Picture this: It’s 9:45 pm on a Tuesday and you realize you’re out of milk. Rather than risk a toddler meltdown at breakfast tomorrow morning, you zip out to the local grocery store and stock up before the morning. You walk inside and take the center aisle down towards the back of the store to get to the dairy cooler.
As you walk past the snacks, you grab a bag of chips. And some goldfish crackers that are on sale. You grab your milk, then scoop up a chocolate bar on your way back to the till. (Might as well pick up a treat for yourself while you’re here.)
You leave with what you came for—plus a few extras. If the dairy cooler was at the front of the store next to the checkout, you might never have grabbed those other items. But, it’s at the back of the store on purpose. Retailers learned long ago that they could maximize sales by putting the most popular items at the back of the store. This kind of intentional layout forces you to walk through an aisle and increases the likelihood that you’ll pick up something else. This is called persuasive design.
But what does grocery store design have to do with digital parenting? Well, many of the tech products that our families use every day are designed with a similar underlying logic. They use persuasive design to influence how we interact with the platform—often in a way that benefits the tech company.
The term “persuasive design” gets thrown around a lot, but I wanted to define it and outline what it means for kids and parents. It’s an important one because it affects us when we use tech platforms for better or for worse.
I like this explanation from Richard Freed, a child psychologist: “The formula is that in order to have behavioral change, you need motivation, ability, and triggers. In the case of social media, the motivation is people’s cravings for social connection; it can also be the fear of social rejection. For video games, it’s the desire to gain skills and accomplishments. Ability basically means making sure that the product is remarkably easy to use. Finally, you add triggers, which keep people coming back. So those videos you can’t look away from, the rewards you get inside an app when you use it longer, or the hidden treasure boxes in games once you reach a certain level—these are all triggers, put there as part of the persuasive design.”
This is the formula that tech companies have been using to make compelling platforms: build a product that speaks to a basic human need. Make it very, very easy to use. Use triggers to keep people coming back for more. Many Big Tech companies have been using this formula to boost their metrics—which improves their bottom lines. They’ve even hired psychologists to help pull the levers and make their products as compelling as possible. And they’ve done so without much regard for how it affects kids.
Of course, persuasive design is not problematic in and of itself. Companies can use the tenets of persuasive design to build products that benefit kids and families. Products that bring them closer together, create new opportunities for shared experiences and encourage them to take breaks instead of scroll forever.
Persuasive design becomes a problem when it’s used against us. Back in 2017, Facebook executives in Australia put together a presentation for advertisers indicating that they could monitor posts and photos to determine when young people felt “stressed, defeated, overwhelmed, anxious, nervous, stupid, silly, useless and a failure.” Obviously, it’s a huge problem when tech companies are helping advertisers target kids who are in emotional distress. Exploiting anyone, let alone children, while they’re in that kind of state is unconscionable.
It’s important for parents to know about persuasive design because knowledge is power. The more you know about how apps are designed (and why they’re designed that way) the more empowered you are. When you check out a new app or platform, ask yourself what kind of formula might be at work in the background. Is the app tapping into your need to belong? It is mining your desire to feel accomplished? Is it easy to scroll the afternoon away, or does it nudge you to take a break? Does it send you notifications at all hours triggering you to open up the app?
Again, persuasive design is not new—and it’s not inherently bad. But, it’s a tool that tech companies have used against users, often without us knowing. Hopefully, the future will bring more transparency, ethical design practices and better support for parents. There are other companies out there like Kinzoo that prioritize kids’ wellbeing when they build technology, and we hope this becomes the rule, not the exception.
A deeper dive
Here are a few helpful resources in case you want to really dig into today's topic:
If you’re curious to learn more about persuasive design, this article here is a great rundown. It’s a little older but still gives an excellent overview of the topic from child psychologist Richard Freed, who I quoted above.
Back in 2018, a group of psychologists wrote an open letter to the American Psychological Association expressing their concerns about persuasive design in children’s technology. They thought it was problematic that trained psychologists were helping tech companies to create products with “hidden manipulation techniques,” and went so far as to call the practice unethical.
TL;DR
Too long; didn't read. It shouldn't be a full-time job to keep up on industry news, so here is a mercifully quick summary of some other notable developments:
More and more, state legislators are beginning to draft legislation to try and protect kids online. The latest to join the pack is Louisiana. According to the New York Times, a new law aims to “prohibit online services—including social networks, multiplayer games and video-sharing apps—from allowing people under 18 to sign up for accounts without parental consent. It would also allow Louisiana parents to cancel the terms-of-service contracts that their children signed for existing accounts on popular services like TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Fortnite and Roblox.” While I agree that regulators need to do more to protect children online, I fear a broad-sweeping law like this is in danger of doing more harm than good. They try to protect kids—but that’s often at the expense of user privacy.
As new bills aimed at child protection gain momentum, Big Tech companies often retroactively introduce new safety measures to try and appease lawmakers. So naturally, Meta is releasing new features intended to protect kids from bullying, harassment and abuse. According to the Washington Post, Meta is also “testing new health and safety features on Instagram, such as nudging teens to log off if they’re scrolling videos at night. Like past updates, teens can ignore these nudges and even opt out entirely of parental supervision.”
And lastly
Here are a few more pieces of original writing from me and my team—just in case you're keen for more:
Dr. Max Davie is Officer for Health Improvement at the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, and my team sat down with him to talk about kids’ wellbeing and technology. Check out the full interview here if you want to hear his take on persuasive design in tech.
It’s not always easy to assess whether a new app is worthwhile or not. If you need some insight into how to tell the good from the bad, here’s a piece my team wrote to help cut through the noise.