Recently, I decided to buy Monopoly to play with my son. What I was sure would be a quick decision on Amazon
turned into a learning experience for both of us. Did you know there
are 2,767 versions of Monopoly on the market and that the original
version is not the easiest to find? My attempt at an impulsive purchase
turned into a draining, in-depth research and decision-making exercise.
It’s undebatable that technology has made our lives more convenient,
but it has also subjected us to a tyranny of choice. Thanks to the
Internet, I can have anything I want delivered to my door for dinner.
The same goes for shopping, finding information, playing games, or
choosing a movie to watch. The Internet has given us an abundance of
choice and an abundance of information to inform those choices. The end
result is that our lives are burdened with approximately 35,000 decisions a day.
The irony of creating so much choice for ourselves is that—from our
health and diet to finances and fitness—people make bad decisions every
day. Little ones that add up over time and, sometimes, big ones that
ruin their lives. And even more importantly, people can suffer real
consequences from the well-documented phenomenon of decision fatigue:
the more things we decide over the course of a day, the lesser ability
we have to make effective decisions. It’s why, for example, prisoners
are less likely to receive parole if their case is heard later in the
day.
Technology has revolutionized the way we live our lives and do
business, but it has done a terrible job reducing the stress of so many
decisions. Industry by industry, great digital design has eliminated
middlemen from the economy and put users in control, making it fast and
easy for us to determine what we want and purchase it directly, whether
on a computer or over a phone. Now, with unlimited opportunities for
decision-making, we have essentially made ourselves the middlemen in our
own lives.
The enjoyment, and even fetishization, of the beautifully designed
experiences we rely on to make these decisions has distracted us from
our original goal of simplifying our lives. We’ve forgotten that the
ultimate purpose of an interface is to make things simpler. In the
future, the best interface will be no interface at all and the best
decisions will be made without me having to make them (but according to
my preferences and goals).
And in a future where brands compete and survive based on the quality
of automated services, today’s manually decided experiences will seem
as obsolete as yesterday’s do to us now.
Design That's One Step Ahead of You
The next big breakthrough in design and technology will be the
creation of products, services, and experiences that eliminate the
needless choices from our lives and make ones on our behalf, freeing us
up for the ones we really care about: Anticipatory design.
Conventional design assumes that the designer is creating
something—whether physical or digital—that people use. The user
interacts with it by holding, swiping, and touching it, and as a result
of those interactions, stuff happens. With anticipatory design, the
user’s job is to make the object accomplish very specific things, while
it’s up to the designer to make that process as simple as possible for
the user, or to make good use of that object and minimize difficulty.
Through great design, no instruction is needed and everything is
intuitive. But at its core, user experience has been about presenting
the user with information and options so she can make a decision. The
user makes a decision, and things happen.
Anticipatory design is fundamentally different: decisions are made and
executed on behalf of the user. The goal is not to help the user make a
decision, but to create an ecosystem where a decision is never made—it
happens automatically and without user input. The design goal becomes
one where we eliminate as many steps as possible and find ways to use
data, prior behaviors and business logic to have things happen
automatically, or as close to automatic as we can get.
Take booking a flight as an example. Rather than being given options—airline,
time, seat location—an anticipatory approach would be to automatically
monitor the user's calendar, and book a ticket when a meeting is
scheduled in a location that requires air travel. Seat preference, preferred airlines, the decision between price and a specific flight time are all based on prior travel behavior and payment information can be electronically transmitted.
Since anticipation is based on prior knowledge, the user may
initially be asked for feedback on the choice before or after booking,
but once the system is reasonably accurate the job will be done without
question. The result is a fully designed system that performs a powerful
set of functionality without the need for step-by-step interaction.
We can see the beginning stages of anticipatory design hitting the
mainstream market in the form of greater personalization. Amazon’s
recommended products and Netflix’s top picks offer us choices based on
previous purchases and viewing habits, are shaping what we expect from
online services. But these types of optimizations are simply training
wheels for anticipatory design, prompting us to make more (in some cases
harder) decisions, rather than making the process easier
At its core, the function of anticipatory design is to gather the
data necessary and move from the era of personalization to automated
decision-making. While most companies are still taking baby steps
towards the future, emerging examples of anticipatory design are gaining
traction for their convenience, and beginning to define new standards
for what users will expect from their devices and services.
Google Now and Google’s Nest thermostat are two early examples. Google Now is a digital assistant that not only responds to a user’s requests and questions, but predicts wants and needs based on search history.
Pulling flight information from emails, meeting times from calendars
and providing recommendations of where to eat and what to do based on
past preferences and current location, the user simply has to open the
app for their information to compile.
With similar intention but serving different needs, Nest, the Internet-enabled thermometer,
automatically adjusts room temperature based on a user’s prior choices.
Assessing what temperature residents prefer based on time of day and
tweaking it accordingly rids the user of the need to decide for
themselves. Around since 2011, both Google Now and Nest are veterans
compared to other forms of anticipatory design services emerging now. An example released this year, Digit.co helps people make smarter, automated savings decisions by connecting to its users’ bank accounts,
assessing income and spending habits, and automatically moving money
into a savings account. The service takes only what you can afford, with
the goal of saving money, based on when bills are due and expenses
become more demanding.
It’s not hard to see how today’s services can easily evolve for an
anticipatory future. By connecting to my daily schedule and assessing my
location, Uber could automatically schedule a car to pick me up from
work when I’m done with a meeting, rather than the other way around.
Perfecting this system, however—ridding it of wild inaccuracies or annoyances—is no trivial task.
Taming and Training Data
In order to achieve the level of convenience promised by anticipatory
design, data must be collected, analyzed, and then repackaged in the
form of predetermined selections. The ubiquity of the Internet is
increasing our ability to collect extraordinary amounts of data from
virtually everyone, dramatically reshaping not only how we interact with
our devices but how they interact with us.
We see these early benefits of collection through devices like the Fitbit and smart watches. Tomorrow's collection technologies
will give us just as detailed data about everything that relates to the
environment around us. Coupled with the explosive power of data is the
ability to bring together information from disparate sources and present
them in a unified viewpoint, whether that be personal, professional,
medical, or financial.
By unifying different streams of data, companies can look at
dashboards to decide whether their marketing campaigns are working, how
their web traffic
is doing, or who their high-value customers are and how to communicate
with them. As a consumer, unification tells me how much I am exercising
compared to my friends, or what the best price is for the car I'm
considering buying. Unification provides information, and we can use
that information to make better decisions—or adjust the decisions being
made on our behalf.
Companies are catching on quickly. With the realization that data is
much more valuable when used with other information, protocol is
increasingly being adopted to ensure that data sharing is seamless. With
the explosion of both data collection and unification, we’re creating
an environment that, while not fully exposed, is at least open enough
for information to be meaningfully aggregated.
Taken together in four steps—collection, unification, analysis, and
implementation—we have an environment where information is working for
you behind the scenes to do things automatically, all in the service of
letting you focus on what's most important to you in work and life.
