The Future Needs A Heart
Data dominates a lot of what we do.
Big business decisions need data. Justifying decisions to superiors need data. Making a change to a product or service needs data.
Data, data, data. Data everywhere.
The human problem
Quantitative data is a great way of measuring things like clicks, scrolls, average spend and site visits. This type of data will answer who, what & when type questions. In this respect using data to make decisions works. But what about qualitative data? What about the why? When it comes to understanding human behaviour we’re still in the dark.
Current survey and customer feedback tools are notoriously sketchy. Bias and lack of trust keep us from using this type of data with confidence. So when it comes to understanding humans we still mainly use basic quantitative methods.
There’s a big problem with that.
The quantitative human world
This round-peg-square-hole approach to human behaviour is a universal problem. We design systems and procedures that treat humans as part of a machine. It’s understandable from a planning stage. It makes it easy if people are just robots with a set of consistent attributes. They can be slotted neatly in so that the whole plan works. Job done.
However there is a huge dehumanising effect when we reduce people into robots.
Time and motion studies in warehouses are used to maximise efficiency. Employers can see what their staff do and where they go. They can even detect if you have stopped for a chat with a colleague.
Also our transport vans and trucks are closely GPS tracked. This could have the benefit of forced rest stops but also places pressure to deliver to deadline.
We are are creating spaces where stopping for a quick chat with a friend is discouraged. Stopping for a snack or picking an alternate route to a delivery will put your job at risk. Is this a good thing to do? When create an environment that lacks humanity, we run the risk of creating people that lack humanity and bad things will happen. Staff retention will go down and people will become miserable.
However these jobs will probably be some of the first to be truly automated. The technology is at a place now where the human is the weak link. But the desire to be efficient and make good decisions based on validated data is making its way into social working environments too.
There is a growing number of companies that offer people analytics. There always has been a desire to make office spaces as efficient as possible. But now we have the technology to really invade the personal workspace. Tracking engagement, productivity and ironically, employee morale is now easier than ever. However farming this data is an emotional dead end. They are intellectual solutions to human problems. However well meaning, tracking people like this will not work. There is no consideration for how people feel. It will de-humanise your workforce and bad things will happen.
Building an emotionally nourishing future
The problem does not lie with the desire to measure human behaviour, many good things can happen if we could. The problem is our current tools are just not up to the job. We treat people like robots because at scale qualitative data becomes very hard to use. If we figured out a way to measure human emotion and give it a numerical value at scale we can start to fix this problem.
CrowdEmotion has done exactly that.
CrowdEmotion uses the latest tech to scale, interpret and respond to emotions around the world. We have a way to reliably quantify human emotion. We can interpret this emotional data to create human first solutions. We can do it without asking for a major re-tool. By just adding a layer of human understanding to your current routines, you can create products, services and content with quantifiable engagement.
Current metrics for measuring humans are broken. Lets work together to make a positive and emotionally intelligent future.
To ask about CrowdEmotion’s UX testing solutions at info@crowdemotion.co.uk.
To unlock emotion recognition, interpretation and response visit our API Demo.
Or find out more at our site www.crowdemotion.co.uk.
