Product For Populism

As the country tries to figure out how they’re going to respond to Donald Trump’s presidency next year, the market continues to stay on course, despite the turmoil on the social and political fronts. Silicon Valley may very much be in disarray right now, but businesses that have been around for longer seems to think that they’re better equipped to handle the the changes that are about to unfold.

Here are some of the projections that financial analysts are making in the short-to-mid term:

Tax Cuts: If this were a normal election cycle, Trump’s proposed tax cuts for the wealthy (which would lead to greater investment in the private sector) would be a surefire thing, given that the Republicans now control both the House and the Senate. Given the fractures and divisions of the current GOP, though, whether this pans out has yet to be seen. (It’s expected that the Democrats will be unanimously against Trump and the vote will be very close either way.)

Regulations: The easing of environmental and financial regulations is very likely, due to the fact that the executive branch doesn’t need Congress’ permission to enact a lot of these changes as part of government policy. Civil and private lawsuits are likely to slow down the process considerably, however.

Infrastructure: In theory, infrastructure spending is something that everyone supports, but the GOP has historically had a lot of disagreements about how these initiatives will gain its funding. If Trump can manage to gain bipartisan support for these measures it very may become a reality, but how likely is that to happen?

Global Trade: Being left out of the Trans-Pacific-Partnership deal, China is actually fairly upset at Obama’s trade policies and is looking at a Trump presidency as an opportunity to start anew. This is still a big question-mark because if Trump sticks to his protectionist agenda there is a chance that trade relations with Asia and abroad will get considerably worse. It’s also unclear as to how the president-elect plans on bringing back manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. when so much of its infrastructure has been outsourced overseas, at this point.

Is Trump going to actually implement any of the promises that he made to his voters? There are already signs that he’s started to soften his stance on a lot of issues that he vehemently argued for during his campaign, if he hadn’t already recanted it fully by now. If he follows the route of the most likely path, we’ll probably end up with the usual governmental dysfunction: more tax cuts, more spending, bigger debt. Terrible, perhaps, but nothing that the American people hasn’t seen already.

That’s the broad overview of what people are talking about in the financial sector right now. Rather than directly talking about politics, however, I’d like to spend the time here to talk about how these changes might affect product and product design, particularly in the technology sector. There’s a good chance that politics will run as usual, but what’s obvious is that the sentiment of the public has changed drastically, and irreversibly. In order to stay relevant, tech itself will have to adapt to its new cultural climate to survive.

Populist Design

Politically speaking, we are now in an age of populist nationalism — an economic and ideological reaction from the forces of globalization that has remained dominant for the last several decades now. Even if Trump somehow manages to lose his presidency before his next term is up, the writing is still on the wall: Americans, as a whole, are not very happy with how things are going right now. Having spent the last few decades trying to “eat the world” through software, this transition will be a pretty tough one for Silicon Valley since they’re used to thinking about customers as a global entity, rather than a national one. As a continuation of my previous article, I’d like to go more into detail about what this shift really means.

The unexpected amount of support given to Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump during the 2016 elections is proof that there was a hidden “pain-point” among middle and working class voters in the US that had largely been unaddressed. Many in the tech industry chose to ignore (or even be hostile) to these trends, however, since it didn’t quite jive with their globalist ideology and economic beliefs. All of our smartphones are manufactured overseas, after all — who were they to get in the way of progress?

I’ve always felt that the way the Valley thinks about UX and design had a certain, unmistakable bias to it: mainly that techies were creating products largely for themselves. The sleek, minimalist design featuring simple shapes, primary colors, and lots of empty space — a style now associated with expensive condos and office spaces that most people can’t afford — has a tendency to make most people feel uncomfortable, at best. Yet, the same designs get used over and over in every startup, every technology website, as if it’s supposed to satisfy the needs of all of the customers all at once. Perhaps we’ve been pushing an aesthetic onto the public against their wishes and hurting ourselves in the process, even without knowing it.

There’s also a problem with a lot of the content we produce on the internet itself — articles and ads on the net are largely geared towards people who spend most or all of their time on the computer. While this might be fine for white-collar workers, there are many people who have physically demanding jobs that don’t allow them the luxury of sneak-surfing on the web during work.

Fake news content tends to be geared towards people working a few jobs at a time, those who don’t have the time to fact-check everything they read. Can we really blame them for not performing their “civic duty”? Or perhaps it’s our fault for not realizing the true extent of the problem.

A lot of this is the result of the tools that we use to conduct our research on our customers — surveys, formally constructed interviews, data points derived from what people do on our apps —things we feel don’t judge us accurately as a person but a system that we consistently push on others anyway. Using computers to gauge how people feel about using computers introduces a bias to the research process that has the potential to corrupt the data that we were wanting to seek.

I’m hoping that in the upcoming years our research methods will improve in order to capture the other part of the picture that we’ve been missing for so long. Not only because is it the right thing to do, but because it’s an opportunity to make better products that satisfy the customer on a deeper level. To the the real picture, we need the whole picture — not just what makes us feel comfortable.