ETHICAL DESIGN TAKES A STEP BACK AS ATTENTION ECONOMY KICKS IN
The Social Dilemma experience
How the border gets blurry in the usage of Persuasive Technique in design.
Nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse.
— Sophocles
The opening line of the just-released Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma starts with a warning. It is an extension of The Great Hack (The Great Hack, dark patterns and UX) which deals closely with the world of design, ethics and usage of persuasive techniques. While The Great Hack dealt more with data and data science, this one takes the game one notch up and shows how our psychology is being used against us and how easily our emotions can be manipulated by a group of engineers and how our senseless surrender of ourselves in the hands of technology is costing us moral and ethical degeneration.
Welcome to the Attention Economy
If you are not living under a rock, you know by now that Netflix itself uses all tricks of persuasive technique to get us hooked to its shows for hours. The platform itself is somehow guilty of being part of the attention economy like every social media platform. The suggested videos, the nudge to see what’s on Top10 in US, the auto-play feature which starts the next episode without you literally moving a finger, are all part of a bigger plan. Every model has its own pros and cons. The documentary itself may be one of your junk watch but you must praise the platform to force you to think twice of the bigger goal and purpose for which we all signed up for this industry: Make a difference.
In the documentary, director Jeff Orlowski shows how the persuasion technique being used to manipulate our thought process and behavior. Netflix has been surprising us with these bold documentaries that challenge modern age creatives with some basic questions. Are our creations going out of hand in such extent that they in turn has taken the controller to control us?
We realize the problem is real when Tim Kendall, CEO of Moment, former executive of Facebook and Former President of Pinterest confesses that the program he had created (read Pinterest), had him glued even after work during his family time — how he felt guilty about the addiction of fiddling with app when his sons craved for attention. Coming from the creator, you know the problem is much deep-rooted than we think it is. The documentary touch upon the analogy by Steve Jobs from an earlier interview where he referred that the computer is like a bicycle for brain. Unfortunately, that bicycle is not an inanimate object anymore, it has become so smart that it has now the ability to get you out of the bed, make you forget your essentials and force you to ride it. If this doesn’t sound bad enough, worse is: it makes all the attempts possible to not let you get off it.
With the interim Black Mirror type of fictionalized narrative that plays like a movie snippet inside the documentary, it tries to simplify the jargons and make it more entertaining for the non-IT folks. Everything may seem futuristic, but is very much real and happening as we speak.
A 5,000 person study found that higher social media use correlated with self-reported declines in mental and physical health and life satisfaction. — American Journal of Epidemiology, 2017
The Persuasive Equation
Let’s take a look at the Persuasive Technique Model which can also be referred to as the Fogg Behavior Model. Dr. BJ Fogg, a Stanford University Professor created this model on which Persuasive Techniques are loosely based. In Dr. Fogg’s website it says “The purpose of his research and teaching is to help millions of people improve their lives”. It illustrates that all three parameters - Motivation, Ability and Prompts must come together at the same time for you to influence behavior.
As a designer, what you used for micro-interactions like a gentle nudge or a timely reminder to complete the task in your design are all part of persuasive technique. Nowadays UX and Interaction Designers follow this trend as a standard element of design. Measuring up with analytics will garner better result if you use vs. don’t use a gentle warning or if you select option B vs A (A being the company wants you to select as a preferred choice). Persuasive design techniques like push notifications and the endless scroll of newsfeed have created a feedback loop that keeps us glued to our devices. Businesses have started understanding this nuances since digital has become the “new normal” marketing tool.
With time and aggressive monetization model, products in the attention economy employ persuasive techniques in their design that are similar to the techniques that are used in the non-digital world. Digital products use these techniques virtually everywhere, from the font colors to the text that frames anything, from profile completion cues to promoted posts. Numerous companies service offerings include helping websites optimize for where to place their content to get the most clicks and shares.
Persuasive design techniques involve these fundamental theories:
1. Reduction: Making complex tasks simple.
2. Tunneling: Guided persuasion — giving control over to the experts or allowing the system to guide you the way it wants.
3. Suggestion: Placing triggers in the path of motivated learners.
4. Tailoring: Provide options to users who prefer to customize and more likely to complete the task that they choose.
5. Self-monitoring: Never underestimate the thrill of checking a box or of recognition
6. Conditioning: Reinforcing targeted behaviors.
7. Surveillance: Data is analyzed in the back-end and machine learns tomorrow what it doesn’t know today.
Persuasive Design techniques, like any other design technique is meant to make the users’ life easier. But with the rise of this attention economy, the technique has gone monster and being used to hook us with the desired apps in order to sell our attention to the advertisers. As common word of wisdom goes “If you are not paying to use the product, you are the product”.
Revisiting the Purpose
Coming back to the documentary, the internet is not what it was supposed to be. Early tech pioneers and tech entrepreneurs who came after them imagined a world without borders that would bring us together, where all human knowledge would be available at our fingertips and everybody would have a voice. the rise of the internet was always based on “collaboration, openness, freedom.” But while we got some of that, we also got introduced to polarization, fake news, rising extremism that destabilizes societies, autocratic powers that undermine democracies, and giant tech companies that are eliminating privacy. We got a system that not only permits, but amplifies hate, bullying, and divisiveness.
By carefully crafting the experience, the social media apps are turning us into products that the advertisers use. One important mention in the documentary is “only two industries refer their customers as users: Illegal Drug Industry and Digital Apps.”
In briskly edited interviews, Orlowski speaks with men and women from the industry who helped build social media and now fear the effects of their creations on users’ mental health and the foundations of democracy. They deliver their cautionary testimonies.
“Never before in history have 50 designers made decisions that would have an impact on two billion people” says Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google. Anna Lembke, an addiction expert at Stanford University, explains that these companies exploit the brain’s evolutionary need for interpersonal connection. And Roger McNamee, an early investor in Facebook, delivers a chilling allegation: Russia didn’t hack Facebook; it simply used the platform. Coming from the people who made their name in the industry, you have to believe that the perniciousness of social networking platforms is a feature, not a bug.
It also touch upon some good advice from Jaron Lanier, who has an written an aptly names book Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now.
In a quick cut video, the story narrative shows how the life of an otherwise not-so-social teenager’s changes because Lies spread 6 times faster than truth on these platforms or how a middle school girl falls victim to online bullies.
We know these things and the pandemic has given us more excuse to let our children hangout on their own with their digital devices because “they have nothing else to do”. But it also argues that like any other platform, absence of authority and pressure of social acceptance is making us all vulnerable to collapse in our morale and sensibility. If we all do our part, verify news before forwarding and be more empathetic, we can fight against fake news and regain our purpose. The documentary is a call to raise our voice for what is right and what is humane.
So, you be a designer who uses this techniques to increase SEO ranking or just an addict of these app or both, use your conscience and use the internet for the greater good of humanity as much as you can, and let it not use you as a product worth few cents.
Watch the documentary because knowledge is power! And as I always say like The Minimalists —
“Love people and use data because the opposite never works”.
I am all ears for your take on the documentary or anything UX, feel free to connect with me on Linkedin.
