The Buzz about Google Buzz: Behavioral Economics and Online Privacy
February 14th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Last week Google launched Google Buzz, a new status update and social network aggregation feature for Gmail users. Within minutes of its launch, digerati took to Twitter and blogs to discuss their first impressions of Buzz. Early reviews were generally positive, but my mid-week, the tone had shifted dramatically. It began to surface that Buzz had a fatal privacy flaw that could potentially jeopardize the real-world safety its early adopters. As one widely shared op-ed piece on Gizmodo.com explained, “Fuck you, Google. My privacy concerns are not trite. They are linked to my actual physical safety . . . You have destroyed over ten years of my goodwill and adoration.”
Fueling this vitriol was a naive design decision to eliminate signup procedures allowing users to choose with whom they would like to share information. As the Google Buzz landing page describes, “No setup needed. Automatically follow the people you email and chat with the most in Gmail.” (In the case of the writer above, her abusive ex-husband could now view her status updates and items she shared with her current boyfriend.)
This incident underscores the importance of understanding the behavioral economics of privacy in online settings. Had Google designed buzz to better account for how users make decisions as to the degree of personal information they feel comfortable sharing in initiating a service, this scenario could have been avoided.
Understanding behavioral economics to design for privacy
In Alessandro Acquisti and Jens Grossklags’ 2006 paper, “What Can Behavioral Economics Teach Us About Privacy?,” the authors address the complex and often contradictory behaviors surrounding online privacy. As Acquisti and Grossklags describe, “we feel entitled to protection of information about ourselves that we do not control, yet willingly trade away the same information for small rewards; we worry about privacy invasions of little significance, yet overlook those that may cause significant damages.” The authors explore the behavioral principles that impair or aid individuals in making privacy decisions online, concluding that behavioral economics can improve privacy policy decision making and technology design for end users and data holding entities.
The case of Google Buzz is a clear example of asymmetry of information in decision making. In opting in to the service, users had no way of understanding the algorithm Google was using to automatically link contacts nor the extent of data that would be shared between contacts (at least at the outset). Users were not guided through procedures at signup that would make this clear.
In addition, users were subject to status quo bias due to the simplicity of opting in to the service. To make signup simple, Google intentionally made the “automatic follow” feature a default setting. Thus, many users failed to realize what and with whom they were sharing information until hours or even days after signup. This agrees with Acquisti and Grossklags’ findings, whereby their study of online social networks revealed that the vast majority of users do not change their default (and very permeable) privacy settings (likely due to status quo bias).
But why all the vitriol? While the personal safety violation described above represents an extreme case, negative opinions of Google Buzz circulated widely. It is widely known how Google benefits from the personal data of users of iGoogle and Gmail. In the case of Buzz, Google was looking to capitalize on real-time social data by stealing users from other popular social networking services like Twitter and Facebook. But as Facebook has learned from its own privacy issues, the fungibility of user data and free services is a complex and sensitive issue. Acquisti and Grossklags found the behavioral economics of inequity aversion to be at play when users make decisions to share their personal data: “In the privacy arena, it is possible that individuals are particularly sensitive to privacy invasions of companies when they feel companies are unfairly gaining from the use of their personal data, without offering adequate consideration to the individual.” With Google Buzz, it’s likely the case that users felt they were receiving relatively little in the way of new functionality (beyond what services like Facebook and Twitter currently offer), in exchange for automatically (and often unknowingly) giving up personal and social data. Hence, a sense of privacy violation is apparent in much of the negative backlash.
Privacy principles to consider in future design projects
Setting a user’s expectations of what and with whom their personal information is shared is clearly a critical step in developing a service. And in most cases, it’s not enough to provide a privacy policy at signup. Often, the economic principle of rational ignorance comes into play. As posited by Acquisti and Grossklags:
Ignorance can be considered rational when the cost of learning about a situation enough to inform a rational decision would be higher than the potential benefit one may derive from that decision. Individuals may avoid assessing their privacy risks for similar reasons: for instance, they may disregard reading a data holder’s privacy policy as they believe that the time cost associated with inspecting the notice would not be compensated by the expected benefit.
Privacy policies, often lengthy and rife with legalese, are generally not designed to give online service users greater understanding of the tradeoffs or probability of risks associated with opting in to a service or service feature.
As designers, we must also consider what Google learned from crossing two distinct modes of online social interaction. While Google stood to gain traction quickly by offering Google Buzz to its large installed base of Gmail users, crossing the modes of email and social networking through the “automatic follow” default was shortsighted. Users share different types of information through these two channels and communicate with different degrees of intimacy. This teaches us that when developing services that combine multiple modes of online communication, we need a clear picture of the behavioral norms of each of the channels incorporated into the design.
Brains, Behavior, and Design: Applying Behavioral Economics
February 11th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
I took part in a workshop tonight to beta test an applied behavioral economics toolkit created by several of my colleagues at the IIT Institute of Design (the team included Ann Hintzman, Van Vuong, Miguel Cervantes, Jennifer Lee, Nikki Pfarr and Jerad Lavey). As described on the toolkit website:
In the real world, people are often irrational
Over the past few decades, researchers have codified many of the patterns that describe why people behave irrationally. As researchers, how can we be on the lookout for these patterns of behavior when we go into the field? As designers, how can we use our understanding of patterned irrational behavior to help people make better choices?
We are a group of graduate students at IIT Institute of Design working on an independent research project. We are developing tools that apply findings from the fields of cognitive psychology and behavioral economics to the design process. These tools provide a head start on framing research as well as developing new strategies for solving user problems.
I highly recommend experimenting with this helpful toolkit which can be downloaded here. And feel free to send the team feedback as they further develop this system.
Coke versus Pepsi: The humble systems thinker versus the design egotist
September 22nd, 2009 § 1 Comment
Over the past year, there’s been no shortage of press surrounding Peter Arnell’s failings with the Tropicana and Gatorade brand redesigns at Pepsi. I just read Fast Company’s Masters of Design feature on David Butler, head of design at Coke, and was impressed by the stark contrast he represents to Arnell’s approach. David Butler’s philosophy (not to mention personality) certainly sounds markedly different from Arnell’s “purveyor of pop culture” approach which found him on a “five-week world tour of trendy design houses” as a major source of inspiration for the Pepsi assignments:
“It’s great that when David speaks, he doesn’t speak in the language of design,” says Joe Tripodi, Coca-Cola’s global marketing chief. When he talks to folks on the manufacturing side, to the bottlers, to the retailers, Butler’s message, Tripodi says, “is very simple: Here’s what I’m going to do to help you sell more stuff.”
Contrast that with his counterpart, Pepsi’s design consultant, Peter Arnell, who titillated the blogosphere last spring with a 27-page memo he wrote called “Breathtaking,” defending his new logo design. He cited inspiration from da Vinci’s Mona Lisa to his Vitruvian Man, and described the “gravitational pull” of a can of Pepsi on a supermarket shelf. That was before he compared his genius at creating a 3-D Super Bowl ad to Thomas Edison’s invention of motion pictures. Many designers were mortified, fearing Arnell had discredited the whole tribe with his claptrap.
In many ways, Butler is the anti-Arnell, a first-class designer who shuns the latest trendspeak. “I read all the journals. I love design theory. I’m a junkie for that stuff. But that’s at home,” he says. “At work, I don’t use the phrase ‘design thinking.’ Here, it’s about creating more value. How do we sell more of something? How do we improve the experience to make more money and create a sustainable planet?”
David Butler is inspired by design theory and pop culture as much as the next designer, but his real drive comes from approaching big problems through systems thinking:
[Butler's experience at Studio Archteype] and a run-in with Peter Senge’s book The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization changed the way Butler thought about design. He saw how systems thinking could be applied in a more holistic way. In the past, he says, design had been focused on straightforward problems: Come up with a drinking vessel, say. But now it was being asked to solve multipronged problems: How do we get clean drinking water? “We’re moving from linear problems to wicked problems,” he says, and the old default solution — hire a rock-star designer — no longer works. “The model of a master of design creating that magical object that is going to change the business is an old way of thinking. I can’t use it to work on wicked problems. I need to have capability internally.”
Side note: This trajectory was pioneered by Esslinger at frog design and is a major focus of his new book, A Fine Line:
Is small the big idea?
July 18th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
In Gareth Kay’s most recent op-ed for Agency Spy, he espouses the pursuit of smaller, more useful and socially conscious ideas in contrast to our current obsession with chasing big, spectacular awareness-driving ideas. He writes:
Now clearly spectacle has been a powerful force in culture over time, but it’s one type of execution and a type that feels increasingly at odds with a more intimate and invisible culture. We’re getting better but we’re still not very good as an industry at celebrating small, relatively invisible things but increasingly these are the ideas (think Nike+, Fiat Ecodrive, even iTunes and the Obama campaign) that are driving culture, that seem to thrive in an increasingly digital world and are able to change behavior.
Kay goes on to laud BakerTweet, a Twitter-based service developed by the smart folks at Poke as an example of a powerful small idea:
[Vimeo=http://vimeo.com/3972081]
While I agree with Kay in that our obsession with spectacle can be a distraction from truly useful, behavior-changing ideas, it’s really not BIG ideas nor small ideas that are the issue here: It’s smart, platform-based innovation. BakerTweet is indeed a smart little idea that provides a convenient little service. But it’s real power lies in the fact that it is proof-of-concept for a whole platform of simple Twitter appliance-based innovations. Bakers can turn a nob and press a button to effortlessly tell the world what’s coming out of their ovens. Wouldn’t it be nice if your local Secretary of State facility could do the same to tweet line waiting times? One can imagine a variety of labor-intensive, time-sensitive service scenarios that could benefit from a computer-free relatively hands-off Twitter appliance. Ah, the joys of an open API combined with little electronics prototyping platforms like Arduino.
So what I’m proposing is that ideas like BakerTweet may seem small to advertising folks because we’re trained to look for big insights that lead to big campaigns, and we call everything under that “tactics” (sometimes we even treat tactics as a four-letter word when we’re in the midst of a strategic conversation). But in the eyes of a design planner, BakerTweet is proof-of-concept of a platform for innovation. In fact, Kay’s other examples are cases of exactly this. iTunes and the Obama campaign are not, as Kay puts it, “small, relatively invisible things” — they are entire ecosystems of innovation. They are aggregates of many small ideas and innovations that work together toward a common purpose. They essentially become their own micro-economies.
Here’s a great talk by Larry Keeley of Doblin addressing platform-level thinking (He gets to it about 20 minutes into the lecture if you want to fast forward):
[Vimeo=http://vimeo.com/5000092]
So I think we can all look forward to lots more BakerTweets, Secretary-of-StateTweets, FarmerCo-OpTweets, MyPartyStoreIsGettingRobbedTweets etc. . . all Twitter-based appliances designed for very specific purposes when other means of accessing Twitter simply won’t suffice. Perhaps the Twitter API combined with things like Arduino isn’t such a small idea after all.
Is Design Planning the future of Account Planning?
June 29th, 2009 § 1 Comment
On Thursday, I learned that the 2009 Account Planning Conference has been cancelled. It seems we’ll miss this year’s installment of prognostication (and pontification) over the future of planning.
In recent years, the planning conference has seen a fair amount of design thinking infused into both philosophy and process — the “actions speak louder than words” era is upon us. The Jay Chiat Awards call for entries was certainly evidence of this; two categories call for cases involving product design thinking.
It’s also interesting how traditional agencies are beginning to resemble design consultancies. Just have a look at this PSFK panel discussion on agencies thinking outside the traditional agency-client relationship to build brands from the ground up:
I would hope that as a part of this shift, Account Planning will play a major role in bringing the principles of human-centered design to bear on IP. Otherwise, agencies best leave it to the design minds at places like Continuum. Their short film “Resonance” is a great introduction to design planning, offering some hints as to how agencies must change traditional organizational structures if they are to succeed at creating truly relevant IP:
