This Is Why Your Tech Is Designed To Make You Less Happy

so why can't we build apps and Tech products that actually make you happier it's like everything has been consumed by this wave of attention hacking where the only thing that matters is more engagement manipulating you into spending more and watching more ads and the people that work at these tech companies with their evil agendas spend their days finding ways to control people's lives and sucking their more into the Vortex of Doom scrolling and using technology to control the world well no there is a big misconception about why Tech products seem like they don't want to make you happier because basically every tech company from trillion dollar ones to startups use this very Loop to build their products and this is the key how do I know this well this is what I do every day as a product manager actually working in Tech and while you may think people building these Tech products are agents of evil trying to conquer the world in reality they look more like this myself included but as it turns out there is a solution and we actually can build technology that straight up makes you happier but to understand it we first have to understand how Tech products are actually built so congratulations you're Now product manager in a team in the social media app woof.com you're working with engineers and designers and at any given time you have a list of features that your team could work on these are ideas that the engineers might have come up with for the designer or you did some research it doesn't matter this can be tweaking the algorithm to show more diverse posts on the feed or sending a notification to users when a friend posts something new and so how do you decide what to build and what not to build what you do is take these ideas and evaluate them against one thing you're okr okr stands for objective and key result let's say in this case the objective of your team is to increase the engagement that the users have with the feed of wolf and the key result is how you measure this so let's say you have chosen as a metric the average time spent per user per day so this is what you want to increase and so all the things that your team could work on are evaluated against one thing could this new thing impact your okr and if that's the case great you go ahead and design a thing and build it but always with the okr and your goal in mind and once it's ready you usually don't just YOLO and launch it you want to make sure that what you build is actually improving your metric so what you do is you run an A B test fifty percent of the user base will see the current version and 50 will see the app with a new feature give it some time throw in some basic statistics and you can actually measure whether what you build is actually improving your metric this is the reason why when you open Instagram or Spotify with a friend their app might look different because at any given moment in any Big Deck product there are probably hundreds of experiments running at the same time so you find out that your feature is actually improving your metric and so all good you release it and on to the next one but the Smart Ones amongst you will probably already have figured out what in this cycle drives products that are built to provide value versus make you descend into a spiral of addiction and it's this thing right here the objective that you put for the team and how you measure it and it comes directly from the strategy of the company AKA how do we make money and get this spread you can literally draw a line here that leads to more money for the company your team will build a new feature sends a notification to users to get there on the app because you want to increase average time on the app per day because you want to increase engagement because you can directly correlate more engagement with more money now this thing right here this innocent looking Loop is the secret that made software companies become trillion dollar Giants because only with digital products you can build something release it immediately and worldwide and track exactly what the impact of what you did was in a matter of days while Google was testing with a split test what specific shade of blue was leading people to click more on the links in Google search yes this is an actual test they did Supermarket that wants to test if a certain higher layout is better than another would take weeks and months to run their test and they could not even accurately measure the impact of the change since you cannot have a Multiverse with two versions of the same supermarket at the same time this is a huge advantage that digital products and software products have versus everything else but this Loop in itself well it's not the problem it's just an incredibly effective way to build products when Nintendo was developing their open world game The Legend of Zelda breath of the wild their goal was to push players to explore the map on their own so they analyzed the movements of the first group of players on the map and and created a heat map to see where they went and based on this they were able to keep iterating on the map and create interest points going from people just following roads to creating a map that is inherently discoverable which is an integral part of what made this game one of the best ones of all time so if this Loop is not the problem where did things actually go wrong why does it seem like apps are only able to build stuff that makes us more and more addicted instead of building things that make you happier where does the evil come from when a company starts off maybe they're just a small startup here they put value for the user solving a real problem if you're building a search engine this is helping users get to the information they want the easiest way and that's what Google focused on in the beginning and why it was a revolutionary product if you are building a social network it's connecting with your friends and that's what Facebook did 15 years ago this is what it means to optimize for happiness it's optimizing for the value that you bring and helping people solve the problems and struggles of their daily lives now this is a very interesting topic but it's very complex and there's much more that I wasn't able to fit in this video if you sign up to my free newsletter the email Club each week you'll get an exclusive video just for subscribers about tech and building stuff online and in the next episode I'm gonna go deeper into everything that we discussed in this video it's free to join and you can sign up with the link in the description but as you know things spiraled from value to attention hacking and dark patterns and this is because companies started to replace values and objective with more engagement if my users end up engaging with my f more then they're getting more value out of it right well no so I recently booked a flight for a trip that I have in Asia and this airline that I booked with has been bombarding me with emails trying to get me to download their everything app where I could get anything from my booking to streaming movies and renting cars now this is the perfect example of products that started optimizing for engagement and not for Value probably some executive somewheres was like you know what we could make people more engaged with our Airline by making them watch movies on our app but as it turns out there are two main reasons why companies have been running like crazy towards this quest for more engagement and for each one there is a solution that can lead to building apps and Tech products that optimize for happiness and not for how many times you log in each day and for the first one let me ask you a question how happy are you twelve nine thousand eighty thousand eighty five how much value did Spotify give you this month 5.8 how much happiness did you get from Shazam this week 3.1 millise miles the reason why we've seen this run toward starts more engagement is because it's so easy to track and it's basically the only thing that product teams can put here as a key result you can set up tools like amplitude mix panel or Google analytics in a few hours and there you go you have all the tracking and data and charts that you want optimizing for engagement has taken over because it's easy to measure it's quantifiable it's numbers ironically if our devices had a way to actually measure your happiness somehow people would freak out and think it's creepy even though it might lead to building products that actually make you happier and so what is the solution here to me is changing what we measure to something that is not engagement Couchsurfing a service that allows you to get hosted and host people for free some years ago has changed how they track success from how much you engage with the app to something that is much more tired with the value and happiness that you get out of an app like this the amount of time that you spend with the person that is hosting you this is the metric that they ended up optimizing for and they were getting this from some service at the end of each day so how could we make this shift happen for for all apps and products well this is a very complex problem but an idea could be introducing a happiness score something that is standardized across the industry the platforms and operating systems like Windows Android and iOS could ask people each month on a rolling basis to rate the apps that they have installed and use based on how much value and happiness they're getting out of them and the results can be made available to the developers of each app so they can track progress and use this as an actual metric and to incentivize adopting this new standard this can be added front and centers in all the app stores and this way you'll know that the app you're about to download is providing or not value to users now of course this has its flaws but it can be a first step and it can provide teams with quantitative measurement of the actual value and happiness that they are bringing to users but the second reason why everything has been turned into more engagement is a spicy one because it's about money and more specifically monetization models today basically all modern tech products make me money by either showing you ads while you're using the product subscription that you pay every month for every year or gamified micro transactions which are popular especially in gaming but also in apps like Tinder and Bumble for example but it wasn't always like this 10 years ago you were downloading apps from the app store for 2.99 or buying a single song from iTunes store for 99 cents but over the last decade basically everything has shifted towards advertising in-app purchases or subscriptions why well again since became perfectly Monitor and measure engagement we can optimize like crazy for it make this Loop spin incredibly fast as your all the monetization models that relied on engagement have become popular in basically the standard now with ads the more you engage and spend time on the product the more money the company makes with in-app purchases the more you interact the more you spend and subscriptions it's debatable but companies now can draw a very clear line between increasing engagement and increasing how much money they make and when more engagement equals more money it's very easy to get into predatory tactics and dark patterns and promoting addiction to your product all of this in the name of God engagement and so how do we fix this well this is more tricky than fixing measurement these modernization models have become the standard for basically every tech product today we have become used to not paying services that bring insane value to our lives imagine going to your dads in the 80s who was going on a road trip with his friends using an atlas and paper maps and telling him that there's this device and you can basically have navigation to anywhere in the world with live traffic and knowing all the restaurants and have all the photos of all the menus in the entire world she definitely would have paid a good amount for something like that in the 80s but today consumers have become used to getting products that give them insane value for free but that got monetized in a very predatory way so again It's tricky to solve this one but one way would be to beat them at their own game and finding something that links with making more money that is stronger than engagement if you're able to crack the measurement of real value that we provide like we've seen in a step before this can be linked directly to how much money the product makes and if we find that this is a stronger LinkedIn engagement we did it if the incentive of the game now is to provide the most value this will mean that advertisers will pay higher cpms to appear on the apps that provide more value to customers subscription prices can become higher for products that you actually get more value from and the same for in-app purchases of course this was also needs a huge shift in the way consumers are perceiving payments and value for these kind of apps but I believe that the era of more engagement Is Not Gonna Last Forever fixing these two things is what's needed to get rid of engagement right here and actually end up building products that optimize for value and happiness regardless of how much time your users spend on the app or how many times they log in a day and yes still making massive profits but there is one less thing while there are definitely only things that are wrong with how some tech products today are manipulating users and creating addiction the people that are complaining about how all technology is evil and these platforms are just beasts of Satan they're doing it from a platform they can use for free uploading videos at no cost with no gatekeeper that can be seen by anyone in the world they are making money and maybe possibly also making a living out of this so maybe in the end it's not all evil after all if you like this video consider subscribing to my channel because more videos like this one are coming and in the meantime here's another video that you might enjoy

Channel: Enrico Tartarotti

Views: 26,021

Keywords: enrico tartarotti, enrico, tartarotti, enritarta, tech, tiktok, tiktok bad, why tiktok is bad, instagraam, instagram bad, instagram addiction, instagram evil, chatgpt evil, chatgpt bad, zuck bad, product management, product strategy

Id: Vbg5TeoLTW0

Length: 12min 34sec (754 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 10 2023