Smartphone applications are exploiting our basest instincts. Is that how we want it to be?
DIGITAL ADVERTISING AND CUSTOMER JOURNEY STRATEGIES
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31 MAY
08:30 – 11:30AM
Slaves to the phone
Many of us feel like we’ve become slaves to that little device in our pockets. We check it all the time. We have truly become addicted. And this is no coincidence. According to Tristan Harris, Ex-Design Ethicist & Product Philosopher at Google (his own words) we have become phone-addicts because of the way the technology is designed – because we are, on a certain unconscious level, extremely easy to manipulate.
A long list of tricks
Harris lists ten ‘hijacks’ of the mind, from the false idea that menus are objective overviews of what’s actually available to the way phone apps work like slot machines, offering us intermittent variable rewards, in other words: with each draw of the phone from my pocket I might have won a new like, a new email, a new re-tweet.
Harris suggests that “companies like Apple and Google [now] have a responsibility to reduce these effects by converting intermittent variable rewards into less addictive, more predictable ones with better design. For example, they could empower people to set predictable times during the day or week for when they want to check “slot machine” apps, and correspondingly adjust when new messages are delivered to align with those times.”
Privacy?
Meantime, over in Palo Alto, there are signs that our disaffection with being turned into fodder for corporate money-making, is being heard, at least when it comes to issues of privacy and ownership of data.
Tim Cook, Apple CEO, recently gave a speech where he stated that:
“Our privacy is being attacked on multiple fronts. I’m speaking to you from Silicon Valley, where some of the most prominent and successful companies have built their businesses by lulling their customers into complacency about their personal information. They’re gobbling up everything they can learn about you and trying to monetize it. We think that’s wrong. And it’s not the kind of company that Apple wants to be.”
His conclusion is that customers will one day wake up and realise the scam. And what then?
At their peril
When Harris talks about “[protecting our time] with the same rigor as privacy and other digital rights”, he knows that companies are only exploiting our subconscious weaknesses as long as they are allowed to.
The view of the customer as automaton, as someone who can endlessly be fooled into giving away more time, more freedoms, more privacy, comes at the tech companies’ own peril.
A tech customer revolution is not difficult to envisage, in the same way customers (let’s call them people) have forced the advent of eco-tourism and locally sourced restaurants (turning whole businesses up-side down as a result).
Harris closes off his brilliant exposition of our evolving phone addiction by hoping for a better, more regulated tech future: “We need our smartphones, notifications screens and web browsers to be exoskeletons for our minds and interpersonal relationships that put our values, not our impulses, first. People’s time is valuable.”
Isn’t it about time we created responsible customer journeys? But let’s call them ‘people journeys’ instead, for a start.
Want to find out more about digital advertising and customer journey strategies? Make sure you sign up to the DSMLF meeting on 31st May and join your peers for a lively debate on the matter.