If Amazon is not willing to change, can we make them?
The rise of the informed consumer. A spicy mix of personal anecdotes and insights about driving change in the face of consumer capitalism. Or: Why and how to say no to mindless materialism more often. A story not just for designers.
An anecdote to set the tone
Once upon a time, Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, visited a Michelin-starred restaurant in Berlin. It so happened that I was the host at the time, the first point of contact, the gatekeeper, so to speak.
The restaurant, tucked away in a back alley littered with pigeon crap, was in stark contrast to the exclusivity it offered. The path led to two doors, one of which opened onto the bar I was tending; a small gateway to the vegetarian delights on the upper floor. Bezos, accompanied by a few tie-wearing associates and a team of grim bodyguards, walked through this door, causing a flurry of excitement among our staff.
I was not impressed.
All I saw was a man who, according to various reports, seemed to have little regard for his fellow humans. So, not knowing any better at the time, I treated him accordingly. As the only person in charge of the bar, I deliberately kept them waiting, dropping my usual polite demeanor in favor of my most neutral facial expression. I know what you must be thinking: This guy is a real hard-boiled egg.
When it was time to pay, I refused to accept any tip. This small act of resistance was my way of demonstrating that wealth does not automatically command respect. They probably didn’t care anyway.
Why am I telling you this?
Recently, Amazon has come under scrutiny for its (alleged) use of dark patterns to trick customers into subscribing to Amazon Prime. So, I wanted to take the opportunity to raise awareness and share my more mature perspective on what this might mean for our future and how to protest more effectively than younger rebel-me.
Amazon’s Dark UX Patterns — Expert View
Amazon’s UX has always been efficient for purchasing items. However, when it comes to unsubscribing from one of their services, good luck finding a way out.
Jakob Nielsen, a leading usability expert, examined Amazon’s user experience (UX) design. While he doesn’t label Amazon as the worst offender when it comes to using dark patterns, he does rate the experience they’ve designed as “bad” and admits that they “obviously could have designed much better workflows.” These shady and manipulative tactics used by organizations such as Amazon are designed to keep users engaged at the expense of their autonomy and transparency.
Nielsen concludes, “Whether laws have been broken is for the courts to decide.” From where I sit, I hope the court sets the tone for a better future and applies some common sense, as Amazon’s use of dark patterns seems pretty obvious to me.
No wonder they internally chose the low-key code name “Iliad Flow” to describe the process of unsubscribing from their service. What could inspire more trust than being sent on a maze of unexpected twists and turns to reach the lofty goal of canceling a service I no longer want? It reeks of respect for the people they serve.
By enabling users to discontinue subscriptions easily, companies honor their autonomy and respect their decisions. — Eric Chung
The Amazon experience — A personal perspective
So, they resort to questionable tactics to keep you in their ecosystem. What seems obvious now, wasn’t so clear to me as a 90s kid, growing up in a capitalist society. I found the lure of discounts, bonuses, and free stuff hard to resist, especially when money was tight — and it always was. When presented with opportunities to “save” some of my precious gold for other purchases, the likelihood of being distracted from my original intention to opt out was quite high.
“Leaving so soon? How about a free month of service? Think of all the things you’ll miss when you leave. (Meanwhile, we’ll find ways to make it almost impossible for you to leave once the free month is up.)” Ooh, the feelings they’ve triggered; the emotions they’ve stirred up. “I’d better not miss this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” I’d think, “or I’ll regret it.”
As time went on, I often forgot about my subscriptions, while companies continued to extract money from me even as the value of their service diminished. According to a Business Insider report, this forgetfulness can cost us significantly more than we realize. Add to that the cost of the countless non-essential items we buy in pursuit of short-term need satisfaction — things that make us “happy” — and you get a lot of wasted money and piles of garbage that, in the long run, hurts more than our wallets. It hurts our planet and the generations of children who will succeed us.
Interestingly, research suggests that “lower-class individuals” are more likely to derive happiness from material purchases. They assert that investing in “experiences” rather than material possessions is simply not an option when time and financial resources are scarce. I can certainly relate to this idea.
A call for companies to support healthier consumer habits
So, Amazon’s business practices may be somewhat questionable, and people like you and me may fall for the lure of their offerings, and I get that. But are companies that engage in practices like Amazon bad by intention? Or rather, do their high-ranked executives knowingly make choices that are bad by design? Do they simply not care? How could I know? But in order not to prevent genuine communication and understanding, I usually prefer to give people the benefit of the doubt. Given their practices, however, maintaining such an open mind can be, let’s say, challenging.
Ever since the boom of consumer capitalism in the post-World War II era, our thinking, and behavior have been shaped that this is it: “You need stuff, you buy stuff, you’re happy. Repeat.” But if we want to ensure our continued existence on this planet, it’s high-time we started rethinking and redesigning these patterns. What could companies do to promote healthier consumption?
Baby steps — A few ideas off the top of my head
What if services were designed to counteract impulse buying by encouraging introspection? Imagine:
- Easy-to-use bookmarking systems that allow consumers to conveniently revisit their items.
- Clear, accessible tools for comparing the sustainability of different products.
- Prompting people to take notes on items they are considering buying to stimulate thoughts, such as:
“Why do I need this item? Will I need it in a day? In a week? In a year? How was it produced? Have any people been harmed in the process? Did our planet suffer?”.
What if we implemented a feature that allowed users to set reminders for their bookmarked items, allowing them to reevaluate their need after some time has passed?
“But if the desired item is sold out tomorrow, I will be very unhappy!”
What if we considered offering something like a no-charge one-day reservation to help alleviate the fear of someone else snatching up their precious item? And if a customer needs more time than that to consider whether they need a product, perhaps a reasonable reservation fee could be an option?
Call me an idealist or a dreamer, but I passionately believe that companies need to do their fair share to promote healthier consumer habits. Maybe the production of the next piece of (hopefully) sustainable plastic isn’t even necessary to begin with. What is even better than a recyclable material? You probably guessed it: No material.
Wouldn’t it be great if the products we bought lasted longer, and instead of having to buy new ones on a regular basis due to planned obsolescence, companies focused more on providing you with excellent service to maintain your goods? Of course, there are jobs and countless other dependencies that prevent this from happening overnight, but a shift still needs to happen.
If we are to stay on this beautiful planet, the only thing “users” really “need”, and I stand by this, is to understand that they don’t need nearly as much as they are led to believe. But when material possessions don’t matter, what does?
What really matters
In their research on digital wellbeing, the BBC highlights that articulating our needs can be difficult without a certain level of self-awareness. It’s intriguing to consider in conjunction to one study that suggests that not fully understanding our true needs may be an inherent aspect of human behavior. How do we proceed from here if we don’t know what we need?
The BBC suggests that “…values are easy to explain and so act as a gateway to understanding people on a deeper level.”
…at the end of the day, it’s not about your conditions. It’s about taking whatever you have, and using it as best you can, together with your neighbours. — Norbert Aluku, social worker in the slums of Kibera
I learned to say no to many of the things I “needed” to be happy, and as it turned out, I really didn’t need most of them anyway. And if you don’t believe me, I get it, maybe this sentiment from Norbert Aluku, a skinny young social worker born and raised in Kibera, the largest slum in Nairobi, can convince you that “at the end of the day, it’s not about your conditions. It’s about taking whatever you have, and using it as best you can, together with your neighbours.”
We are talking about a place where the “primary means of disposing of human waste is what the slum-dwellers wryly refer to as ‘flying toilets’: the practice of defecating into a plastic bag, then flinging it as far from your own home as possible” and where “20 per cent of the population is infected with HIV”, as Oliver Burkeman states in his enlightening book The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking.
I am not saying that we have to get rid of everything we own to experience a similar kind of contentment, and I am certainly not saying that we have to live in slums to come to our senses; no living being should be forced to live in such grim conditions. What I am saying is that we should rethink what we value in order to make more sustainable choices. That in a way, we are all responsible for this situation because the temptation to have everything at all times may have made us lose sight of what really matters, and that is authentic human connection.
“But if I don’t sell (meaningless) stuff, how will I sustain my business?” a concerned Jeff Bezos might ask, or in other words, “How will I get even richer?”
Well, maybe, Mister, you’re rich enough? Let’s face it, wealth can corrupt, and if a person has accumulated such wealth, they’re unlikely to change their habits that have proven to be successful so far. So, what does this mean for us regular folks? What can we do to take the situation into our own hands?
Reshaping our collective behavior
It will take a mobilization of many to change our way of being so that we can change the world, a change in which we measure success not in money or other indexes such as gross domestic product (GDP) but in the wellness and happiness of people — all people. — Don Norman, Design for a Better World
As Don Norman points out in his recent book, Design for a Better World, “It will take a mobilization of many to change our way of being so that we can change the world, a change in which we measure success not in money or other indexes such as gross domestic product (GDP) but in the wellness and happiness of people — all people.”
Or, as the admittedly quirky Buckminster Fuller noted decades earlier in his 1968 work, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth: “We are not going to be able to operate our Spaceship Earth successfully nor for much longer unless we see it as a whole spaceship and our fate as common. It has to be everybody or nobody.”
This means that if corporations are unwilling to change, it’s up to us, the people, to change our behavior. We hold the power to shape our world into a more intentional and equitable space. As long as we continue to fall for dark patterns, the likes of Amazon will continue to employ them. And if we continue to mindlessly buy stuff, they will continue to give us what we “need.” But what if we all decided to resist? At some point, they would (eventually) have to rethink and decide to redefine their values and business models to fit the new paradigm.
So, what is the role of design in all of this?
In my view, any person who identifies with the principles of ethical design needs to embody the critical thinking of a philosopher, the eloquence of a diplomat, and a decent understanding of our fundamental systems while striving to understand what makes us human in the first place. This combination equips the diligent design thinker with more than the knowledge to create stunning user interfaces (yawn), but with the ability to understand different perspectives and be a voice of reason in our efforts to reshape our collective behavior.
Sure, this responsibility cannot fall solely on individuals who identify as designers. I’ll take a leap and ask: What if we incorporated human-centered design thinking into our education system? Design is more than just aesthetics — it’s a process of understanding our biases and solving complex problems with a focus on human needs and experiences. I believe that design thinking is not just a skill, but a mindset that everyone deserves to develop, much like writing.
Fostering a collective understanding of human(ity)-centered thinking, could enable us all to become more intentional in our actions. Recognizing the biases that drive our impulsive behavior can help us adjust our emotional reactions to the world, leading to decisions that benefit ourselves, others, and the planet as a whole.
But we are not all designers (yet)? What can we do? — Raising awareness
Until design thinking becomes a universal skill, we need to empower individuals to become more aware of their choices and their impact. In his renowned book “Don’t Make Me Think,” Designer Steve Krug advocates for effortless user experiences, but perhaps in our current context, encouraging thinking is precisely the antidote we need. This could mean intentionally building friction into our designs to encourage introspection, even if it may seem counterintuitive from a business point-of-view.
“Users are lazy,” a designer might say. They will not prioritize ethical design over other factors like price and convenience, and sales and design will wholeheartedly agree that users may seek their “happiness” elsewhere.
But would they really? Imagine if companies, fueled by a commitment to authentic value, went beyond mere products to provide meaningful experiences and enduring service — a trusted partner in your journey. What if transparency and honesty became the foundation of these services?
In such a scenario, I believe many people would begin to appreciate the long-term benefits of moderation and refraining from impulsive behaviors. People will likely develop the ability to recognize when companies are exploiting their emotions to sell them junk they don’t need, and instead seek offerings that give them the space and time to evaluate what truly matters to them. A newfound awareness that could empower them to make more informed choices and align their consumption with their true needs and values.
Given these insights, I think it becomes clear that it is the responsibility of any individual who recognizes these deviations to speak up if they feel that our core human values may be compromised by unethical design/business decisions.
Admittedly, redefining what value means in a business sense is a huge and complex issue, far beyond the scope of this discussion (and my humble knowledge). But here’s what I think: It all comes down to each of us recognizing our own humanity, which in a Daoist way means, as I have come to believe, understanding our insignificance in the grand scheme of things. This understanding can help us become more empathetic and less fixated on material possessions. And here’s something I’m pretty confident about: In a world that increasingly values authenticity and ethical behavior, companies that prioritize respect and trust will thrive.
Imagine a common reality of collectively prioritizing our most universal gift: life on Earth. — Adrienne Maree Brown
Let’s go a step further and echo the sentiments of author Adrienne Maree Brown in her piece Murmurations: Accountable to Earth, and ask what it would look like if everyone prioritized the Earth and its needs; envisioning a world where we build more sustainable habits by grounding our actions in their environmental impact, to find the will to simply say “no” to mindless consumerism more often. Did I mention? I like to dream.
The rise of the informed consumer
Let’s return to my original question: If Amazon is not willing to change, can we make them?
We may hope for regulatory measures, but given the consistent delay between technological advances and government regulations, bringing lasting change through legal means is a daunting task. Frankly, is it wise to put our faith in this alone? If we wish to see change, we must begin with the one entity that we have the power to influence, however slightly — ourselves.
I know it’s easy to feel powerless as a consumer in the face of dark patterns. It’s a real challenge to question established norms when you don’t know of alternative ways. You can’t know what you don’t know, unless you try to know something.
But as our understanding of these manipulative tactics grows, so does our collective capacity to resist and demand change.
With growing awareness, I hope that people will choose to say no more often, and support companies that prioritize more ethical design, forcing industries to shift to more humane and sustainable practices.
And maybe, if enough of us resist their temptations, they will have to care about or small acts of resistance and start to change.
I, for one, and many people I know, would rather spend our money where we feel respected. And when we feel respected, we are more likely to come back — unlike Jeff, who I never saw again.
Thank you for taking the time to read, I deeply appreciate your investment and I hope my words have brought you some value. I can only try to convey my truth. But since my truth is not the truth, but merely one truth — it remains open for discussion.
References
- Exhausted workers, polluting journeys: how unethical is next-day delivery? Luke Winkie, The Guardian. An eye-opening article from The Guardian exposing the unethical practices behind Amazon’s next-day delivery promise.
- FTC Sues Amazon Over Prime’s Dark Patterns: Markena Kelly, The Verge. An in-depth look at the dark patterns in the Prime subscription model, and the FTC’s lawsuit against Amazon.
- What Makes a Dark UI Pattern? NNgroup. A 3-minute video presentation that explores the characteristics and examples of dark user interface (UI) patterns, shedding light on the manipulative techniques used in UI design.
- Is Amazon.com Guilty of Dark UX Patterns? Jakob Nielsen’s insightful analysis of Amazon’s use of dark UX patterns, questioning the ethical implications of their design choices.
- Deceptive patterns: what can designers learn from Amazon getting sued?: Eric Chung, Product Designer. An insightful Medium article that explores deceptive design patterns, draws lessons from Amazon’s legal troubles, and urges designers to prioritize ethical practices.
- Forgotten subscriptions cost consumers an average of $133 more than they realize a month, according to a new study: Charlie Wood, Business Insider. Article about a study on the financial impact of forgotten subscription services on consumers, emphasizing the need for awareness and control over recurring payments.
- Experiential or Material Purchases? Social Class Determines Purchase Happiness: Yeun Joon Kim and Stephanie R. Hall. A research paper that explores the relationship between social class and purchase happiness, examining the differential impact of experiential and material purchases on individuals.
- Planned obsolescence: Wikipedia page about the process by which a product becomes obsolete (i.e., unfashionable or no longer usable) is planned and built into the product from its conception, a strategy that has far-reaching economic, societal, and environmental implications.
- BBC Research and Development — Digital Wellbeing: BBC Research and Development. The official website of BBC Research and Development, exploring various projects and initiatives related to digital wellbeing and the impact of technology on individuals.
- We May Not Know What We Want, But Do We Know What We Need? Examining the Ability to Forecast Need Satisfaction in Goal Pursuit: Julia M. Werner and Monika K. Milyavskaya. A research paper investigating the ability to predict need satisfaction in goal pursuit, exploring the complex relationship between desires, wants, and needs.
- Kibera: Wikipedia article about one of Africa’s largest urban slums, highlighting the challenges faced by its residents and the importance of addressing social inequalities.
- The Antidote – Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking: Oliver Burkeman. A book that challenges the pursuit of happiness and offers alternative perspectives on finding contentment in life.
- Design for a Better World: Don Norman’s latest attempt to drive change through design, urging us to alter human behavior and explore the possibilities of a better future.
- Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth: Buckminster Fuller. A 1968 classic that suggests that rethinking design of our systems and technologies can lead to better stewardship of our “spaceship” and thus change our behavior for the better.
- The principles of ethical design (and how to use them): Carrie Sownie, 99designs. Article discussing the principles of ethical design and offers practical guidance on incorporating ethical considerations into the design process.
- Transcending assumptions: My brief exploration of the impact of non-linear problem-solving and as a way to drive sustainable innovation and challenge our biases.
- A philosophical case study of a career changer with obsessive perfectionism: Reflections on my journey to overcome perfectionism, embrace uncertainty, and find healing through writing and design.
- Cognitive bias cheat sheet: Buster Benson. A comprehensive cheat sheet outlining the various cognitive biases that affect human decision-making, providing an invaluable resource for understanding biases and their implications.
- Don’t Make Me Think: Steve Krug. A pioneering work in the field of web usability, advocating intuitive and straightforward design principles and emphasizing that a good website or application should allow users to accomplish their intended tasks as easily and directly as possible.
- Why Designers Think Users Are Lazy: 3 Human Behaviors: Kate Moran, Nielsen Norman Group. Informative article examining common user behaviors that designers often misinterpret as laziness, shedding light on the importance of understanding user motivations.
- Dao: Wikipedia article. The essence of Dao is the fundamental, unchanging principle of the universe that guides all things and is the path to follow for a harmonious life.
- Murmurations Accountable to Earth: Adrienne Maree Brown. A thought-provoking piece that questions the prioritization of the earth’s needs and imagines a world where actions are guided by their impact on the planet.
