Is it possible to design an interface for more responsible decisions?

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Among this year’s Ig Nobel Prize winners is a study showing that wealthy people are more likely to steal candy from children.

As always, this could be dismissed as just another amusing scientific experiment, but the researchers’ assumptions are intriguing.

“The general pattern seems to be that with wealth and rising power, you become less engaged with the needs of others and less burdened by the needs of social relationships,” said Dr. Paul Piff, a social psychologist at the University of California, Irvine. “Taking candy from children might be the least of our worries but it’s emblematic of the tendency to prioritise one’s own needs over those of others.”

This study itself has its critics, but I was interested in something else — if we assume that this kind of socially detached behavior truly exists among different people, and that there is an asymmetry of control beyond social class, is it possible to design a system (for me, this is a digital interface) in such a way as to mitigate decisions made under the influence of this detachment?

Formulating the hypothesis

The premise itself can be reformulated as follows: “The less a person depends on those around them and the greater their sense of control, the easier it is for an interface to allow them to ignore the interests of others.”

And now, based on this premise, I’ll try to propose solutions for situations where reducing social distance might be helpful. For example, these could be situations in which a user can:

  • take a resource from another user;
  • claim someone else’s slot;
  • undo another person’s action;
  • present a user with a fait accompli;
  • gain an advantage at another user’s expense.

What can a specialist designing system behavior do in such a situation to reduce the collective costs?

The first thing needed here is to reveal the “invisible other.” Typical interface behavior follows the “action → result” pattern, but sometimes it’s helpful to change it to “action → who will be affected by the consequences, and what those consequences will be → result.”

For example, instead of the simple action “Reschedule meeting,” you could use: “Reschedule the meeting for 6:00 p.m. For four participants, this will change the meeting time.”

This is an attempt to engage empathy or an assessment of the broader consequences and to bring the user back from the realm of formal actions to a thoughtful decision-making process that takes into account all costs — and, above all, how the decision will affect others.

A caveat is worth adding here. It’s important that the phrasing “For four participants, this will change the meeting time” doesn’t turn into a tool for manipulation: “Are you really sure you want to ruin the day for four colleagues?” But I’ll leave “confirmshaming,” like any practice involving dark patterns, outside the scope of this discussion.

That said, I understand that in each specific case, using this approach may not be effective, because it’s easy for a user to ignore the additional information. But the impact of this approach on a large scale can be statistically significant.

In a sense, the premises I’m putting forward regarding the user’s return to the social sphere are similar to another experiment that showed that social engagement changes our behavior.

One example is the experiment involving eyes and a payment box (“Cues of being watched enhance cooperation in a real-world setting,” 2006). When a picture of a pair of eyes looking directly at the viewer was hung in an office where people could help themselves to coffee and pay for it themselves, people began paying, on average, 2.76 times more. A similar experiment cut bicycle theft by 62% through the placement of a poster.

Interface principles

When we want to improve the quality of the decisions we make and ensure that they are made more consciously, we may need to move away from the classic approach of optimizing speed and reducing steps, which designers have championed for many decades.

Broadly speaking, the goal is to shift the focus from optimizing actions to optimizing the quality of decisions and the cost of those decisions, taking externalities into account. This may be particularly relevant for the interfaces of government systems and internal organizational interfaces that are linked to complex, multifaceted processes, where it is impossible to intuitively grasp the cumulative impact of a routine operation on other processes.

I would suggest highlighting two key principles that deserve attention.

Friction — the deliberate creation of interface points that slow down decision-making when those decisions affect other people. In essence, I propose purposefully directing the user’s attention to the potential consequences of their actions.

Visibility of Consequence — making the expected consequences noticeable and obvious.

Kahneman described one of the errors of judgment as “What you see is all there is”; in other words, what a person does not see at the moment of decision-making may, with a certain probability, not be taken into account. And if a designer focuses in advance on the importance of information about the consequences of the user’s actions and displays them, then such an interface will potentially influence the quality of decisions.

Conclusion

Here, I’ve tried to articulate the idea that an interface can be built not only around behavioral metrics but also with a focus on the quality of decision-making. To create such interfaces, we must take into account the nuances of user psychology, and one of these nuances is that by bridging the gap between the user and an understanding of the consequences of their decisions, we can foster more responsible decision-making. To achieve this, we need to incorporate the principles of Friction and Visibility of Consequence into the design process.

By and large, all the ideas I’ve outlined are theoretical and require practical testing, but I hope they resonate with designers and developers who create systems optimized for the quality of decision-making.

Sources:

Is it possible to design an interface for more responsible decisions? was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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