Ending the arms race in the tech industry

Photo by Science in HD on Unsplash

The arms race in the tech industry goes like this: As companies build increasingly sophisticated tools to extract profit from users, users have to work harder to counter these tools and manage their own well-being.

In hindsight, the banner-ads of the ’90s seem like crude tools — users quickly learned to ignore them. Companies have since learned to build better mousetraps. As you find yourself reluctantly glued to the infinite scroll on your phone, you can almost hear the evil cackle on the other side, “Now try to ignore that!” Increasingly, we’re learning that companies are better resourced for this arms race and have every incentive to win.

History shows that an arms race raises the stakes, and the stakes are becoming more visible in the tech industry. To get users’ attention, we’re creating a divided society by showing increasingly polarizing content. Other tools seem deceptively benign by helping users find answers to every question, but they don’t ensure that the user is getting the truth. In the last decade, we’ve launched a large number of products and companies, but in the process, we’ve created a more polarized world where our users are easily manipulated and have a hard time telling fact from fiction.

The arms race is creating digital pollution that erodes the stability of our democratic society.

The collateral damage through our products shows that lip service to being user-centric and customer-obsessed is not enough. The reality is that our user only exists in the context of society. So if we’re fraying the fabric of society as a byproduct of delivering a service to our user, we’re not being user-centric in the long term after all.

Often what gets in the way of being truly user-centric is that our business models are in conflict with user well-being. This conflict is most obvious with social media companies — their financial incentives are to get you hooked. But the COVID crisis has unmasked less obvious examples. The for-profit business model of most hospitals in the US resulted in a system designed for “just enough” — just enough beds, just enough doctors, and so on. This led to shortages in PPE and sacrificed the lives of both healthcare workers and patients. To preserve the lucrative revenue stream from non-COVID outpatient services, some hospitals forbid healthcare workers from wearing masks unless they were with a patient. They didn’t want it to seem that COVID was a problem in their hospital. We deeply affect people’s lives when there’s a conflict between our business model and user well-being.

To end this arms race and be truly user-centric we may need to rethink our products along with our business models.

Take the example of insurance — when you claim insurance, it eats out of the insurer’s profits. If you’ve ever claimed insurance, you have experienced first hand that your insurer has every incentive to deny your claim. Lemonade Insurance developed a business model that aligns its incentives with its users’ — the company makes money by charging a fixed fee off of insurance premiums. What’s unclaimed goes towards charity. By reimagining their product and business model, they have aligned their incentives with their users’ needs.

Ending the arms race with your users

Our current approach to building products by maximizing revenues and user engagement only pays lip service to user-centricity. It’s propagating an arms race and inflicting collateral damage. To end this arms race, here are 3 practical things you can do to reimagine your product and align your business needs with your users’:

1. Take responsibility for your users’ well-being: Our products and businesses deeply affect people’s lives. As we master techniques to build and launch products faster and cheaper, we must embrace the responsibility that comes with it. You can choose to take the Hippocratic oath of product leadership and recognize that you’re responsible for the product decisions you make and the resulting effects your products have on users and the society.
2. Make users central to your vision: To reimagine your product, you have to start with the perspective that your product is only a mechanism to create the change you envision for your users — a successful product is not the end goal in itself. To bring about this mindset shift, you need a detailed vision that is centered on the user. Craft a vision that articulates whose problem you’re setting out to solve, why it needs solving, and how their world will look once you’ve accomplished your goal. It’s easy to get stuck in trying to find the perfect words when you start with a blank sheet of paper. To help with this problem, you might use the “Mad-Lib” vision statement from the Radical Product Thinking methodology. RPT gives you a systematic approach for building successful products that make the world a little more like the one we want to live in.
3. Develop a product strategy to align your business model with your users’ needs: The business model is often an afterthought bolted onto the product. A good product strategy not only identifies the pain points you’re setting out to solve and their solutions, but also aligns these with your business model. Your product strategy helps you translate your vision into deliberate choices in a business model so you can avoid a model that conflicts with user well-being.

By taking this systematic approach to building products, we can end the arms race. We can build successful products while embracing our responsibility for making the world a better place.

The UX Collective donates US$1 for each article published in our platform. This story contributed to UX Para Minas Pretas (UX For Black Women), a Brazilian organization focused on promoting equity of Black women in the tech industry through initiatives of action, empowerment, and knowledge sharing. Silence against systemic racism is not an option. Build the design community you believe in.