South Korea's 'dopamine sites' sell food orders that never ship. The transaction is fake. The satisfaction is not.
This piece uses that provocation to challenge a core assumption in UX: that flows exist to reach an endpoint. The argument is that anticipation, browsing, and the act of choosing generate measurable engagement independent of conversion. The delivery that never comes still delivered something.
If you design checkout flows, recommendation engines, or any system optimized for completion rates, read the full piece. The question it forces is specific and uncomfortable: what are your users actually getting from the journey you built, and have you ever tried to measure that separately from the outcome?
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