Usability is an ethical position
Usability is usually argued on business grounds — conversion, support cost, retention. Those arguments are true and they’re not the real one.
The real one is that a difficult interface takes something from people that they cannot get back. Not money, which they agreed to spend. Time, attention, and a small amount of self-regard, since most people blame themselves when software defeats them.
The transfer
Every unclear label is work moved from the team that built it to everyone who uses it. The economics are brutally one-sided: an hour of clarification during design, against ten seconds of confusion multiplied by every user, every session, indefinitely.
That’s why “we’ll document it” is rarely an answer. Documentation moves the cost rather than removing it, and it moves it toward the person with the least context.
The measures are old and still right: effectiveness (can they complete it), efficiency (at what cost), satisfaction (how did it feel) — measured in real conditions, not the demo. Real conditions means interruptions, a bad connection, a partly filled form, someone who last used this six weeks ago.
Forms make the transfer visible. A field that rejects a valid address, a phone number with a space in it, a name with an apostrophe — people don’t abandon, they lie. They type something that gets them through, and the cost lands twice: once on them, once on whoever later depends on that data being real. The validation was written in an hour to save a downstream check that no longer works anyway.
Where it breaks
Ethical framing raises the stakes, and raised stakes produce their own distortions.
Once usability is a moral matter, disagreements about it become accusations, which is a bad way to run a design review and a worse way to make trade-offs. And there are real trade-offs. Confirmation dialogs make things slower and prevent disasters. Security controls are friction by design. Accessibility work sometimes costs the visual language a team spent months on. Framing usability as a virtue makes it hard to say “this friction stays” without sounding like you’re defending harm.
The framing also flatters. Usability is a floor, not a purpose. A product can be beautifully usable and pointless, or usable and quietly extractive — the smoothest interfaces in the world belong to products optimising for engagement in ways nobody involved would defend. Ease is orthogonal to whether the thing should exist.
So: respect for people’s time is a real obligation, and it’s the smaller of two questions. The first is whether the thing you’re making them fluent in is worth being fluent in.
Takeaway: usability is a moral stance.