On The Hook

In our rush to capture users’ attention and custom, Jamie Stantonian asks if we’re neglecting our ethical responsibility to put their interests and voices first

- Kym Winters

In the past few decades the user experience profession has taken on an increasingly important role in business, evolving from a ‘nice to have’ to being recognised as an essential competitive advantage. Today, in training our clients to improve their UX maturity, we’re helping them metamorphose into their final form: the ‘user-driven corporation’ – Jacob Nielsen’s term to describe a business that’s absolutely centred on user research to drive its overall direction. This means looking to understand the real problems people face and using these insights to create products and services that address them – perhaps helping people’s lives in the process.

But if we step back and reflect on what this looks like to those less invested in the outcome, we might see things differently. Because, to an outsider, the idea of vast corporate entities using applied behavioural science to sculpt our habits and guide our decisions sounds like something from a William Gibson novel.

As smartphones, smart homes and other interactive technologies become ever more central to the human experience, we bear an enormous responsibility to get this right. But there’s a real danger that when our enthusiasm around technical possibilities combines with our unending quest to prove the ROI of experience design, we end up exploiting rather than advocating for users. Already we’re starting to earn a somewhat sordid reputation as mesmerists whose job is addicting people to apps and swindling them into subscription services. While a magician guides people’s attention and influences their behaviour for entertainment, we do so to meet the KPIs of our clients or for the sake of adding another case study to our portfolios.