It’s Time for Digital Products to Start Empowering Us

We’re accepting utility in exchange for disempowerment. It’s not a fair trade.

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The digital world, as we’ve designed it, is draining us. The products and services we use are like needy friends: desperate and demanding. Yet we can’t step away. We’re in a codependent relationship. Our products never seem to have enough, and we’re always willing to give a little more. They need our data, files, photos, posts, friends, cars, and houses. They need every second of our attention.

We’re willing to give these things to our digital products because the products themselves are so useful. Product designers are experts at delivering utility. They’ve perfected design processes that allow them to improve the way people accomplish tasks. Unfortunately, it’s becoming increasingly clear that utility alone isn’t enough.

Quite often, our interactions with these useful products leave us feeling depressed, diminished, and frustrated.

We want to feel empowered by technology, and we’ve forgotten that utility does not equal empowerment.

Empowerment means becoming more confident, especially in controlling our own lives and asserting our rights. That is not technology’s current paradigm. Instead, digital products demand so much of us and intrude so deeply into our daily existence that they undermine our confidence and control. Our data and activity are mined and used with no compensation or transparency. Our focus is crippled by constant notifications. Our choices are reduced by algorithms that dictate what we see. We can’t even set our devices down because we’ve lost our ability to resist them.

In the early years of the web… there was still a degree of separation. We just weren’t on our computers that much. Then the smartphone came along.

We brush this off because we’ve confused a sense of utility with a feeling of empowerment. We assure ourselves that we own our lives when we land a great deal on a place to stay, catch the latest update from a friend, discover a great article, or have our groceries delivered. These are just a few of the small moments of pure…