Pro-Social on Designing for Agency
A recap of our conversation with Kai Lukoff.
Kai Lukoff joined us at our Pro Social in October for a conversation about how - and why - platforms should design for user agency.
Agency - the ability to direct one's actions and their consequences - is closely related to autonomy, but it goes beyond having the right to make choices. Indeed, as Kai discussed, platforms like to make the case that users have freedom of choice in all their online actions, yet at the same time companies design their platforms to chip away at our agency, using auto-play and other tools to make us passive rather than conscious users. It is no surprise that users report having little sense of control when using social media apps.
Kai pointed to ways to restore that sense of agency, which social scientists say is a basic psychological need on par with feeling competent or connected. His work focuses on video apps where users report feeling most like they've given the reins to platforms. He recognizes that users have different goals each time they use a video app; at times they may have a specific objective of learning about a topic; at other times they may just want to be entertained. To give users agency in setting those goals Kai developed SwitchTube, a Youtube-like app that lets users easily toggle between two modes - "focus" that gives results for specific searchers without distracting recommendations or autoplay, and "explore" that lets users sit back and let the algorithm entertain them. In a trial, as expected, Kai found that participants reported the strongest sense of control when they could toggle between the two modes.
While SwitchTube gives users a sense of agency on how they use their time on video apps, in the discussion Kai and Pro Social attendees explored other areas where tools and platforms can design for agency, for example in who we connect to and how we engage with others, as well as in feeling in control of how we manage our work communications on applications like Slack.
Finally, in the Q&A and breakout discussions some themes that arose were whether there are limits to how much agency we should design for, given that making decisions can be onerous, and if we should be designing for agency in different ways for young people.
Watch the full conversation with Kai below.
About the Prosocial Design Network
The Prosocial Design Network researches and promotes prosocial design: evidence-based design practices that bring out the best in human nature online. Learn more at prosocialdesign.org.