Unintended consequences in design
How many times in your life have you wondered seeing the alternative possibilities of a particular product? We, humans, are creative, we tend to find opportunities from every single thing that come across in our lives. Be it using Instagram for showcasing your merchandise, or checking internet availability by typing “google.com” in your browser.
Identifying alternative opportunities or utilizing the product beyond its intended use is cool. However, we, humans tend to use products in our own way regardless of the intended purpose of the product leads to unintended consequences.
What are unintended consequences?
I ran a search in google seeking the definition of unintended consequences returned with this:
“In the social sciences, unintended consequences are outcomes that are not the ones foreseen and intended by a purposeful action.” — Robert Merton.
When I read that, it didn’t sound so alarming to me, but then when I logged into LinkedIn I saw a post from one of my follower and it says: “You have Facebook, Instagram and specifically tinder for dating, please don’t use LinkedIn for seeking your potential dating targets”. Now, this left me disturbed, I was puzzled, and I felt bad.
Coincidentally, I was sent to Design up Conference 2017, which was held in Bangalore by my company then, Kerala Startup Mission where I heard Alysha Naples talking about unintended consequences and that helped me to broaden my understanding.
During her session, she mentioned one of her experience from the game “Journey” in which, another player in the game was drawing a heart to her without knowing who she is. When the journey team designed the game, they never thought about the ability of the game to give an emotional connection to the player in an aforementioned manner.
“I cried, I cried for about an hour. I felt like this person whose name I didn’t know. It can be anyone, we stuck together, fought together, we struggle together and I felt an intensely deep sense of gratitude for being there and leaving this beautiful message to me at the end” — Alysha Naples
While the experience from the journey was benevolent and touchy, there can be some instances in which users might go to the dark side to satisfy their evil intentions. One among those was reported by a female player who was playing QuiVr in 2017. She was playing the game with 5 unknown teammates and at some point, she has to yell through the voice channel. As soon as her teammates heard her voice, they realized that their teammate is a woman. They started chasing her and groping her avatar. Even though the woman was safe in the coziness of her room, this incident made her feel that she was being violated.
Along with this, I need to mention that, QuiVr replied to the article with an update which helps players to create a force field around them which will avoid other players from the vicinity.
Is unintended consequences only affecting games?
You’ve guessed it right. Unintended consequences were in existence since the day mankind started innovation. Did you think that Karl Benz wanted the world to be filled with cars which spit tons of carbon dioxide and other toxic gases and in turn cause damage to earth?
I’m not sure how many of you are aware of SQL injection. Its one of the most common hacking method in which the hacker injects code which could destroy the entire database via an input field, which is used to accept inputs from the users. Most of the web companies are taking precautions to prevent these type of attacks in the current era.
Talking about unintended consequences, one of my friend who was learning from a popular MOOC platform received a message from another user in who reviewed her project as a part of their peer-to-peer assessment praising her physical beauty and seeking her private number. The result, she felt violated and threatened thinking that if she doesn’t give her cellphone number, the other guy won’t be giving enough score to her assignment.
If you notice the pattern I shared above, you will realize that it’s been there, and it’s all prevailing. From knives to the most sophisticated tech. If not designed properly, all of them have the ability to cause something which was never intended during its production stage.
Can we prevent unintended consequences?
Well, Most of them. I know, I wanted to say all of them. The fact that we can’t manipulate or control the human mind with an Imperial curse is the only reason I’m saying that we can’t get rid of unintended consequences altogether.
I believe that Designers can prevent unintended consequences by considering the following steps:
1. Asking the right questions
2. What is really being said
3. Wearing the black hat
4. Observing the usage of the product.
1.Asking the right questions
When we are designing something, we need to ask ourselves questions like, why are we designing these? What are the elements are we going to have in these? why do we need these elements? who are the users of this product?
Referring to the experience my friend had from MOOC learning platform, this situation won’t ever happen if the peer who reviewed her assignment couldn’t see her profile picture or name. Being an active user of the same platform, I believe that the peer’s name and profile picture doesn’t add any value to the process as you are merely reviewing the assignments. Hence, if the designers from that particular company have asked the questions related to the visibility of the profile picture and name to themselves, this situation could’ve been avoided.
2.What is really being said?
This is something designers often get into. There can be instances when someone from the product team approaches the designers and says “Hey, do you know, our users just responded in the survey that they want text messaging in our latest VR product”. This is the moment we need to differentiate the form and the essence.
The form might differ, but the essence always remains the same. If users replied affirmatively to a question towards having a text message feature in the latest VR app. It might mean that they want something in the app using which they can easily communicate with the people whom they care about.
3.Wearing the blackhat.
I love to believe that all of us wants to be the good guys. Most of us believe that we want to change the world for the better good. However, while designing a product which we want to make a social impact, we need to wear the blackhat. We need to consider ourselves as a villain who tries to manipulate the social aspects of our product to achieve evil motives.
Is a knife evil? Only if the wielder is evil.
4.Observing the usage of the product.
Amongst all, this is my favorite part. When the female gamer reported about the terrible experience she had in QuiVr with her teammates. QuiVr team reciprocated with a solution to avoid further repetition of that incident.
No matter how hard we try, there can be instances in which we couldn’t think of a particular scenario which might affect in bad experience to a player.
Own mistakes, Improvise on it. Unintended consequences can be avoided if we are vigilant about it pre and post stages of production.
