Some people are scumbags

Luckily, most people aren’t. The problem is that most of the systems we use everyday — everything from vacation tracking to traffic signals — assume that all of us are. There’s a pretty simple way to de-scumify, as you’ll see below. The missing ingredient? Trust.

Our first instinct when faced with the threat of losing control is to immediately tighten the control we have. Consider employer vacation policies. Most Western employers allocate their staff a fixed number of paid vacation weeks and a handful of sick days. The meter’s running, so you better save them up for something really special. As Dan Pink’s recent Telegraph article explains, there is a better way. Look no further than corporate-culture-poster-child Netflix and their ‘radical’ re-imagining of vacation policy. It’s radical in its simplicity: don’t track it. People use as much or as little as they want as long as their work is covered and their manager knows where they are. It empowers people, treats them like mature adults, and fosters a relationship of trust. I love this quote: “To paraphrase one Netflix executive, the company doesn’t have a clothing policy either. But – so far at least – nobody has shown up to work naked.”

Design for trust

The key is to design for trust instead of deviance. It means letting go of our distrust and innate fear of getting screwed over. That fear is pretty useful in the wild, especially since most things you don’t know are out to eat you, but it’s a lot less useful in the ‘civilized’ world.

eBay is a classic example: a system that wouldn’t even exist if Pierre Omidyar hadn’t designed for trust. Buyers and sellers in face-to-face auctions can exchange money for goods in a safe switcheroo. People doing that over the Internet in 1995 were either the most trusting people on the planet or in for a lifetime on the business end of the bait and switch. Omidyar designed eBay around the belief that the vast majority of people could be trusted and he was right. The inclusion of a reputation system based on data reported by fellow buyers and sellers closed the trust gap even further, resulting in a remarkably fraud-free environment given the potential for abuse.

Design for the center, solve for the edge

None of this is to say that people won’t abuse your system. We’re an opportunistic species and that means we’ll find loopholes you didn’t even know existed (especially if there’s money to be found). You need to realize that opportunistic behavior is the edge case — a problem to be solved rather than a critical design decision. Clay Shirky, author of the excellent Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, as summarized by Dan Pink:

…when we design systems that assume bad faith from the participants, and whose main purpose is to defend against that nasty behaviour, we often foster the very behaviour we’re trying to deter. People will push and push the limits of the formal rules, search for every available loophole, and look for ways to game the system when the defenders aren’t watching. By contrast, a structure of rules that assumes good faith can actually encourage that behaviour.

Traffic signals are one of the best examples of this behavior. Driving is not a higher intellect activity — we’ve all blearily buckled in at home and suddenly found ourselves at work with no real recollection of all the in-between bits — and so it’s not surprise that most traffic systems treat as as automatons who react only to red, yellow, and green. The very design of the system dehumanizes us, turning otherwise normal, caring people into road-rage infected demons. Witness the eternal battle of Mr. Walker and Mr. Wheeler:

Motor Mania (1950) — skip to 3:20 for the bit about traffic signals

It’s hard to imagine roads without signals, especially if you’ve grown up with a traffic light at every intersection. People feel the same way about vacation tracking — we do it because we’ve always done it — but it doesn’t have to be that way. Enter Hans Monderman, Dutch traffic engineer. If there’s one thing Monderman hates, it’s traffic signs. His core belief: Build roads that seem dangerous, and they’ll be safer. Speaking about one of his intersections, which lacks any form of traffic signs, Monderman says:

“Pedestrians and cyclists used to avoid this place, but now, as you see, the cars look out for the cyclists, the cyclists look out for the pedestrians, and everyone looks out for each other. You can’t expect traffic signs and street markings to encourage that sort of behavior. You have to build it into the design of the road.”

In the same way that removing vacation tracking re-humanized vacations, Hans has found a way to re-humanize drivers by designing for trust (see the excellent Wired article all about Hans, Roads Gone Wild).

The ‘perils’ of anonymity

Anonymous feedback was the first feature we ever built at Rypple. From day one people told us it wouldn’t work because (other) people wouldn’t be able to resist the siren song of anonymity and would surely use it for evil. Two years in, the jury has unanimously decided in favor of trust. We’ve never had a comment from any of our customers about abuse — only piles and piles of “love” and “awesome” and “culture changing”.

How do you design for trust? What are examples of systems designed for trust?

Photo of Pierre Omidyar by Joi Ito.