Designing for meaningful choice and trustworthy experiences: Open challenge to meet the DMA

IF believes that responsible technology provides a new path forward: one that optimises for trust. We work with innovative organisations to do this. We previously published our Responsible Technology by Design framework to help set a new operating standard for creating trustworthy products and services.

The European Parliament has pushed an important new regulation, the Digital Markets Act (DMA), to also address this challenge. It focuses on online platforms and tries to give us more choice, control and trust in the digital services we use.

The regulation has great potential but it also leaves several questions open. There’s an opportunity for businesses to pick up the baton and make the regulation effective for their teams and users.

In this post we describe the DMA and some of the opportunities and design challenges it raises.

If you’re interested in working with us on these issues, please get in touch via hello@projectsbyif.com

The Digital Markets Act is trying to increase competition while protecting fundamental rights

What’s new? The DMA aims to ensure large online platforms behave in a more fair and open way. The aim is to increase competition while protecting citizens’ fundamental rights.

Who will it affect? The DMA focuses on “gatekeeper platforms” but it will also affect small businesses and users.

The European Commission will have to publish a list of gatekeepers across several “core platform services” but we expect few surprises:

Source: Wikipedia

Why does it matter?: The DMA will establish new do’s and don’ts for gatekeepers. They will need to comply with these by ~Spring 2024, if they don’t they could be subject to large fines and other penalties. We are particularly interested in the following ones.

Gatekeepers will have to:

• allow third parties to inter-operate with the gatekeeper’s own services in certain specific situations (for example allowing people on one messaging app to securely send a message to their friend on a different app)

Gatekeepers may no longer:

• be self-preferential in the ranking of their own products and services
• prevent consumers from linking up to businesses outside their platforms (e.g. payments processors)
• prevent users from removing certain pre-installed software or applications
• track end users outside of the gatekeepers’ core platform service for the purpose of targeted advertising, without effective consent having been granted

The DMA creates both opportunities and design challenges

What are the opportunities? If the regulation is effective then users could expect:

• more choice when first using products like browsers, virtual assistants, and more
• cost-savings on things like apps, as developers and users can use independent payment systems
• interoperability across digital products and services

There are opportunities for service providers too:

• small service providers should find it easier to gain a user base and become a larger provider
• increased competition means that large service providers will need to redesign their services to meet the wants and needs of broader groups of users
• bold service providers can seize the moment to get ahead of the regulatory direction of travel, reducing future risks and compliance costs

What are the design challenges? As with any new regulatory regime there are challenges.

Meaningful choice hinges on users understanding that they are making a choice, what the consequences of their choices are on themselves or others, and that their choice actually influences the system.

This is, in part, a question of trustworthiness.

At the simplest level a bad choice experience could lead to users picking untrustworthy services or simply defaulting to the brands they already know, but as we drill into the detail we can see some detailed challenges:

• How might we help people build a mental model of the different core services that make up the services they use?
• What decisions are made implicitly before users even set up their devices? How do we balance explicit decisions made during set up with the mandated rule of providing choice on first use? When do choices change?
• How might we make people aware of alternatives without overwhelming them with options?
• In what contexts do users care enough to want to find out and to make different choices based on what they learn? How will they know if the services they can choose between are trustworthy?
• When are users unable to care?

Like all of our work these challenges are at the intersection of human, business and society-centred design. Rather than rush to make compliance-centric design decisions, IF believes there’s an opportunity to do more.

Service providers should seize the opportunity to do more

These questions explore hard-to articulate topics. But by exploring them we can use the DMA to create meaningful interactions and trustworthy user experiences across the services we rely on every day.

At IF, we’re already working with clients to explore these issues but we have the capacity to partner with more bold organisations who want to get ahead of the game and rise to the challenge of the moment. If you’re interested in working with us, please get in touch via hello@projectsbyif.com.

Acknowledgments: Sarah Gold, Imogen Meborn-Hubbard, Charley Pothecary, and Peter Wells.