When tech companies exploit customers, they risk undermining trust in the entire digital ecosystem. One common form of exploitation occurs when digital platforms are designed to take advantage of customers’ behavioral biases. Managers need to understand these biases and make a good faith effort to earn customer trust with ethical platform design choices.
Do Your Digital Design Choices Take Advantage of Customers?
Options that manipulate consumers into spending more can also hurt you in the long run.
August 23, 2021
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Summary.
Executives must play a proactive role in making sure their digital design functions in the best interests of users. Doing so has the potential to give companies a deeper and more positive relationship with its customers. Brands that design their sites to exploit consumer behavioral bias (or those that fail to recognize that they do so unknowingly) might benefit in the short term, but the damage done to their reputation will do lasting harm. To determine how your brand might be exploiting customers online, ask yourself the following questions: 1) Are you being transparent in user agreements? 2) Do you make cancelling your services easy? 3) Are your default options the best options for customers? 4) Do you frame choices in a misleading way? and 5) Is your product addictive?