Wednesday, March 28, 1979. A clog is found in the basement of a nuclear power plant. One of the operators, Fred Scheiman rushes to Tank 7 where he takes off his glasses to get a better look. Just as the pipe cracks he hurls himself off the spot. If he had remained in the spot, a second more, the geyser would have stripped off his skin.
The power plant is designed to protect itself from these kinds of leaks. But still, there is a problem. A minor malfunction in the secondary cooling circuit caused the temperature in the primary coolant to rise. This in turn caused the reactor to shut down automatically. The shut down took about one second. At this point a relief valve failed to close, but the instrumentation did not reveal the fact, and so much of the primary coolant drained away that the residual decay heat in the reactor core was not removed. The core suffered severe damage as a result.
Fred and Ed Hauser, the chemical foreman in charge of monitoring the water, went to fix the valves manually. In the end both Fred and Ed got exposed to 600 rem while the thumb rule for the amount of exposure a human can take in, in emergencies is 100 rem. It was miraculous that they both survived.
One of the people who went to study the problem that occurred there was Donald A.Norman.The person who invented the term “user experience” in the 1990s and is considered as the Moses of product design. Also the author of the bestseller “The design of everyday things”.
Now the ‘Three-mile accident’ could have been avoided pretty easily. But there was a fault in the design of the lights and in the equipment that gave false evidence of a closed valve. All switches in the control room were designed to look the same so there will always be confusion about the function of the switch and the men working in a nuclear power plant cannot afford such a mistake. If the panel switches and the equipment were designed properly the accident could be avoided. (Italics is mine)
In this blog, we will see about the ethics of design and also some points which are given by the authors’ Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant of the book ‘User Friendly’ on how to make good design.
Ethical design
Design ethics concern moral behavior and responsible choices in the practice of design. Ethics are important because they keep design clean and honest. That applies to general aesthetics and business issues.
Good Design
Designing a product is not easy and good design is not easy at all. There have been many cases in which products that look beautiful are not functional. For example, in Don Norman’s book ‘The design of everyday things’, he describes a panel of switches installed in his home. The switches which have been installed by architects look very beautiful but Don and his family could never find which switches worked for which application. Though the switches look beautiful they do not serve their purpose.
On the other hand, take the iPod it looks beautiful and it also serves its purpose. An iPod user can find his song in the least number of clicks possible. Steve Jobs instructed the design team that the user should not take more than three clicks to find a song. This is good design.
In the book ‘User Friendly’, the authors talk about how they worked with a local NGO partner in South Africa to create a self-service experience so that the people there can privately test for HIV. They had carefully designed it along with a service that offers access to a trained HIV counselor via cell phone. It was to be designed as simply as a home pregnancy kit.
Four years later, the kit was tested in Edendale, a small town in KwaZulu-Natal where the HIV infection rates are among the highest in the world. In the next room, a young woman tested opened the self-service kit, and carefully read the instructions printed in Zulu. The women first considered calling a counselor but decided against it. She finished the process herself correctly determining the status which was negative. It was repeated over many months with many adjustments which improved the ease and accuracy of the kit. They had redesigned it to be 98 percent accurate in a clinical study. This is good design.
Good design helps us to create solutions to some of the problems of the world and alleviating the pain of the user. E.g. think about a ramp in a mall for physically challenged or braille numbers in lifts which is a boon for the blind.
Now let us look at the other side of design. It’s a darker part of it.
Dark Design
Good design doesn’t mean it is ethical design. Rather, when you think about it, unethical design can actually be a good design but it does not benefit the user in any way, it ensures the user gets addicted or hooked to the product or tricking the user to reveal sensitive information.
In an attempt to create products, some companies have used design to their advantage by influencing people for their own best interests. A common example that can be said is social media. Using external triggers such as pings and other sounds they make sure you stay Hooked. Nir Eyal has written a book called ‘Hooked’, which helps companies to create habit-forming products. (This book has been used by some of the world’s popular companies).
We all know how Facebook manipulated 700,000 users in an emotion-manipulation experiment. We also know how Cambridge Analytica influenced millions of Facebook users without their consent and used it for political advertising. Analyzing 300 or more likes of a user, Facebook has the power to determine the nuances of preference and personality unknown to even the person’s partner.
When Steve Jobs first introduced the iPhone he described it as a ‘widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough internet communicator.’ Never would he have thought that it would change everything including the consumer behavior (or shall I add human behavior).
In the book, ‘User Friendly’, the authors talked to a designer who spent almost two decades at Apple, who played an integral role in creating the first iPhone. He remembers that during the Christmas holidays, the complete family, including sons and daughters, took their work off to be with the family.
After the iPhone release, his entire owned one. That year when he arrived at his parent’s house and rang the bell, no one answered.
Why? Because everyone was busily tapping their phones. This was almost 12 years ago. Now think about the impact companies can make.
It is also mentioned that a New York Times journalist found that Uber was using behavioral economies to prompt drivers to work longer. Drivers would be prompted with messages such as “You’re $10 away from making $330 in net earnings. Are you sure you want to go offline” The number was arbitrary and the goal was meaningless. This made drivers work longer. It was so successful and addictive (hooked) that drivers did not even take bathroom breaks.
An example of dark design:
When Apple released iOS 6, one of the few new features not enthusiastically promoted by the company was Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA) ad tracking. It assigned each device a unique identifier used to track browsing activity, information advertisers used to target ads. Even though IDFA is anonymous, it’s still unsettling to people who worry about privacy.
Fortunately, Apple included a way to disable the feature. You won’t find it in the privacy settings, however. Instead, you have to go through a series of obscure options in the general settings menu. Now, “General” is a crappy name for a menu item. It’s mainly a bucket of miscellaneous stuff that they didn’t know what to do with. In the “General” menu, select “About.” Down at the bottom of this menu, next to the terms of service and license items, there’s a menu item listed as “Advertising.”
If you haven’t been here before, the only option in the advertising menu, “Limit Ad Tracking” is probably selected “Off.”
But let’s take a closer look at the way this is worded. It doesn’t say “Ad Tracking – Off,” it says “Limit Ad Tracking – Off”. So it’s a double negative. It’s not being limited, so when this switch is off, ad tracking is actually on.
Off means on!
Here the user of the phone was misdirected thinking that ad tracking was off but it is on. It takes time to read and put together the actual meaning of the button.
We need to realize the pace and the things that are going on in this world. And hopefully, stop all distractions. Nir Eyal, the author of Hooked, recently wrote a book called “Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life” because he admitted to being hooked.(Look at the irony of it.)
How to make good design?
(as in the book user friendly):
- Start with the user.
- Walk in the Users Shoes
- Make the invisible visible
- Build on existing behavior
- Climb the ladder of metaphors
- Expose the inner logic
- Extend the reach
- Form follows emotion
Even now in the COVID-19 pandemic, innovative des even small improvements in existing design can help save or improve the lives of people. I recently read about a Canadian boy scout Quinn Callander came up with a simple yet genius idea of protecting the ears of people who wear face masks all day. Quinn used his 3D printing skills to come up with a simple yet genius ear guard that protects people’s ears from the painful straps of the face masks.
We can use good and ethical design to prod the world in the right direction. After all in J.R.R.Tolkien’s words “there is some good in this world and it’s worth fighting for”.
Links :
User Friendly: https://www.amazon.com/User-Friendly-Hidden-Design-Changing/dp/0374279756
Donald A.Norman:https://jnd.org/
Magic Bus Ticketing: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2016/09/26/495466938/a-million-dollars-goes-to-an-app-that-leads-to-a-better-bus-commute
Hooked: https://www.amazon.in/Hooked-How-Build-Habit-Forming-Products-ebook/dp/B00NW01MKM
Facebook Experiments: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/07/10/facebook-experiments-on-users/#2b29dd91c3d0
Cambridge Analytica: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Analytica_data_scandal
Indistractable: https://www.amazon.in/Indistractable-Control-Your-Attention-Choose/dp/194883653X
Boy creates ear guards: https://www.demilked.com/boy-scout-creates-ear-guards-quinn-callander/
