Why people want more meaning from their products and in their lives
R&D teams are focused on making you happy
Tech R&D teams are more focused than ever on enabling our happiness. It figures, since Americans are living more tech enabled social lives than ever before. Our happiness seems to be increasingly intertwined with our digital interactions, and in a way more dependent on technology.
In fact, we now spend more time on Facebook than with our pets. And it turns out that Facebook “likes” can be used to automatically and accurately predict a range of our personal attributes including: sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious and political views, personality traits, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental separation, age, and gender. Our life is being lived online, and the engineers at Facebook and other social networks are optimizing our interactions so that they approximate “real life”, centering the activity around the 150 people their algorithms suggest would be most appropriate since that is the number science says is most natural for us.
The standard approach runs on data analytics
Much of the work that goes into engineering how we experience the world through technology is based on exploiting the growing stores of data that companies have on each of us.
Did you know 90% of the world’s data was created in the last two years? There’s going to be 10 times more mobile data by 2020, 19 times more unstructured data, and 50 times more product data by 2020. — Marc Benioff, CEO Salesforce.com
Even as interest in IT analytics software to wring out operational and cost efficiencies has grown over time, it has been eclipsed by interest in predictive analytics software utilizing machine learning and data science to predict what people will do when facing different approaches and how to wring out the most sales from them in the process.
To make analytics like this actually work, it’s essential that the basics of the system at play remain static. MailChimp data scientist John Foreman explains it well in a recent post:
It’s very hard for sophisticated analytics software and techniques running on “big data” to run out in front of your changing business and radically benefit it. The most sophisticated analytics systems we have examples of run on stable problems. For example, ad targeting at Facebook and Google. This business model isn’t changing much, and when it does, it’s financially worth it to modify the model.
So the focus is on increasing your time in whatever social media platform, financial product, or commerce platform you are using, and deploying analytics to optimize (rather than revolutionize) your experience by personalizing it.
The objective is to optimize your behavior
It seems logical that a personalized experience would be more effective with an individual than a generalized one would be. As customers, employees, and even parents, we have bought into this. Many of us are looking for new ways to provide others with data about ourselves and our families so that we can be even more optimized.
Every aspect of your life can presumably be better optimized for your happiness and someone else’s financial benefit. So, lessons learned applying analytics to commerce are now being deployed in people management as well. Experts have predicted that people analytics is on the cusp of huge growth, given rising enthusiasm among buyers and practitioners. An early practitioner of human capital analytics has been Google, under the leadership of Laszlo Bock, the company’s SVP, People Operations.
Bock sat on the board of people analytics company Evolv until it was acquired late last year, and currently sits on the board of predictive analytics company AgilOne.
By streamlining and embellishing your experience
The main ways in which tech R&D teams are trying to make you happier through personalization are by using analytics and algorithms to resolve your decisions for you, navigate you to the content you will want with minimal friction, and conveying it all in an experience that is unexpectedly delightful.
This mindset of eliminating effort so that you can do something better with your life pervades tech R&D departments around the world. Here’s what Baidu’s Chief Scientist and former “Google Brain” leader Andrew Ng had to say about the benefits of “deep learning” for humankind.
I’m optimistic about the potential of AI to make lives better for hundreds of millions of people. I wouldn’t work on it if I didn’t fundamentally believe that to be true. Imagine if we can just talk to our computers and have it understand “please schedule a meeting with Bob for next week.” Or if each child could have a personalized tutor. Or if self-driving cars could save all of us hours of driving. — Andrew Ng, Baidu’s Chief Scientist
This is about more personalized experiences at reduced effort, encapsulated in an individual’s relationship with technology. It makes commercial sense. The notion of customer effort has been captured in the Customer Effort Score, which has been proven to be 1.8x more predictive of customer loyalty than a customer satisfaction score, and 2x more predictive than a net promoter score. It boils down to one simple question: To what degree do you agree or disagree with the following statement — The company made it easy for me to handle my issue.
Perhaps no other company has become more ruthlessly efficient at using personalization to remove customer effort and drive frequent purchases than Amazon.
The company recently patented a system for delivering products to customers before they are actually ordered. Termed “anticipatory shipping,” Amazon’s invention would represent a step change in the application of predictive analytics. Rapid shipping would have the added benefit of being a “delighter” — a product attribute that brings the unexpected, either by over-delivering or doing something out of the ordinary.
Happiness is temporary
The opportunity to delight through technology is impermanent, though. Consider this example from Google:
When Gmail was introduced and offered 1GB free e-mail accounts it was revolutionary and the customer satisfaction was monumental — clearly a delight attribute. Nowadays, most free e-mail accounts offer similar storage capacity, to the point where ordinary users never have to worry about it. It has clearly moved from delight to performance, and is even starting to become a basic attribute.
You might believe that something like free storage is too impersonal and suggest that something more interactive would create a more lasting effect. For example, some businesses attempt to create customer delight in their customer experiences through rewards and what they might term “gamification”. In fact, these kinds of tactics may not be effective for loading a customer relationship with more positive emotion according to the UK government’s MINDSPACE report on behavioral economics. Consider the report’s main insights with respect to how individuals respond to incentives:
- We dislike losses more than we like gains of an equivalent amount
- We judge the value of money according to narrow reference points
- We allocate money to different mental budgets, and are reluctant to move money between them
- We over-estimate the likelihood of small probabilities
- We usually prefer smaller, more immediate payoffs to larger, more distant ones — but we don’t differentiate between medium and long-term rewards
- There is the danger that paying people to undertake an activity may reduce feelings that the activity is worthwhile in itself, making them less likely to do it for free in the future
Meanwhile, designers attempt to add their own elements of more generalized “delight” into products, but these enhancements are just as impermanent as incentives, ultimately being copied by competitors and taken for granted (or even worse, dated) by customers. It all points to the need that companies face to find something deeper than the customer and employee happiness that they are attempting to create.
As someone who grew up in the final years of the Soviet Union, even I remember the penchant that Soviet managers had for gamification: students were shipped to the fields to harvest wheat or potatoes, and since the motivation was lacking, they too were assigned points and badges. — Evgeny Morozov
As customers and employees, we can ask for more.
Experiences are left wanting for meaning
Research in the 2014 Digital Trends Briefing showed that marketers and web designers feel “customer experience is the single most exciting opportunity” and that “targeting and personalization” was a top priority for them. At the same time, buyers looking into products feel that they are simply getting a sales pitch. One way that companies can address this immediately to some degree is by pursuing a strategy of authenticity. But for each of us as individuals, there’s a much deeper concept to grapple with: happiness vs meaning. What we choose to do hinges on how we define ourselves, and there is a role for technology to play in this.
According to recent research on the subject of living a meaningful life rather than simply a happy one, the topic of self is pivotal. The research showed that concerns with personal identity and expressing the self contributed to a sense of meaning but not happiness. On the other hand, happiness without meaning was characterized by a relatively shallow life. Here’s Stanford professor Jennifer Aaker, discussing the research:
This is not to say that happiness and meaning are mutually exclusive. The research indicates that happiness and meaningfulness are substantially and positively intercorrelated. Meaning and happiness feed off each other, but have some substantially different roots. For example, people focused on meaning feel more connected to their communities and to the world around them. The research indicates that deep relationships — such as family — increase meaning in life. Hashing out problems or challenges with the people you care about most can deliver more meaning while casual time spent with friends may simply foster good feelings without much responsibility.
If happiness is about getting what you want, then meaningfulness is about expressing and defining yourself. A life of meaning is more deeply tied to a valued sense of self and one’s purpose in the larger context of life and community. — Jennifer Aaker, Stanford Graduate School of Business
You can see the tendency we have to go into default mode and just “be happy” justified by many, because meaning is harder than happiness. For example, the work of a parent to ensure that their children are successful in life is fraught with challenges:
The happiest, most successful children have parents who do not do for them what they are capable of doing, or almost capable of doing; and their parents do not do things for them that satisfy their own needs rather than the needs of the child.
Helping kids develop self-control and grit during their most critical years is an active and trying pursuit, and it is alluring for parents to tell themselves that their kids will be “all right” regardless what parenting choices they make. It is seductively straightforward to pursue a life consisting of empty but cordial conversations, regular newsfeed scrolls, conflict-averse feedback sessions at work, and path-of-least-resistance parenting. But that is not a course of action that will lead to meaning.
Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it’s going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way?…And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is. — David Foster Wallace
Now, technologists are pursuing meaning
Facebook, the original creator of those newsfeeds that have become ever more optimized is on a search for more meaningful content in your digital interactions on their platform:
“It comes from the intuition that you can only get so far by looking at online behaviors,” says Cox. “It’s expensive, and it takes time. But what you really want is to sit down with 1.2 billion people, every single one, and ask them to go through and point at ‘I really loved that one.” Why did you really love that one? ‘Well I really liked that one because it’s from a person I went to high school with and I use Facebook to stay in touch with people from high school.’ Why did you hate this one? “I really hated this one because I really hate memes.’”
“If you just watch people eat doughnuts, you’re like, ‘People love doughnuts, let’s bring them more doughnuts,” says Greg Marra, a News Feed product manager. “But if you talk to people they’re like, ‘No actually what I want is to eat fewer doughnuts and maybe eat a kale smoothie….’ Then we can give them some kale smoothies, too.”
Aside from Facebook, newer more slimmed down approaches to social media such as This and Ello are being tried as well. This is achieving mixed results, but wouldn’t be attempted at all if there weren’t demand for more meaning and less empty routine.
For others, creating new products to help people focus more and enter their flow state has been a way to create more meaning with technology. Focus is at a premium. We live in a world of distractions, and the ability to do something meaningful requires a level of focus that is harder and harder to get.
Nir Eyal’s recent piece on “distraction tech” discusses companies focused on solving this problem, and the emerging entrepreneurship around the problem set of creating more flow state. For example, Handle is a product that was recently launched in order to help drive focus at work. And the Calm meditation app is seeing tremendous momentum (my kids love it, too).
As for parents, companies like Osmo and Kiwi Crate are using technology to create products that drive new levels of interaction and meaning between family members, rather than simply outsourcing perhaps the most important task many of us will have in our lives.
You can’t separate intellect and feelings in the work of the mind. They’re both there all the time. Real learning — attentive real learning, deep learning — is playful and frustrating and joyful and discouraging and exciting and sociable and private all at the same time, which is what makes it great. — Eleanor Duckworth
The choice is ours
Technology will continue to provide new and better analytics and products that enable you to consume more content, buy more things, and measure your workforce with more specificity. You can choose to be satisfied with that, and claim some measure of happiness as a result.
Or, you can pursue meaning and do more. R&D teams can design products that give people a deeper sense of connection in their closest relationships and that help them make more meaningful achievements. People managers can go beyond simple review cycle requirements at work and instead provide feedback that is more difficult but that is truly meaningful to team members. Parents can bring higher levels of interaction to the learning experiences of their children. And all of us can strive for more meaning in our lives by expressing and defining ourselves in the context of our communities. The choice is ours.
