Before this class, I was highly unconvinced by the idea of behavior change through a digital interface under capitalism. I still wish there was a way for me to fully buy in to the design process as design for design’s sake, through the mindset of creating a nonprofit product, perhaps, rather than one that will eventually be subject to marketing campaigns and revenue projections. My specific concern regarding products that facilitate behavior change is the fact that while they may claim their target user is someone who wants to change a behavior, in the pursuit of increased engagement and downloads, marketing campaigns often manufacture insecurities or issues that users previously did not have, then proceed to sell them the solution.
Although I enjoyed reading the papers and this class’s treatment of ethics, I couldn’t help feeling depressed by the obvious siloing of technologists set up by the course’s framework (which reflects Silicon Valley in general). Since this class only gives a glimpse into the design phase of product development, it’s hard to feel as though the ethical values work and thought labor that has gone into a design will hold up against other factors higher up in the product lifecycle, especially knowing that UX specialists are often considered a “lower tier” in technology organizations. While it was interesting to devote significant time and effort to design and research in the sphere of the class, many comments from guest speakers and readings only amplified the fact that design is not taken seriously in most “real-life” organizations; from when Deb Aoki talked about how UX writers are not respected, to the “soft resistance” described in one class reading when it came time for the values-oriented designers to face up against product managers with totally different concerns.
I don’t come from the tech industry, but from journalism, so I find this segmentation of workers with different priorities to be a bit of a culture shock, not to mention contradictory. Even in newsrooms with workers of different skill sets, there is a shared mission and priority – facilitating the best reader experience and delivering great journalism. I felt disillusioned by the naturalization of the organization of the tech industry such that engineers cannot have design values or be design-oriented, or that product managers cannot be made to care about anything other than profit. As the ethics discussion on soft resistance went on in class, our table was left wondering what the point even is?
I think what this class has taught me is that as someone who has diverse interests, I would be pretty unhappy in a hyper-specialized role that not only dictates my scope of work, but in a sense, also my values. It seems that the “values” engineers have in software teams may be more for efficiency than inclusion, for example. But if that’s the case, I feel like I wouldn’t want to work on a large software team for that reason. I want to believe that engineers can still prioritize things like accessibility naturally; that taking this class has helped bolster those values in me even if I choose not to pursue a singularly UX path in the future.
The most challenging aspect of the project in general though, was the challenge in actually using the unique insights gleaned from the substantial research my team did throughout the quarter. Our insights were so unintuitive that it was difficult to convince users that the intervention would be useful without significant education or, otherwise, “manipulation” in a sense. Through WasteNot, we promote “personal agency” as a way to reduce food waste. In other words, we promote meal planning. Our insights showed that when users read the menu in advance, they were able to not be overwhelmed in dining halls and get the appropriate amount of food for their appetite, since they had a plan. Yet, returning, I guess, to the marketing problem, it’s pretty hard to convince someone who just wants to waste less food that the key to doing so is to plan their meal ahead of time. Unlike other problem spaces, where the interventions seemed to be intimately tied to the location/time of the behavior, ours was not: our attempts to tie them together in our intervention study completely failed. When I mentioned “manipulative” earlier, what I really mean is the feeling that as designers, we have subconscious information about users that they don’t have themselves, and we may potentially weaponize this for social good – reducing waste. I think something that feels incomplete, then, and what I want to learn more of in the future, is how to educate potential users on a product, rather than letting it speak for itself.
During the duration of the class, I was mostly able to set marketing ideas aside and focus on creating the best product possible with my amazing team. I was strongly motivated by the efforts of other students in the class and the heartful products that were produced. In the future though, I want to stay away from making products for the consumer space, particularly the “elite college student” market. Ideally, I would love to have an environment to practice designing for a group that I’m not a part of. Even if that’s logistically challenging, I think I would find it more fulfilling. I also still find it ethically tricky to think about any persuasive technology, as someone who highly values personal autonomy and freedom. Perhaps that means I would be more interested in B2B type solutions, rather than building for an end user with a face. I can imagine creating ethical software solutions for businesses to stick to the values they say they want to promote, for example, as an example of “behavior change for organizations.”
