Chapter 6 - Building Better Supports People’s Best Impulses
Apple Harvest by Lajos Karcsay
“Only the friendship of those who are good and similar in their goodness is perfect. For these people each alike wish good for the other qua good, and they are good in themselves. And it is those who desire the good of their friends for the friends' sake that are most truly friends, because each loves the other for what he is, and not for any incidental quality.”
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
In our previous post, we discussed that the first concrete step for an aspiring better builder is to take care to learn from the great builders of the past. This week we continue to put the Philosophy of Building Better into action by exploring the proper posture towards our users.
In order to clarify what the right approach is, I want to first tell you about the wrong approach. I want to tell you about shadow patterns.
Shadow patterns are a design concept that encourages users to do something that is not aligned with their interests. A common example of this would be having an unsubscribe button greyed out to the point where it is difficult to see in an email. Companies are required to provide users with the option to unsubscribe, but may include a shadow pattern in their design if they take steps to purposefully make it harder to do so.
We’ve all experienced these kinds of shadow patterns in our day to day life. Subscriptions that are easy to sign up for but almost impossible to cancel. Requirements buried in fine print that mean the service we paid for isn’t what we expected. Insurance packages that cover everything except what we need them to.
Shadow patterns are obviously duplicitous and leave us with a bad feeling in our gut, but their existence reveals a fundamental insight about design.
Every design choice is a normative choice. Every. Single. One.
You either consciously encourage/discourage a certain action or you implicitly do so. The pitfall we so often fall afoul of when it comes to building is fooling ourselves into thinking that we are participating in some neutral science instead of a complex system that has human beings at the center of it. Flesh and blood human beings, not abstracted “monthly active users”, “customers”, or "occupants". Real people use the things we build. If we think of our building as some act of impersonal science, we will obfuscate the effect our choices have on the people they impact.
There is simply no such thing as “neutral” design patterns in systems involving human interaction. This fact imparts significant responsibility upon the aspiring better builder. To be clear, patterns exist along a continuum. The shadow patterns we highlighted earlier are obvious examples of bad building, but some patterns are objectively better than others depending on the context. An example is paid media versus advertising-supported media. Neither of these are necessarily bad patterns, but paid media tends to encourage better, more incentive-aligned content whereas advertising-supported media tends to optimize for controversy or outrage.
Since there are no neutral design patterns, there are no neutral acts of building. You cannot build anything without imbuing it with a standard for the kind of behavior you want to enable or encourage. When it comes to building there are fundamentally only two types of patterns. Those that resolve the competing forces in a way that brings the system into balance, or those that don’t.
There are no ties in this war to build a better, more integrated world.
Since there are no neutral acts of building, it means that every choice matters. As builders, we have a fundamental responsibility to think through the impact of the patterns we use. The fruits of our labors and whether they will be life giving or life destroying.
Building better, means making the choices that support people’s best inclinations, not taking advantage of their worst.
Building better means implementing the opposite of shadow patterns. Whereas shadow patterns seek to encourage users to do things that are against their best interests, building better seeks to encourage them to do things that lead to their long-term flourishing, even when those choices may be difficult in the moment.
Difficulty in choosing the right thing over the expedient thing is fundamental to the human condition. This is due to the fact that the expedient choice is often what is optimal in the moment and it is only through the compounding of time that it leaves us worse off than we could ever imagine. This inability to properly compare present rewards against future costs is known as Hyperbolic Discounting in the field of behavioral economics. This phenomenon describes why people struggle to form exercise habits, smoke cigarettes, and eat junk food. Human beings tend to have a hard time making choices with their long-term well-being in mind, especially when it comes at some sort of short-term cost. This reality is challenging enough, but it is only made more so by the fact that so many people and companies build products to hijack this cognitive bias and exploit it for their own outsized gain.
In Chapter 2, we highlighted numerous examples of poor building.
“Apartments that make us feel claustrophobic and separated from our neighbors. Tech products that riddle us with anxiety and the fear of missing out. Societies increasingly feel strained at the seams between competing ideologies. Cosmetics filled with harmful chemicals. Food filled with cost cutting preservatives. Entertainment meant to consume as many of our waking hours as possible and to keep us tethered to our screens. Financial products designed to keep us in a cycle of living paycheck to paycheck. Appliances that are purpose-built to fail more frequently.”
While it is easy to think of examples that take advantage of people’s worst impulses, what is much harder to find are products that are built to support our best inclinations.
One of my hopes for the Building Better Project is that it can be a vehicle through which I can help highlight examples of people and companies building things the right way. Just because they are less numerous does not mean they don’t exist. We all have experience paying a bit more to purchase something that we are really happy with rather than a cheap alternative. I am sure if you think back on some of the favorite things that you own or experiences you've paid for, many of them were not the cheapest option, but whatever you paid feels more than fair for what you received.
A helpful frame to guide our building efforts in this regard is to build as if you were building for a friend. Your true friends are those you want the best for as an end unto itself, with no expectation of receiving any additional benefit. Adopting this frame towards our users or customers helps us to build with their long-term flourishing in mind as we make choices that align with their ultimate interests.
Imagine you were making some sort of household appliance. If you solely maintain the perspective of doing what is best for your bottom-line, you may be tempted to build with planned obsolescence in mind, designing your product to wear out or fail prematurely. If instead you build your product as if you were building for a friend, you’d obviously want your appliance to work as well as possible for as long as possible. You’d want your friend to get the best value for their money and to enjoy the benefits of your product as long as it is able to function. This perspective of building as if we are building for a friend helps us to avoid taking advantage of our customers or creating shadow patterns that encourage users to act against their own self-interest.
Building as if we were building for a friend allows us to achieve a level of concord between us as builders and our users. We provide them with a good or service that creates a tangible benefit for them at a fair price. It creates win-win-win scenarios where we as builders thrive, our users thrive, and society as a whole thrives. When we do the opposite and attempt to extract more than we should either through misaligned incentives, shadow patterns, or preying on short-sighted user behavior, we deteriorate societal concord and erode the ties that bond us in pursuit of a shared common good.
I believe it is possible to build with better patterns, no matter the business or area of life, if we only have the will and the foresight to do so.
What would our world look like if social media algorithms were designed to make us feel happy and at peace instead of outraged and filled with anxiety?
What would our world look like if everything we bought was designed to perform as well as possible for as long as possible?
What would our world look like if things were gamified to help us have a healthy relationship with products and technology instead of becoming addicted to them?
All of these are possible today.
No technological innovation or cutting edge business strategy is required to enable them. All that is required is for builders to make a design choice to support people’s best impulses instead of taking advantage of their worst.
Building better can be a scaffolding that supports the best in us.
Our capacity for kindness, joy, and care for one another.
I don’t mean to suggest these decisions are easy. In fact, quite the opposite. The expedient path is definitionally the easier one to follow.
But if we maintain a long enough time horizon, I believe that the better choice will pay off. It will pay off with happier, healthier, more loyal customers. With customers that feel better after using your product, not worse. With customers that are more whole and in balance because the things you built encourage them to be so.
This better world is within our reach, if only we have the will to choose building better.
Let’s build better,
Erik