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Zooming Out: Societal UX

What is Societal UX?

Societal UX is term I came up with to describe a potential field of study that uses data to account for the civic impact of UX decisions, and designing a future with that understanding in mind. 

Much has been written about "Designing for Social Impact", and using UX to create positive environmental and social change.

This entry is more of a neutral, generalized look at the idea of the true value of a product or system includes the effect it has on society, and potentially designing an offset, or accounting for a limitation in scale or usage time by a user.

Across any industry, designers and analysts can point to data showing how UX decisions plays out at scale. Something as simple as a “Checkout as Guest” button has measurable effects: increased conversion rates, and an ever growing pile of globally discarded goods visible from space.

Societal UX could be the study of how the design of systems, services, and platforms produce outcomes, and attempting to incorporate these outcomes into the product vision.

Societal UX can be a framework for value, by focusing on decisions that consider what comes next, and accounting for that in the decision to extend a product's lifespan. This could include undoing work done in earlier paradigms.

It is my opinion this type of approach can be focused on ROI and done without abstract utopias. Using an evidence-based approach to shaping systems can increase economic resilience, and maximize potential value at every stage of an interaction.

Is "Disruption" Considered Societal UX?

The disruption era promised liberation, and instead transferred control to centralized platforms. This has eroded wages, housing access, and economic mobility. Disruption became a bait and switch: offering freedom, but delivering consolidation. 

Societal UX could be a way of responding to the "Disruption Era" by building user strategies informed by the data we now have. For example, let's look at some of the outcomes of this era that have weakened the economic resilience of the societies these businesses rely on.

Ridesharing

Drivers carry full financial and physical risk, with no benefits, no path to ownership or advancement.

Gig work was marketed as freedom, but resulted in centralized platform control and suppressed wages.

The shift to driverless cars leaves no future for driver careers within the system.

Alternative Hospitality
Platform use by commercial investors reduces housing supply and inflates urban rents.

Individual homeownership declines as large scale property management dominates.

Enabled corporate real estate expansion under the guise of community driven sharing.

Streaming Music
Streaming economics favor major labels while independent musicians earn unsustainable payouts.

Automated playlist curation and visibility are controlled by corporate gatekeepers, not users.

The platform replicates traditional industry hierarchies while presenting itself as democratizing.

Streaming Movies
Originally framed as a disruptor of traditional TV, now mirrors studio gatekeeping.

Algorithm-driven content and IP exploitation dominate its production logic.

Has introduced ad-supported models and bulk production, blurring with the legacy networks it replaced.

Social Media

Initially platforms for community, now closed ecosystems driven by the sale of advertisting data.

Monetizes user behavior at scale, shaping public discourse through engagement favoring rage and division.

Users, creators, and publishers have no ownership and limited visibility into how the system works.

Decentralized Finance (DeFi)
Promised transparency and decentralization, but mirrors Wall Street’s opacity.

Value easily manipulated by early stage investors.

Exploits governance failures, exposing systemic fragility.

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Societal UX: Designing for Participation

Poor design can discourage participation, while increased access will encourage it.

The experience of interacting with the biggest platforms can set the tone for how citizens view their society. It can build engagement, or erode it. It can increase equity and prosperity, or widen existing gaps.

Cleaning Up Dark UX and Algorithmic Bias

The UX decisions behind these platforms are often hidden, driven by algorithmic prioritization that isn’t visible to the user. This has led to the widespread normalization of “dark UX”, a manipulative pattern to drive engagement without consent.

For marginalized users, algorithmic bias compounds the problem, reinforcing systemic inequities through machine learned patterns of exclusion or misrepresentation.

Transparency in how content is surfaced, agency in how algorithms can be configured, and accountability for outcomes are all representative of building user trust.

What we experience online is a product of human decisions, and making those systems legible could have an enormous impact on society's ability to understand the effect of these platforms.

What Effect Does UX Have on Society?

Over time, interfaces teach people how to behave.

This shaping power can be subtle. How dating apps structure interactions changes how people form relationships. How payment platforms show (or hide) fees affects attitudes toward transparency. How comment sections are styled influences whether users respond with thoughtfulness or aggression.

As UX scales, it becomes part of the social fabric. 

Inclusive UX addresses the full range of user realities. When done responsibly, it becomes a tool for inclusion in a platform's business model.

Now That We Know What We Know, What Do We Make?

The ethical failures of digital platforms are well documented.

We know that design choices affect mental health, democracy, and inequality.

We know how patterns like endless engagement play out over time.

So the question becomes what do we build using that knowledge, in a way that will still provide ROI for the business it's based on? As UX designers, this is likely to become a defining challenge of the next era.

The Effects of Algorithms are Evidenced in Global Relations

Algorithmically driven interfaces are well known to push content based on negative engagements that elevate outrage over discourse. When deployed globally, these patterns affect how people relate to one another, to authority, and to truth and reality itself.

Designers working at scale should consider not just the user, but the society the user lives in. At this level, UX no longer just informs behavior, it constructs environments we all inhabit.

Limiting Disinformation

Digital platforms weren’t designed to uphold the integrity of civic discourse, to put it lightly.

Designers have begun to explore interventions like labels, context cues. These are affordances for better judgment. When properly designed, they create space for pause, for checking sources, for resisting impulse.

UX cannot solve disinformation alone, but it can label it and reduce it's algorithmic value.

How to Undo the Mental Health Damage from Social Media Going Forward

Young users of social media experience increased anxiety, loneliness, and body dissatisfaction linked directly to the design of these platforms.

Inanity is engineered to feel urgent to young minds.

Feeds are structured to create emotional highs and lows, and present ads based on these emotional states.

Attention is extracted at any cost.

To undo this damage, UX could shift to designing tools that emphasize for intentional use, offering clear off-ramps, and giving users visibility into how their content is being prioritized, and avoid preying on users with UX that exploits addictive tendencies.

Social Impact Design

This kind of UX doesn’t chase growth. It creates room for people to thrive where growth has previously excluded them. It brings the principles of good design to the places that need it most, and often receive it last.

This is the hardest UX to sell.

Improving the civic experience could mean focusing on clarity, consistency, and accessibility across all interactions.

It involves designing systems that work for those with limited literacy, disabilities, economic, or language barriers.

Good design supports workflows, reduces burnout, and reinforces collaboration, enabling information to flow smoothly.

Design systems that can alleviate pressure.

Societal UX is Self-Aware Innovation

Innovation that incorporates Societal UX considers the full context of a product’s deployment, from development to long-term use to the challenges it will create for users.

It involves designing with foresight, acknowledging risk, building in accountability, and accepting limitations as opportunities.

What Could Societal UX Look Like in Practice?

I came up with two examples to try to illustrate this in practice:

1. A major retail platform knows that 10% of goods are returned to them on average.

The current policy is to discard returns that don't meet the qualifications for repacking.

A separate part of the same marketplace could be rebranded to sell these discarded goods in another market under another name.

This reduces the waste generated by returns almost zero by putting these goods back into retail circulation, and protects the integrity of the original marketplace by operating under a different name.

2. A social media platform is struggling with over-usage and improper content with users who are minors.

Similar to the above example, a completely separate silo for users based on age, this time under the same brand name, could limit exploitation, usage, surveillance, and harm.

This type of UX would have to come with an acknowledgement that data will reveal less Time in App for this demographic. But a willful avoidance of addictive UX techniques, of dark UX altogether, creates a more trustworthy user experience for a brand as a whole, which would in turn contribute to longevity a positive qualitative trade-off for a brand.

These obvious real world examples already exist on some level, but are marred by reliance on upward metrics in every measurement.

By zooming out, we can see there is enough value generated and maintained in their core platforms to provide continual growth and revenue without relying on growth in every direction.

The process of maximizing value is both a business problem and UX problem, but designing to include the deficits/problems of scale as social and societal solutions, is a uniquely UX problem. For the largest platforms in the world, value consists of brand perception in addition to revenue.