The Little Things

Koan #48

I hit one of those hand sanitizer pumps at the pharmacy the other day. You know, the ones in the gallon container that dispense an ungodly amount of sanitizer that still has you rubbing your hands together two minutes later. There I am in the pharmacy, rubbing sanitizer all over my hands, in between fingers, up my arms, wondering when it will thin out enough to dry. Then I started wondering about the company that manufactured this stuff.

In my home, I have various pump dispensers of this sort. There are the soap pumps at every sink. The shampoo and conditioner dispensers in the shower. Then you have the hand creams, lotions, sprays and the list goes on. It’s seldom that any of them dispense the right amount of product. Most of the time, they seem to dispense too much. This seems to be the exact opposite of my experience in public restrooms and restaurants where automatically dispensed products seem to consistently dispense too little soap, paper towels, napkins, ketchup, etc.

Here’s what I picture happening in the development of these various products. I could be wrong, but I imagine a hand soap company that needs to increase sales. So, they look at their business slides in a meeting and decide to put an incentive in place for executives who can do this. They set a metric that trickles down to some product person or engineer who has the idea to simply make the soap dispenser dispense more than what is needed. The opposite happens in businesses that need to curb overconsumption. A restaurant, for example, might choose a soap dispenser that dispenses far less than what is needed to mitigate excess expenses.

Sound far-fetched?

I went to a presentation on behavioral economics years ago when we were just starting to talk about it as a concept in design circles. An example of Alka-Seltzer was given as a product that encouraged overconsumption. A single tablet of Alka-Seltzer technically provides a single dose of aspirin (325 mg). But the product is sold in packets of two tablets and the company’s old jingle used to go, “Plop, plop, fizz, fizz. Oh, what a relief it is.” For years, they ran that commercial showing a hand dropping 2 tablets into a clear glass of water.

We could probably split hairs and debate whether a single dose of aspirin is 325 mg or 650 mg. But the point in the presentation stuck with me. There are most certainly products out there that encourage overconsumption to sell more product.

At what cost?

For the soap and chemical companies, we’re increasing harm to the environment and possibly even contributing to antibiotic resistance. Hairspray (and other aerosol products) almost certainly contributed to the hole(s) in the ozone layer and increased incidence of skin cancer across the globe. Fast food companies not only supersized their meals and drinks but also our waistlines.

I’d like to think my chosen profession in the digital world is the exception. But it isn’t. We do the exact same thing with our digital products. Notifications are a good example. They are like the soap dispenser that dispenses too much.

Notifications increase engagement. Engagement is one of the numbers used to entice advertisers to put their content on a platform. Every time I click on the ellipsis telling LinkedIn not to send me a certain type of notification, they comply and then begin sending me a different type. Somebody deep in the bowels of that company likely uses engagement (the number of times a user logs in to the platform to clear out a notification) to achieve their metrics and annual goal.

At what cost?

In the digital world that’s even harder to figure out. But I theorize we begin to see notifications as less important over time, ignoring them or clearing them out quickly and moving on. Or maybe we become even more addicted to our devices and platforms, which contributes to mental health issues.

Then there is the obvious electrical energy expended each time a device is turned on or a web page is accessed. So, in some small way, we are harming the environment with each engagement and each time we run our batteries down a little bit more. It may be a small amount. But it exists and it grows as we consume more and more technology.

Nothing is free in the universe. For every action there is a reaction and energy is exchanged. Even for the smallest things this is true. Logging into a platform consumes energy.

As an undergraduate, I can still remember being exposed to Chaos theory and how a butterfly, flapping its wings off the coast of Japan could cause a tsunami across the world. I’m still fascinated by that idea — the smallest things having large consequences.

Little things matter more than we think they do.

Every once in awhile, we designers get the ball. When we do, it’s up to us to decide whether we choose the supersized pump or the one that dispenses the right amount — the notification system that increases engagement or the one that just makes sense.

Though it often doesn’t seem so at first blush, the decisions we make and the products we design can have far-reaching consequences.