Self-service options on the web changed customer activity. “Thank You” stamped on the lid of a trash bin at fast food chains was intended to change activity. I don’t see anything new here. UCD can go either way, to reinforce or to change activity. How did people, at least in the USA, learn to pump their own gas even in the absence of Self Service or Full Service signs?

Competition is not going to work for everyone but its one step higher in the ‘empowerment’ stakes and at least gives people the option to engage / disengage actively rather than simply having something forced upon them. Is the real challenge not making people feel that they are higher up the hierarchy/design decision tree than maybe they actually are, so they don’t just feel like helpless nodes at the far ends of the network/system/service diagram?

Again this is not new, I suppose it’s why Google and other keeps things in beta a lot of the time. But why if designers are prepared to / have to acknowledge the dynamic nature of systems do they still try and design products that give user’s the impression they are completely robust. Again this is Don Norman territory isn’t it – “if automation is not completely robust, don’t automate it” and it’s is all stuff you covered already Dan.

But given that there are performance benefits of giving designers a supervisory or testing role http://www.fergusbisset.com/blog/2009/05/17/systems-that-encourage-you-to-think-you-can/ why aren’t more designers/organisations adopting a beta model when it comes to developing products and services?

Part of me does fear that a massive increase in the use of design to influence behaviour will lead to a lot more cynical, ‘users-are-stupid’ examples (or designers becoming part of some nanny-state apparatus that we’re really not suited to) – or even a kind of retreat from debate of the kind that Martyn Perks argues Nudge-type thinking will lead to, as users come to rely on design/policy to guide us to behave ‘correctly’ in everything.

Even if the intent is benign, for some definition of benign (and it won’t always be), as you say, the impact on millions of people’s lives by small design changes can be massive. It’s perhaps going to be difficult to embed the need to think about those impacts, and take responsibility for them, into designers’ processes, especially for cases where no-one really knows what the impacts will be.

On the other hand, though, B J Fogg has argued (paraphrased) that the very fact that a tiny change to, say, the Facebook home page or Twitter’s @reply process can alter the way millions of people interact with it, just like that, and that we can measure & track the behaviour change exactly in a way that just isn’t possible with physical, non-networked products, allows this kind of service to become the ultimate real-time mass laboratory for testing out different design techniques, with far less potential downside (quick to fix, too) compared with real-life roll-outs of products. Though, of course, users might not appreciate being seen in this context!