Hello Linnéa.

This is a really interesting opening thought for a discussion not only designers need to have. Why not only designers?

In my world, the User Stories (or job stories, or requirements) rarely come from a designer. And if they do come from a designer they have to get through other people anyway. There are Product Managers, Business Analysts, Product Owners … and many others.

And therein lies my struggle. While it became gradually easier to sell the usual “take the people into account” worldview to the whole product development team. These were stories for the normal people. The real target audience. Not assholes, jerks and other weirdos.

Usually drawing the line from product performance — the KPIs by which we measure product success — to my designs is already hard enough. That is if there are any KPIs at all. Besides the usual “let’s release by Christmas”.

As if this was not struggle enough there is another issue. Defining and describing the problems our digital products should solve is a craft on its own. Targeting the biggest (or underserved) problem with the best solution you can figure out is what makes a product truly great.

This problem definition becomes the crucial part as it underlies any solution you will design. So where do we stop at imagining the negative consequences of people that want to ruin the experience for others? How do you gather enough evidence on to convince all the other people involved in the product decisions?

Without data to back your hypotheses up you might be just catastrophizing (this and more in here, more context here — thanks Stephen Anderson).

To sum it up. Great that you pointed it out. Good for you if you can convince people to put in safeguards against behavior that would spoil the experience for other users of your product. Not sure we can get there just by thinking about it upfront. Definitely looking forward to the interviews with the jerks ;)