The Promise and Peril of Persuasive Technology

Hey everybody. So it is so good to see you all here today. The Habit Summit is like birthday and Christmas and New Year's and Hanukkah all rolled into one for me because I get to see so many of my friends and it is just terrific to see so many of you here today. This is the fourth time we have done this Habit Summit, first time in this new venue because we've had to expand and we have people here today who from over 21 countries. So welcome to all our out of town guests, welcome to everyone coming back to the Habit Summit who has been here before, and welcome to all our new guests. We are thrilled that you are here. So welcome, welcome, welcome to this year's Habit Summit. I think you are going to love today as you learn the lessons that we share today and as you want to share that with the world, please remember to use this hashtag Habit Summit so that we can get the message out around this great conference. And with that, we are going to kick off with our very first speaker, me. And that's a good thing because I've known this speaker my whole life. So a few years ago I wrote this book, how to Build Habit Forming Products. And it was an attempt to teach companies how to make products that people love as much as they love Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and WhatsApp and Slack. And the idea was I wrote the book to help companies build healthy habits. And I've since worked with many product teams and many folks who I didn't get to work with have read the book. And I've heard that the book has been applied at several companies. And I've worked with teams at Microsoft And Mozilla and PayPal and GE, many big companies as well as smaller firms, smaller products like MyFitnessPal and Product Hunt, which was acquired for hundreds of millions and tens of millions of dollars, respectfully, respectively. But today's talk is not about how to get people hooked. If you've been to the previous Habit Summit, you've already heard that talk. Today's talk is about something a little different. The talk I'd like to give this morning is about the role that we who build these products and we who use these products have in fixing some of the problems caused by these technologies. Because as Paul Varillo said, when you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck. He also said that every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technological progress. So when thinking about our industry, about consumer technology, about many of the types of companies I described in my book. It seems like we've had a lot of shipwrecks lately. Every other day something terrible is being done to us because of our technology. We're told that our time is being taken over, that our data is being hacked, and that our brains are being hijacked. So we're told. I certainly can't cover everything that's wrong with the Internet, nor do I claim to have all the answers. But I do think that there is room for hope. Hope, because believe it or not, things are getting better. And that's a big part of why all of us are here today. We want to make the world better through the products we build. When was the last time you heard of an actual real life shipwreck? Pretty rare. Even though there are more ships sailing the seas today than ever before. There are more airplanes in the sky and yet fewer accidents. There are fewer car fatalities, and would you believe, even less pollution per mile driven than ever before. We don't read about it often, but across many industries, things are improving. So I think it's time that we look at our own industry and we try to identify some of these shipwrecks and see if we can make things better in our industry too. So I'd like to tackle four shipwrecks. Again, these aren't all the problems we encounter online, but these are four common problems that I hear associated with personal technologies like the ones I described in my book. And these four shipwrecks include dark patterns, addictions, work time, all the time, and distractions. So let me explain. Let's start with dark patterns. One of the amazing things that we can do with the technology we build is that we can influence human behavior. You're going to hear a lot about how to influence user behavior today, and generally we can use that for good. I know the vast majority of you here, you want to build products to help people live happier, healthier, more productive, more connected lives. But this influence can also be used to hurt people. And so that's our first shipwreck. Let's start with acknowledging the fact that there are two kinds of influence online. There's persuasion and there's coercion. While persuasion is helping people do things they want to do and is certainly on the ethical side of the spectrum. Coercion is getting people to do things they don't want to do, which is an unethical business practice. So how do businesses get people to do things they don't want to do? Well, they trick them. So dark patterns are experiences that use coercion to get people to do things they don't realize that they'll later regret. Let me give you some examples. Many of the examples I'm about to show you, like this one here, come from a site called darkpatterns.org and it's a repository of coercive tactics like this beauty. This dark pattern is called the Roach Motel because once people get in, they never come out. Stamps.com made it easy to sign up for a one month free trial, but when the subscription continues after the trial period, it's incredibly difficult to to cancel. First, the user would need to search on the site to figure out how to cancel, then fill out a comment form and finally contact the help center via telephone during business hours. Right? Completely ridiculous. Calling to cancel an online service through the phone is like updating your Facebook status with a carrier pigeon. Makes no sense. So I know what you're thinking. This is a particularly horrible example, and that you'd never do that. But what about this example? This is essentially the same trick, but maybe a little bit less bad. Let's play a little game today. Let's play Find the unsubscribe button. Anybody see it? There it is, right? You couldn't find it unless you were really looking for it. Because Amazon has used visual contrast to get people to not do the thing they don't want them to do. Unsubscribe. And many of us here are pretty tech savvy. Maybe you found the unsubscribe button, but many of our users can't. I mean, I recently helped my father with a new iPhone and, and I was looking through his email account and it was just stuffed with spam that he couldn't figure out how to unsubscribe to. Here's another example of a coercive tactic. This dark pattern is called the sneak into the basket technique. And here livenation.com had an unticked checkbox at the end of their checkout flow that snuck a paid subscription to Rolling Stone magazine if this box was not checked. So clearly, this is an example of coercion, because it's unlikely the user would buy the subscription if they knew that what the designer knew that a subscription was being snuck into their checkout basket. Dark patterns rely on consumers knowing less than the maker. Okay, so this next example still sends shivers down my spine. Do you remember this one? Anybody remember this from the New York Times? So the New York Times thought it would be a good idea to make these dials jitter, giving the impression that There was new data coming in in real time that was changing the results of the presidential election. However, in reality, the only data making these dials move was the movement of the user's laptop. So this is an example of the inappropriate use of variability. Now, if you've read my book or you attended the workshops yesterday, you've heard how much I love variable rewards and the power of variable rewards to keep people engaged. But in this case, I thought it was an abuse of that power because there's no way people would have guessed that what was really moving these dials had nothing to do with the results of the election. And it illustrates a bigger point about the use of variability. Variability isn't something that we slather on to our product like so much peanut butter. It has to fundamentally give people what they want. It has to provide relief, not more worry and anxiety, like I think this example does. Finally, here's another example of coercion. It's called the viral Oops. Now, unlike viral loops, which are actions that users take in the normal course of using a product to invite new members, viral oops rely on the user messing up. A viral oops occurs when the user unintentionally invites other people, but when they look back and try and figure out what happened, they blame themselves when it was really the product's design. In the case of Kim Kardashian, Hollywood I know, bear with me, this is my job. This is what I do for a living. In the case of this game, it begins innocently enough. The Kim Kardashian game is a classic role playing game where players take the part of an up and coming Hollywood celebrity determined to climb up to a list status. Moving through these levels requires completing all kinds of tasks like posing for magazines and going on dates and following people on this in game version of Twitter. Now that in game version of Twitter is how the viral Oops works. So while you're using this in game version of Twitter, which comes with hashtags and followers, the fake Twitter is meant to look as much like real Twitter as possible. To get the player going. The app offers points for sharing news on the in game version of Twitter until suddenly there's a bit of a fake out here. When the user thinks that they're posting to the in game version of Twitter, but really they're posting to the real world version of Twitter and and this is an easy mistake to make and hundreds of thousands of people inadvertently tweeted a message to their real life Twitter friends as opposed to the in game version one of those people was someone at the Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Water Management who sent out this tweet announcing that they were now a C list celebrity. So maybe this explains why we have so much glitter in our tap water. So the tweet was quickly deleted, which shows indicates to us that this was another case of coercion. What happened was not what the user wanted. So what do we do about dark patterns? What's the solution to this particular shipwreck? The good news is that bad news travels fast and that these shady characters tend to get found out and the companies change their ways. Many of the examples I just showed you, Live Nation, Stamps.com, even the Kardashian game, have been publicly shamed to change. But of course we shouldn't wait to be shamed by the public. We can fix coercion another way by not relying on the user knowing less than us. You know, I think that over the past few years, the product design community hasn't been able to put our finger on what we won't do. When it comes to your boss asking you to design something that feels kind of shady, what do you say is the reason why you don't want to design that particular user Interface? When the VCs are breathing down our necks, what line won't we cross? I haven't heard a great answer. So what I think we need is some kind of moral code, some kind of answer to this question that prevents coercion. And I think the antidote is transparency. Here's my take at the answer. We need to hold ourselves accountable to not design products that require the user to be uninformed about what's going to happen next. That is to say, we should stand up to bosses that ask us to implement dark patterns by letting them know that it's unethical to get users to do something they wouldn't do if they knew everything that we know. But your boss might ask, well, how do we know what the user knows? Are we supposed to be some kind of mind readers? How could we possibly get into users heads? Well, I would submit that we know exactly how to get into users heads. We've been doing it for years. We test it, right? If whenever we felt queasiness about doing something unethical, we just tested the experience, this problem would essentially go away. Spending a few bucks on a site like usertesting.com or calling up a few customers and asking them what do you expect to happen next in this interaction can tell us when our design is persuasive. Versus coercive testing with a representative sample. The same way we test any new feature will give us important answers and keep us on the right ethical track and prevent coercion. Okay, what about addiction? This is the next shipwreck and it's a complaint I hear about technology quite often and it's something that I have a lot of thoughts to and some potential solutions for. However, Gabe Zickerman is speaking later this afternoon and he spent even more time and effort thinking about solutions to the problem of addiction. So I don't want to steal his thunder. I'm going to let him answer some of the questions around addiction later this afternoon. So stick around for that. But what I do want to talk about today is this other problem I hear quite a bit, which is that many people tell me that they want to use technology less often, but they can't. Not because they're addicted, but because their jobs won't let them. That the demands of their clients and their bosses keep them tethered to tech all day and all night. So the question is, how did we let our 9-5s become 24 7s? And who is responsible for this particular shipwreck? Let's explore the real cause in 2012, Leslie Perlow, a researcher at Harvard, wanted to study the role that technology plays in the workplace. She wanted to know if companies with an always on culture were actually better off. So she looked for a company where employees were glued to their devices. And she found that company when she found a partner working at the Boston Consulting Group. Now the BCG is one of the most prestigious consulting firms in the world. They specialize in strategy and large corporate reorganizations and they're known for their hard driving culture. I should know. It was actually my first job out of college was working at bcg and let me tell you, I the expectation was to be always on all the time. It was the epitome of a 24, 7 work culture. Now BCG is organized into small case teams of 7 to 10 people and PERLO wanted to run a very simple experiment. She wanted to know what would happen if everyone on the case team got just one night off per week from their technology. One night with no emails, no technology requests of any kind. Pretty simple experiment. So she asked the BCG partner if she could work with just one case team. The partner looked at her and said, absolutely not. There's no way I'm going to let you onto my case team, but why don't you have another partner's case team? So that's what she did she took this other partner's case team. She sat down with the team and the first thing that she asked the team was whether everyone wanted one night off per week. And the answer was unanimously yes. Every single person on that team wanted to have one night off to go see their kids basketball game, to have a nice dinner with their significant other, or just to go to the gym and take some time off. Everybody wanted it. But then she asked, well, do you think we can accomplish this goal? Can we give everyone one night off from technology per week? And the answer was a unanimous no. There's no way we could do that here. Our clients demand us to be available. What if something terrible happens? But all of these excuses really boil down to the culture that the standard excuse was that that's just not what we do here. That's just not the standard way of doing things. To which Perlow gave them a new challenge. He said, look, BCG is known for your corporate reorganizations. Imagine that this isn't a challenge that you're taking on for this team. Imagine if there was a client that came to you and said, how could we structure the team so that everybody gets one night off per week. The team accepted the challenge and what they found was that the fix was actually pretty obvious. The fix was open communication that when teams were asked how could we do this? What would it take to give everyone one night off a week? They talked about the problem openly and figured out how to accomplish the goal. And the solutions included some pretty obvious things like implementing email and phone off hours, coverage by other team members during those times and systems to keep each other accountable so that when someone was online when they shouldn't be, they were gently reminded that they were breaking a rule that the team had agreed to. But what Perlow found was most important was the role that company leadership took. That when the boss stuck to the one night off policy, it gave permission for everyone else to do the same. But if employees turn off their tech, didn't the business results suffer? Well, in fact, they didn't. The business results improved because study after study shows that companies benefit from changing their always on culture, not only in retaining their employees, but but serving customers better and increasing efficiency. In addition to the Boston Consulting Group, several other companies like Intel, Altos, Daimler and others have increased worker productivity by changing their tech culture. At BCG, for example, teams that implemented this strategy reported a 55% increase in the likelihood that the team was doing everything that they could to be more efficient. And team members reported a similar 74% greater likelihood of staying at BCG for the long term. The lesson here is that culture is like water. It flows down the organization and it's just as much of a habit as the products that we build. Company leadership sets the example for what is expected. And if people at the top are constantly connected, people see that and act accordingly. But it doesn't have to be this way. Companies, clients and employees all benefit from drawing boundaries. But the tech won't do it for us. Company leadership needs to decide to make it a priority. And as workers, frankly, it's our fault if we continue to work for companies who demand more than we're willing to give in terms of our time and our attention. For example, when I worked at BCG before these changes were made, one day I sat down and tracked all my hours and tried to figure out what my effective hourly rate was. And. And I figured out that I was making just a little bit more than I used to make working at a burrito joint as a teenager. And if that's okay with you, terrific. That's great. However, if you're not willing to make those trade offs, then perhaps we shouldn't blame the tech, perhaps we should blame the career we've chosen and maybe look for other professions or other workplaces where our time is more respected. And again, if you're in company leadership, the data shows it's a net positive if you give employees time to disconnect. Let me give you an example. Take Slack, the fastest growing enterprise product in history. It's ironic that Slack is this product that many people think tethers them to their workplace. But in fact Slack itself, the company doesn't have that problem. Here's my friend Amir who works at Slack at company headquarters. And Amir tells me that the company is so serious and about creating a culture where people work hard at work and then go home and disconnect, that they literally write it on their walls. That's how seriously they take this. Because Stuart Butterfield, the CEO, makes sure everyone in the company knows that this is how the company works. He respects people's after hours and weekends and that permeates throughout the organization. It is a big company. No, no, at Slack, to bother people outside of working hours. Again, the problem isn't the tech, the problem is the culture. And the culture can change. The last shipwreck example I want to talk about is one that many of us face and it's a problem of general tech distraction. Now this is a problem that I personally have experienced quite a bit at times. I find it very hard to focus. Not because I'm addicted or because my company culture expects it of me. I work for myself. I but because it's just so fun. I like reading the news and I like watching YouTube videos and scrolling Reddit and Twitter, even when I know that sometimes I should be doing something else. And I think this is another potential shipwreck. At least we can take some comfort in knowing that this is not a new problem. The ancient Greek philosopher Socrates and Aristotle debated the nature of Akrasia acting against one's better judgments. And frankly, as the ancient Greeks prove, humans have been struggling with distraction for a very long time, well before Facebook and YouTube. Ekrasia is why we do things we shouldn't do in the first place. But just as we wouldn't blame the baker for making such delicious treats, we can't blame tech makers for making their products so good we want to use them. Of course that's what tech companies will do. And frankly, do we want it any other way? Products getting better isn't necessarily a problem. It's progress. We want our technologies to get better just as we want food to be delicious, just like at the bakery. The fact that the tech keeps getting better and more enticing and potentially distracting is not the customer's fault, but it is their responsibility. So what do we do about it? How do we manage this tech distraction? Well, I think we're going to do the same thing that we have always done. When we've identified negative aspects of a product, we will adapt and we will adopt. Remember Paul Varillo's quote that I showed you earlier that when you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck? Well, why don't we see that many actual real life shipwrecks anymore? Why are planes and cars safer than ever before? How have other industries fixed so many problems with their products? Here's how people adapted their behaviors and at the same time we adopted new technological fixes. Take car fatalities for example, which are at an all time low per mile driven. The adapted behavior is the seat belt and the adopted technology is the airbag and many other technologies that make driving safer than ever. And we're going to do the same thing when it comes to the problems in our industry. Let's start with how we're going to adapt to new behaviors. Who knows what fubbing is? Has everyone heard this term fubbing? Right, Fubbing. It's phone snubbing. It's what you see happening in this picture. This is super annoying. You're with some friends, you're having a nice meal and someone thinks it's a great time to take out their phone and start messing around on Facebook or something. I'm sure we've all experienced this, right? Well, what do you do? This person is clearly distracted and the whole group suffers for it. The solution, I think is to make this no longer socially acceptable. We need to change our manners and our norms. Sort of like the way everyone smoked socially 30 years ago, but today smoking rates in the United States are in the low single digit percentages. Well, why is that? Because it became socially unacceptable to do so. Of course there were laws passed. But that doesn't explain why we don't see ashtrays in people's private homes where it's perfectly legal to smoke as much as you want. When I was growing up, I remember my parents had ashtrays all over our house even though they never smoked. Because the accepted custom was that when someone came over the they just expected to be able to smoke in your house. And we wouldn't have dreamed to ask them to go outside if they wanted to smoke the way we do today. Well, I think that we can adapt the same exact rule for our technology used in social settings. Now, most people know that fubbing is for jerks. And if you didn't know that, well, now you know. But what about those people who haven't gotten the message when someone does this to you, there's no need to call them out rudely. If their face is planted to their screen. All you need to do is ask them a very simple question which will get them to rejoin the conversation. And that question is, is everything okay? That's it. Because for all you know, there might actually be some kind of emergency they're handling. But by asking them this question of hey, is everything okay? Either they'll get up and take care of that emergency if that's the case, or they'll rejoin the conversation. You know, the interesting thing here is that I think there's a bit of a generational divide, that folks who have had access to these technologies for the longest, they actually don't suffer from this problem. And here's some of the evidence that I've seen. You know, when I teach my class at Stanford and I work with 20 somethings, they don't do this as much. At least from my anecdotal evidence. Even when I see them interacting with each other, they don't fub each other. It's when I go into a company and I'm sitting with a bunch of designers and executives, it's usually the highest paid person in the room that decides it's a good time to mess around on their phone. And I think part of it is this generational divide that people who have had these technologies the longest have already begun to adapt their behavior so they don't suffer from some of these negative consequences. And of course, all of us can do the same. So what about the technologies we use when no one's around? Here are some more ways that we can adapt our behaviors when it comes to the use of our technology to make it less distracting. Did you know that 2/3 of people never adjust their notification settings? That's crazy. Please, we need to take 15 minutes and make sure that only the apps we authorize to interrupt us can do so and that we turn the rest off. For the love of God, please don't sleep with your cell phone. Some 75% of Americans charge their phones in their bedroom, and I think that's a big mistake. You'll get more sleep, you'll have more sex if you buy an alarm clock. That's what they're for. Uninstall the apps that distract you throughout your day. So this is what I did with Twitter and Facebook. I love Twitter and Facebook, but I only use them on my browser when I'm at my desk. If you're not willing to uninstall an app, then perhaps log out between use sessions and and bury the app in a folder so that it's a little bit harder to find so that you won't use it habitually. We want to add a little bit of friction to these behaviors that we want to do a little less often. Now, these are very simple tactics that we can use and I promise will have a huge impact on the way you use these products. So those are the few of the ways that we can adapt our behaviors to put technology in its place and cure the shipwreck of technological distraction. But how about how do we adopt new technologies to fix this? There's a burgeoning industry of new products and services that I call attention retention devices, and I want to show you a few examples. Here are two free chrome extensions that you can use, anyone can use for free. The one on the left is called the Facebook News Feed Eradicator, and it does exactly what it says. So when I check Facebook, I don't see the newsfeed. It doesn't serve me, so I don't want to see it. Instead, I see this nice little inspirational quote. I still use Facebook, but when I use it, I go to a friend's page so that I can see what's happening with them instead of seeing this algorithmic feed that I know is designed to keep me coming back. The one on the right is a Chrome extension called Space, which asks you to be mindful for just a couple seconds before visiting a particularly distracting website like Reddit, for example. Here's another example. When Most people see YouTube, it looks like this. And for those of you who took the workshop yesterday or who read my book, you know that all those things on the right are external triggers. They prompt you to action. They want you to do something. Well, I use a chrome extension called DF YouTube, which stands for distraction free YouTube that scrubs out a lot of those external triggers so you don't see any of those distracting videos, you don't see any of those ads so that I can focus on just that video I want to watch at that time. Here are some more attention retention tools for the mobile interface apps like Freedom that turn off the Internet during set periods of the day. Pocket Points that rewards you for staying off your phone when you need to focus. Or a very simple solution that we use in our home. We bought an outlet timer to turn off the Internet router every day at 10pm Again, the goal here is to give us a bit of mindfulness about what we're doing so that we're not using these products mindlessly. These are just a few examples, and I'm sure you can think of many other ways to manage distraction. Now, some folks will tell you that technology is hijacking your brain or that it's irresistible. And I think that that is the worst thing that you can believe. Why? Because thinking this way is dangerous. Did you know that drug addicts and alcoholics who believe they are powerless to resist a drug are several times more likely to relapse? That in fact, a 2015 study published in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs found that individuals who believed they were powerless to fight their cravings were much more likely to drink again. In fact, get this. Beliefs of powerlessness determined whether someone would relapse after treatment as much as the level of physical dependency itself. Now think about this for a minute. For alcoholics, their beliefs were as much of a factor as the physical dependency itself. And that's for alcoholics. What does that say about our ability to resist behaviors that have no physical dependency? Remember, we're not freebasing Facebook and injecting Instagram here, right? So the lesson here is that we can't believe that we are powerless, that we're only powerless if we think we are. Instead, we should ask ourselves a simple question. When it comes to distractions of all sorts, remember, not just technologies as distractions, but there's all sorts of distractions out there. The average American spends five hours watching television a day. So the simple question is, is this technology serving me, or am I serving it? When we open ourselves up to the answers that flow from this question, we can find ways to put technology in its place. Again, it's not about implementing any one specific solution that I've discussed today. I'm sure you can come up with even better solutions. The idea is to remember that we are not powerless. We are in control and we can do something. Today, I've discussed four technology shipwrecks. Now, I haven't even touched the surface of many of the problems that technology creates. There are many others. But to be fair, I also haven't given any airtime to all the blessings that these technologies have brought us. It's easy to forget how magical these inventions are and how much better our lives are for them. But I hope I've given you a glimpse at something that Kevin Kelly, the founder of Wired magazine, once told me, which is that 99% of both our problems and solutions come from technology. And that's very true and very exciting, because what this means is that there is an opportunity to improve our lives through new discoveries and new inventions. Because this means that there are opportunities to improve our lives through these new discoveries, and that the same way that we make ships and airplanes and cars safer will be the same way that we make the next generation of technology better for us all. And you, my friends, play a critical role. There has never been a better time to have a bigger impact. The products and services that you're making can touch more lives than ever before. Never have smart product designers like you had more power than you do today. The future is yours now. Make it the future that you want to see. Thank you.