Caring

This week one of my clients hosted me in their office for a warm, wonderful ask-me-anything session for their product and design teams. While I don't like onsite work, it was very lovely to be welcomed. We ate at their yemekhane (company cafeteria) and like many company cafeterias, they served not so tasty but humble food. We then gathered at a conference room for a long, unedited, unfiltered chat about careers, working in tech in Türkiye, design approaches, inter/intra-team conflicts. Oh mind you, tea was flowing like water! :)

We had a list of questions they wanted to discuss, and we ran out of time. One of the questions that we didn't get to discuss was about the quality of a user experience:

My answer: the amount of care.

Good design shows that you care

Things that are designed well show that the team behind that product (or service) cares. I feel that there are roughly four levels to this care:

• Level 1: Team cares about the immediate user, the person in front of the screen/touchpoint. This is the easiest thing to do and most teams focus on this entirely, and they do a decent job.
• Level 2: Team cares about the affected users, secondary users. For example, if you are running a grocery shopping app, what happens when you are about to run out of stock on an item? Do you rush to make sure that you empty your inventory so that you can sell other items, or do you offer alternatives so that someone else who may need that item more than others could have a chance to get it?
• Level 3: Team cares about the people that make the product/service possible. For example, if you offer same day shipment, what do you do to make sure that the pickers at the warehouse do their job comfortably?
• Level 4: Team cares about people that are not users; they care about the things that their product/service causes in other people's lives who are not users of this service. For example, when you haul a shared ride, do you consider the effect of the pickup zone on commuters who are trying to get home? You can extend this level all the way to the atmosphere, or beyond.

It is hard to care nowadays...

Nowadays it can be very hard personally to go beyond Level 1 :( There is only so much one can do as an individual to influence organizations to go beyond Level 2. Teams may be shooting for Level 4, but political and economic realities may be actively pushing teams to avoid this level of care. As you move up, you get more responsibility, which implies that you may need to care about ethics, and that decimates profits, doesn't it... 😑

Caring gets even harder in an environment where mindless automation without regard to process, outcomes, and quality is pushed to us everyday. Yes, AI. Dan Sinker has an excellent post where he covers the concept of care and how it has the potential to be a factor of distinction during this AI bubble.

Not caring is so emblematic of the moment we're in where completely disposable things are shoddily produced for people to mostly ignore. AI is, of course, at the center of this moment. It's a mediocrity machine by default. It has the ability to create something good enough. If you don't care, it's miraculous. The fact that the userbase for AI chatbots has exploded exponentially demonstrates that good enough is, in fact, good enough for most people. Because most people don't care.

For readers in Türkiye, replace who cares with bişey olmaz and check to see if you are still comfortable with that.

Care can start at any level

Showing that you care can start at any level. I want to share with you one recent example–about Skype.

You may have heard that Skype has been phased out, and rolled into Teams. Skype was the cool tech back then. It had the best video and audio quality, and that mattered A LOT to people who are trying to talk to their families and friends from a long distance. It mattered even more to people separated from their families living abroad. It was easy enough to setup for even the least techie relatives, and it gave us a, mind you, a free way to connect with them.