What I really do for a living, and why the new Vox redesign chaps my hide

I don't really make donuts. I'm an editor for a large, well-known online media company. Specifically, I produce content for a web site. It's a professional site with a strong social networking component and a large community of members who interact with one another primarily in the comments sections of a series of blogs. Sound familiar?

I don't talk about the specifics of my job much on Vox, because this space is where I occasionally vent about minor workplace irritations in, I hope, semi-anonymity. But I'm mentioning what I do for a living now because it plays into why I find the latest Vox redesign more than just screechingly irritating -- in my opinion, it's really offensive.

Vox is a business. I get that. With a very specific (and familiar) business model. I expect they've got a team of highly paid data specialists in a room somewhere, counting every mouse click and every page view. They have a team of high-level sales people laser-focused on monetizing every mouse click, every user eyeball, every minute that any one of us spends surfing around in the bowels of Vox, trying to find assets, write posts, or follow discussions. The sales folks take those click and page view metrics and use them to sell ads, because the ads sustain the site. The higher the page views and click numbers, the more attractive the product they're selling (web page real estate) looks to the advertisers. It is in the interest of Vox's bottom line to increase the number of times every user clicks a mouse, the number of pages every Voxer looks at on Vox, and the number of minutes every Voxer spends on Vox every day.

There are several ways Vox can accomplish this goal. They can make the site attractive and easy to use, offer plenty of powerful features, and continue to add cool features and improve the interface over time. They can foster the community atmosphere on Vox by sponsoring contests, Vox meetups, and the popular TiG feature. This approach would allow them to not only attract but retain a loyal base of blogger members -- who in turn would invite their friends to Vox, and grow the community even further. This approach requires time, patience, hard work, and a fundamental respect for Vox's end users, the community of eyeballs that is, under Vox's profit model, the product that is being sold to advertisers. We're the geese that lay Vox's golden eggs.

Until fairly recently, I thought we were making a fair trade. Vox provides us with a pleasant virtual space in which to hang out and chat with our friends, and in exchange we permit Vox to sell our valuable eyeballs to their advertisers. But after the last redesign, I have serious doubts. See, there's a cheap and sleazy way to quickly raise your site's page view numbers, mouse clicks, and the amount of time spent by each user on the site: Crap up the user interface. That's right. Make it harder to find things so that every user has to click eight times instead of once to read a post, leave a comment, or post a picture. Sure, it's possible that a site with a dreadful interface simply has bad designers. It's a bad day when I find myself actually wishing that were true. What's likelier, from where I'm sitting, is that a couple of brainiacs from Vox's sales and data teams got together and cooked up a quick way to get a big bounce in the site's performance numbers and, ultimately, give a huge boost to Six Apart's corporate bottom line. Oh, it's easy. Just throw the end user under the bus.

I meet with my team at work once a week. We have bigger company meetings several times a year. We worry about many of the same things I imagine the Vox and SixApart teams do. We want our performance numbers to look good, and there's a lot of pressure on us to make those numbers look better and better, every week, every month, every year. It's a big challenge, and yeah, it can be stressful, especially when the sales guys lean in and say that solid content and a large and loyal membership are all very well, but that we need the site to be different in X or Y way, to make the product  more attractive to advertisers.

Here's what one of our company's biggest cheeses said to us, the content and development teams, just last week while we were going over these precise issues. Before the meeting even started, he looked around the room at us and said: Whatever we say in here, whatever numbers get thrown around and whatever big sales goals or performance targets are identified -- Don't crap up the site. He repeated the sentence six times before we even started the meeting, just to make sure we got the point. We got it, and speaking for just myself, it felt good. It would be nice to boost the bottom line, but we're not going to do it at the cost of sabotaging a great product that our members love. Don't crap up the site.