“The vicious cycle starts: if you fail at something, you think it is your fault. Therefore you think you can’t do that task. As a result, next time you have to do the task, you believe you can’t, so you don’t even try. The result is that you can’t, just as you thought.”
― Donald A. Norman, The Design of Everyday Things
There is a more sinister element to this quote that is more apparent today. The book I mentioned talks about design in physical sense, the art of directing users to be able to use products and services to the upmost benefit. In 2024, as we see many companies take advantage of a local populations, the purposefulness of poor feedback from technology pierces through.
The most apparent place I see the darks side of this is through how difficult it is to cancel subscriptions compared to how easy it is to sign up. There are so many flows where a consumer can sign up for the service through almost every channel. But somehow, when it comes to canceling the service, we can only go on a browser or through email.
In our devices we see the same things. I think that the iPhone when it first came out really made technology manageable for many people. It allowed people to text without using T9, to browse the web without a computer, and use apps for services that they may otherwise not have, like Google Maps.
Fast forward to today, where Apple is becoming a services company over a hardware company, and I think this confusion from poor feedback comes through. Apple is banking on a 30% fee from every dollar spent on the App Store from any app. Apple is just as incentivized as everyone else to make you spend more, or perhaps, to make you forget to cancel subscriptions.
I know that apple has an easier subscription cancelation process than almost anywhere else, but that is the bare minimum. Apple knows exactly how much money is being transacted through this apps, and could give you a breakdown of how much is spent.
But if you are monitoring 10 different dollar amounts through 10 different apps, how are you really supposed to pay attention to them all?
Japan is a cash based economy. On my trip to Japan, having to withdraw from an ATM to be able to pay for things made me acutely aware of how much I was spending. The feedback of physical dollars spent to an emptying wallet was a good one.
Abstracting away all of our expenses and making it difficult to cancel them is a sinister design. We will always be blamed, which, to be honest, I do blame myself for. But why are we living in an economy where we have to be borderline tricked for almost every service?