Cliff Kuang, Author, User Friendly; UX Designer


Brainstorm Design 2023: Problem Solving At Massive Scale Future 

Conferences

Cliff Kwang is a user experience designer. He is an award winning journalist and he is author of the fantastic book, user friendly. How the hidden rules of design are changing the way we live, work and play. Please welcome Cliff Kwong. All right. Uh Thank you for having me. Um I'm going to talk a little bit about um some things I'm working on now. Um And some things I'm thinking about in the, in the wake of the book that I wrote that Clay mentioned. Um So I'll just start at the beginning um in the nearly 15 years since the iphone was announced, technology has become embedded um in almost every second of every day, not just in the phones and devices in our lives, but in the services and information, those devices deliver, whether you're booking a car ride across town or accessing the information you need to deliver, let's say patient care uh in an enterprise setting. So the point is that computers aren't just one device, they are quite literally the environment we live in and machines aren't just tools anymore. Uh They're partners in the way we go about our daily lives. Uh and today life is one ongoing human machine interaction. And so the question now we all have to answer is whether we realize it or not, how do you pair machines and people? What is the proper relationship between a machine and a person? Um And in today's talk, I want to give you a simple framework for what you might need to build, to create a healthy relationship, both to the world and to the machines around you. Um And I'll start in a moment about 40 years ago which most of you probably have heard of. Uh but perhaps don't know much about. Um And this is a picture of Three Mile Island which is a little spit of land in Pennsylvania, not far from New York City, probably about, I would say 90 minutes. Um And it was put simply the worst design disaster in American history, I would argue and if it began with something as banal as a clog in the basement, and now the maintenance crew at Three Mile Island actually, uh they were prepared for just an occurrence. Um You know, the uh a nuclear power plant is just this complex system of heating and cooling lines which always needed vigilance. They always needed to be taken care of and stewarded and just monitored constantly, right? But as the reactor went through a routine shutdown so that the problem could be isolated. A critical thing went wrong. The foreman in charge of the plant needed to flip a critical valve to the closed position to make sure that reactor system wasn't leaking water, um which was vital to keep the reactor cool enough to manage. But when the foreman flipped that switch, the switch lied to him, a light went on, presumably saying the valve has been closed just as you asked, but the light actually wasn't wired, right. So instead of being wired to light up when the valve was actually closed, it was wired to light up when the switch was flipped. So to put it another way, it marks intent rather than effect, right? And it didn't reflect whether that intent ie closed. This valve had actually happened in the real world where it actually mattered, right? So the feedback that that machine had offered had been taken for granted and badly designed to nearly catastrophic effect. And unbeknownst to anyone, the water cooling, that reactor core was escaping in a column of steam like a tea kettle with the, with the lid open. Um and three Mile island, I think is important because it signals just how much our relationship between man and machine depends on feedback, right? This idea that the machine is communi you are communicating with the machine, the machine is communicating with you and there is a kind of balletic sequence between those two things. Um And that's that sequence is just what we call feedback or feedback loops. Now, the most familiar delivery mechanism for feedback loops is the button, right? You want to do something, let's say you want to summon an Uber, you push a button, the button changes color you, then you get a message saying the cars on the way, then the car arrives. That's a feedback loop signal, input feedback reaction. Really that simple, right? But the point I want to make is that almost everything you appreciate about a product that's well designed and almost everything you hate about products that aren't comes down to feedback loops. How are they responding to me? How are they talking to me? How are they communicating my intent? Communicating the idea that they've understood my intent and what are they doing with that intent? And that notion of clear feedback that you can understand, it sits at the heart of every interaction you have on your phone. The feedback that give that a product gives you is the difference between understanding how something works and being mystified as to why it's so confusing and rethinking the way how we tell computers what to do. And the millions of little nuances of how it gives feedback in response to us is really what set us on the path of what I call the user friendly world, right? A world filled with technology from ease of use. We take so much for granted. The computers don't even come with instruction manuals anymore. I mean, just think about that if you are like me um you know, of an age where you remember VCR remotes and like VCR manuals, all these kinds of things. This is one of the greatest cultural accomplishments. I would argue the last 20 years, the fact that none of those things obtain anymore, right? You were expected to unwrap some of the most advanced technology, human beings have ever created and be able to use it without anybody telling you how now feedback even has the power to mold how you feel about a product, right? And a good example is Instagram stories. So when Instagram launched in 2010, it wasn't about putting up the perfect image of the perfect life, even though it became that pretty soon, it was actually about making your photos just good enough in the age of really bad camera phones that you didn't feel embarrassed sharing pictures of whoever, whatever you might be doing in the moment, right? But by 2016, 6 years after Instagram was founded, um they noticed that people were starting to be using it less and less. And it turns out that as cameras were getting better and as the ecosystem of amazing photographers on Instagram started growing, the bar was getting higher and higher and higher for what counted as good content on Instagram. And so in other words, people were becoming so self conscious about posting something good enough that they weren't posting as much content as they used to, which obviously is a mortal threat to Facebook. Right? And this is a massive problem for them. Um And so they copied, of course, the disappearing post of Snapchat. Um And the reason why is that because the very fact that they disappeared and the fact that the only way to respond was private message and the very fact that there was no public likes change the feedback a user might get from their post. And it made posting feel both less precious and also less loaded with meaning, right? In other words, it it lowered the barrier of what a post itself meant, right? And that simple shift, rethinking the types of feedback you could get from a post is what saved, Instagram. It completely halted the growth of Snapchat and revived the amount of engagement they were seeing and made the product ephemeral again instead of feeling like a 21st century art gallery. Now, designing feedback is about taking into account those four basic components that I mentioned, right? So a trigger which is something like looking like a need state. You have like writing, getting a right home or finding a new song to listen to an input, which is the act of pushing a button or engaging with the product that you found um the feedback, which is how the product surface shows you that something's been done and the reaction which is how you respond in kind, right? So feedback loops have the power not just to change the way we feel about the product as I hope to show you with that Instagram example, but how much we're willing to use it and they also have the power to shape the world around us as well. Um And I want to give you a few examples of how that works. Um to give you some inspiration about exactly how big the effect of something as simple as a feedback loop can be. So just to start with a thought experiment, um whether or not we understand them or not feedback loops, they shape the way we live, right? And the lack of feedback loops shapes us as well because it shapes our imaginations about what we can affect. So let's do a little thought experiment. Um We as a species began emitting carbon into the atmosphere about 100 years ago. Um But nothing seemed to happen, right? Nothing, not the next day. Um Not 10 years after that, not even 50 years later when, um you know, these little towns that popped up along the railroads become filled, became filled with cars like the Ford model. A now imagine if for a second, everything had been the same. But if instead that carbon that we've been releasing in the air, turned the sky green, everything was the same. Let's suspend the laws of physics and just imagine everything was the same, but the sky was getting greener all the time. So do you think if that simple change had happened, even if nothing else is different, that we would have spent the last 50 years arguing about whether or not climate change was real or do you think that we would have felt compelled to act on it even if we didn't know what the effects were going to be yet? Now, climate change is a good example of climate of feedback that we humans just aren't wired to understand because the time scales are too long, the system is too complex. Um And that example applies more generally, right? Um I want to suggest then a new framing about what technology does in our lives when it works well. Um New technology full stop just improves the feedback we can get how fast we can get it and it allows us to act on new types of information. Um So you can consider something like buyer seller feedback, right? Ebay was unknown. In fact, it was actually struggling before they introduced this feature where buyer and seller could rate each other just creating a feedback loop that actually engendered trust and made trust manifest in the system. And now that simple idea transformed the online buying economy such that we're we can we're willing to stay in the homes of a stranger even now, right? And the smartphone, for example, is the most powerful instrument of feedback that's ever been created. Thanks to the fact that it twins information and action in 11 interface and the entire entirety of social media itself is based on new feedback loops for social affirmation, right? I see. And I work on a lot of new innovative products. Um I would say almost all of them ultimately rest on bringing new feedback to the market. And when feedback loops, we need simply don't exist, we act as if there's no consequences to our actions. But of course, we know there are now, here's an example. Um You know, you don't know this but your electric, your electricity comes from all kinds of different places on a given day. Um Sometimes it might be coming from a coal fired power plant, other times it might be coming from a windmill. It depends on the load on the grid and factors like whether or not it's sunny or cloudy. Um So in Switzerland, a company is building a new carbon aware internet protocol, right? And the idea is to measure where it's sunniest and route internet traffic through those areas. Thus creating an economic incentive to actually make that, make that entire network more green, right? Because it increases demand to those green energy power stations, it increases the incentives for things to be built along those paths. And the idea is that if you can build this feedback driven energy route, you can incentivize faster development of green energy without any kind of centralized planning. Um Next is an example of a friend of mine who was stationed in Mosul in Iraq for a year who was an A I engineer for the United States, United Nations. Um to which you might ask, what is the United Nations A I engineer for? Well, my friend's job was actually to figure out safe pas routes for refugees, fleeing ISIS um as it took over Mosul. Um And this is harder than it seems, right. This is a desert. Um There are literally infinite numbers of paths you can take out of a city like Mosul. Um And if you're the UN, you don't know exactly where to support people or where they're going to go. But they did have cell phone data and they use that to analyze the calls being made from Mosul to other areas. And this is where it gets interesting by observing the calls that various people made on their cell phones and monitoring where those cell phones eventually ended up as they left, my friend could start predicting where people were going to go based on their phone calls. And once they knew that prediction, they would leave supplies on that route. And what would happen when those supplies would be left on the route is that people would tell other people, hey, you can go here and so they would, they would create, they would leave more supplies on that route. And eventually what happened is like this is a self reinforcing feedback loop and eventually you could have safety in numbers. So that's how you create a safe escape route from zero when there's literally infinite possibilities with just a feedback loop, right? So I'm going to skip ahead because I'm running a little bit at a time. But I want to offer you an example of personal action, right? To give you a sense of what you as a single individual might accomplish, right? This woman here, her name is Madeline Nonda. She was a TV reporter based in Douala Cameroon. She often covered the the floods that had been, become more and more common in her area in the last several years. Um And those floods were ruinous. They were catas catastrophic to everyday life, right? They prevented people from being able to go to school, to go to work. Um But Nendo would report on those floods and, and she didn't know what caused them, right? But what she figured out was basically that in 2015, there was a dam that was built and vast swaths of the forest have been cleared to make way for that dam, basically Uprooting the the the the webbing that kept all that soil in place. And so when rains would come, they would wash the soil away and then you would get flooding, right? But a lot of that logging was illegal because the people that would hear about a new development would say like, hey, I can pretend that I have a permit too and I can go deforest this land without anybody ever raising any, any issues, right? But what she did was actually what she realizes is that if I, if I hook up an S MS system to satellite monitoring of forest cover, then I can allow people to sign up for subscriptions to tiny little areas of forest, right? As little as 20 m uh on on a side. And that would create this new feedback loop where people at scale, like people like forest rangers or indigenous people could actually monitor uh in a distributed way the rain forest that they lived on. So they could basically say, hey, there's something happening here, we should go check that out, right. And what would happen was they actually by doing so they actually decreased the chances that any given part of this area would get deforested by an astounding 30% within just a couple of years, right? This is just a feedback with just a text message and just the ability to just that people have to self direct and go to the site for something where help is needed. Right. So Maddie's work, so I want to highlight is about this relationship between machines that give human capabilities and insights that the other would, wouldn't have um together with the tools to act on that insight. Um And the point is that those tools though have to be designed, right. Right. We have to put the hand the tools in the hands of the people at the right time in the right place with the wherewithal to make the right decision. Um And of course, Maddie's work is a small example, but I do think that there's reason to hope um because we can't solve the problems that face us either in our lives, in our workplaces, in our societies without creating new feedback loops. And in fact, we already are, but we still need to do more and we need to see those problems we face for what they are, which is feedback loops that need to be designed so that we can all know whether the things we do every day are, in fact leading to the world that we actually hope to create. Um I'll just leave you with five seconds uh with just like a very brief worksheet that I actually take students through sometimes to actually show how this actually works in print practice. You're free to take a picture and sort of see how this works for you. I just gave a little quick example of how I just, you know, just a very quick example of showing how you actually can build feedback loops into this notion of problem identification. Um And so that's my talk. I hope uh I hope you're able to make use of it. Thank you for having me.