What the Heck Tech: A Design Wreck
Dear future designers…
A couple months ago, I drove a Tesla for the first time.
I was surprised to find driving it felt more like using a piece of technology than driving a car. Unlike a typical car with physical buttons and a dashboard in front of the wheel, Tesla’s screen replaces all buttons, switches, and dials. I thought the future was at my fingertips — finally a car redesign that seemingly incorporated all the complexities of the car interface into one screen.
However, I soon started realizing the tradeoffs that came with the switch from knobs and physical buttons to a touchscreen. Like the challenges of using a phone without looking, it felt impossible to navigate the multi-menu touchscreen interface without averting focus from the road. It was like implanted distracted driving.
A German Court decided in August of last year that “Tesla’s touchscreen car controls should be treated as a distracting electronic device. This is concerning as distracted driving killed 3,142 individuals in 2019 alone (NHTSA). In addition, in February of this year, Tesla recalled 135,000 Model S and X vehicles due to touch screen failures in rearview mirrors and defrost controls. In 2017, the switch to a touchscreen control system of a Navy ship from a mechanical system caused the death of 10 sailors, which ultimately led to a switch back to the old system.
Driving the Tesla served as a crucial reminder for the amount of control that is now at the hands of designers. When I drove a Tesla, I witnessed how much the user interface could dictate the lifeline of someone who might get distracted while changing playlists, adjusting the AC, or connecting their phone to bluetooth.
As the first line of defense in early ideation, designers play an important role in predicting and thwarting harmful and dangerous use cases for platforms. Unfortunately, edge cases are difficult to predict, and there have been countless critical failures that have resulted from blind spots in designing for user intentions and ethics. In 2014, Uber was designed to evade authorities by giving a fake user interface if someone was found to be a government regulator. In 2016, Microsoft unveiled a chat bot named “Tay” that turned into a Holocaust denying, misogynistic, and racist tweeter in one day through “conversational understanding” from submitted tweets. In 2018, smart devices were used as spycams for spouses to stalk their former exes. In 2019, a white supremacist used Facebook Live to stream his act of terror, murdering 50 people at a mosque in New Zealand. No matter how it was intended to be used, these platforms’ functionality were limited to how they were designed to perform. Out of this limitation in design, these malevolent edge use cases were made possible.
“The problem with UX design as a field is that it’s so relatively new that we’re not sure how to teach it, but the consequences of getting it wrong are so massive.”
— Mike Monteiro, Ruined by Design (p. 64)
Why aren’t we training designers to consider human ethics if they’re already studying user journeys and looking at problems from a user-centered approach? Adopting training for responsible design is relatively new. Unlike the well-matured path for doctors — pre-med, MCAT, medical school, residency, and medical license — designers can go to two-week boot camps to prepare and “know all they need” to start designing. As Mike Monteiro from Ruined by Design states, “Ask yourself whether you’d want someone who took a one-week intensive class in ‘Bones! How do they even work?’ resetting the arm you broke snowboarding.” We are unlikely to trust an untrained doctor that dictates our health decisions, yet we have designers with limited ethics training at the forefront making decisions in social media apps and user interfaces that are affecting billions of users.
Unfortunately, the turnover rate of user experience designers is significantly higher in the technology industry at 23.3% (source) as compared to all other industries at 17.8% (source). Companies are easily able to scout new talent each year from a fresh batch of graduates looking for opportunities and the cycle of limited training continues.
Going Forward
Though the touchscreen interface has its drawbacks, it has allowed Tesla to easily push software updates onto the screen, which traditionally weren’t possible in mechanical systems. One of these updates had been autopilot, which Tesla claims to have made crashes 10 times less likely without the need to monitor speed and steering while going on the highway (though skeptics say this is misleading). This is still a new system and understandably far from perfect — countless reported fatalities have resulted from its misinterpretation as a self-driving substitute.
Historically, the introduction of new technology has been a double-edged sword in adding value but also introducing unprecedented new challenges — cars giving way to accidents, guns to mass shootings, phones to social media addiction. Though there have been casualties that have resulted from Tesla’s car redesign, it has also greatly minimized the need to purchase a new car just for updates to the interface. It has transformed our definition of a motor vehicle by integrating machine learning visualizations to assist in our daily commutes. It has rejuvenated our excitement toward sustainability by moving toward green energy. It has disrupted the automobile industry, effectively paving the path for the development of consumer electric vehicles for generations to come. Tesla has played a large role in designing the future of how we commute, and as designers, it is up to us to continue to iterate on our idea of the future.
If it’s part of the design process to solve a problem, minimizing harm afterward should be part of the responsibility. There are two distinct ways to design for problems.
- Adding an error message. (as referenced in Don Norman’s Design of Everyday Things) This could mean adding a sign to tell someone to push a “pull door” instead of fixing the door itself or an error message when a user fills out a form field incorrectly. This typically happens when it is too late to actually fix the problem — finishing the high-fidelity prototype without iterating or installing a door before testing it.
- Fixing the root problem. This involves figuring out the problem at an early stage and designing with user consideration in mind. Ideally, we want to maximize thinking about root problems over adding error messages.
No software is bug-free, and no design is pixel-perfect. Nevertheless, if we unintentionally design harm into the world, we need to work together to put our efforts in reversing root harms. We hold an ethical responsibility for the effects of the work we create, and to be more accountable for our impact, it starts with our awareness of the problems that arise.
As Charles Kettering, inventor and engineer for General Motors, once stated:
“A problem well- stated is a problem half-solved, while a problem not stated is a problem unsolvable.”
⭐️ Acknowledgements
Thank you so much Jack, Nabil, Joyce, and Maggie for pre-reading, re-reading, editing, and providing so much thoughtful feedback for this piece! And a special ✨ thank you to Maggie for drawing the splash art for this piece. This easily wouldn’t have been possible without all of your contributions. In addition, I cannot be more grateful for the Design Buddies community 🐰 for providing me the opportunity to reflect on my design experiences and meet all the amazing designers advocating for and solving problems directly shaping the next generation and the future of tech.
I drew much of my inspiration from:
- Ruined by Design by Mike Monteiro (big big thank you to Mary recommending it to me, easily one of my favorite books I’ve read this year)
- Ezra Klein’s podcast on views of techno-optimism
- Tristan Harris’ ideas about designers’ influence on user attention from Netflix’s documentary The Social Dilemma
- Programmable User Interfaces course by Jason Hong, and this article he shared on the UX of different types of interfaces explained through Legos
- Reboot’s ⚡️ weekly newsletter essays
If you’ve made it this far, thank you! Feel free to comment or tweet thoughts at me, I’d love to chat more on this topic 👋
