Designing for Respect

Chapter 3. Looking Forward

So what might some of these principles look like put into action? Here are a few thoughts, concepts, and scenarios that could help provide for a more ethical and respectful future:

Messaging is the new medium

The world is moving toward messaging and conversations as ways of transacting. Imagine if canceling a service was as simple as sending a text message. There are already some services that are beginning to base themselves entirely on messaging. Magic and Facebook’s M are a couple of services that take the idea of conversation as service to the next level. Apart from these personal assistant solutions, can businesses leverage conversation as a new way of servicing customers?

I know you know me

Given all the data that businesses have on their users, can’t they guess why we are probably calling, or signing in? Let’s build a system that makes some smart guesses. Similar to the credit card example from before, can we save users time by proactively making guesses about what they are most likely curious about? The key here is that the user often knows what data the business knows, so why not use it? Imagine if the next time you log into your bank’s website, a chat box pops up and says, Hi, thanks for your recent payment. I see that there was a strange charge on your card—would you like to investigate that?. This ideal experience could be a recording or a human; the key is, given all the data we know they know, it’s possible to save time and get to the ...