pour resources into making purchase buttons more persuasive.

The Capitalism Behind User-Centered Design

Maybe I’m being cynical, but modern UX design has less to do with users and more to do with extracting value from them efficiently. The techniques we call “user-centered design” often center the business first, then work backward to make user manipulation feel inevitable rather than intentional.

Large tech companies have transformed “don’t make me think” into “don’t let them think about what we’re doing to them.” The interfaces that receive the most sophisticated UX attention are those designed to capture attention, harvest data, or drive transactions. Meanwhile, public infrastructure – elevators, medical equipment, transit systems – remains confusing because improving these experiences doesn’t serve corporate interests.

The Misplaced Focus of Empathy Education

This explains why we teach empathy to designers instead of decision-makers. Designers, positioned at the bottom of corporate hierarchies, receive extensive training in user research and empathy mapping. But the executives who approve budgets and define product requirements remain untouched by these supposedly transformative practices.

We end up with empathetic designers presenting carefully researched user needs to stakeholders who care primarily about business metrics. It’s empathy theater: elaborate research presentations that justify predetermined objectives while maintaining the illusion of user-centered design.

If empathy actually mattered to user experience, wouldn’t we teach it to people who control the experience?

What Users Actually Need

I’m not sure I have answers, but I’m starting to think users might be more resilient than our industry assumes. The treadmill displays and elevator buttons work, not because they’re well-designed, but because people adapt, learn, and develop mental models even within flawed systems.

Maybe the goal shouldn’t be eliminating all cognitive effort, but respecting human intelligence enough to create honest interfaces rather than manipulative ones. Maybe users don’t need us to remove every bit of mental work from their experience. They need us to stop treating them like marks in an elaborate behavioral economics experiment.

A Different Framework

I’m thinking out loud here, but what if we replaced “user empathy” with something more honest like “user respect”? Instead of studying people to influence their behavior, we could design systems that trust their intelligence and serve their actual needs, even when those needs conflict with business objectives.

This might mean creating interfaces that help people make informed decisions rather than quick ones. It might mean designing systems that empower users rather than extract value from them. It might mean fixing the elevator buttons simply because confusion is unnecessary, regardless of whether it affects quarterly earnings.

After fifteen years in this industry, I’m realizing that the most important question isn’t “how can we empathize with users?” but “why do we only empathize when it’s profitable?” 💬 (2) The answer to that question might reveal what UX design actually serves and it might not be users at all.