Designing in the Echo Chamber
Or why chasing “newer, faster and better” prevents us from solving bigger, more interesting problems.
Few people live a more technology- and media-saturated life than the UX designer.
Many of us are geeks and technophiles at heart. We are optimists. We like solving problems and creating delightful, predictable, intuitive solutions for others. But in our efforts to achieve this, are we failing to perceive larger systemic problems — or even perpetuating them by relying on the familiar?
Two billion new people will join the connected world by 2020. Many of them live in developing regions of the world where literacy rates are lower, and English literacy rates are lower still.
Soon, a new majority of users will bring entirely different needs and cultural metaphors that drive the ways they use technology.
As UX professionals, we can bridge these technical and cultural gaps to reach the hundreds of millions of new users coming online every year.
This means adapting our thinking and our tools so we’re armed to face new sets of problems — and able to design solutions that resonate far beyond the limited borders we initially target.
In this talk, I explore some emerging technology trends and use cases from both the developed and developing worlds. I demonstrate how current UX patterns, metaphors, and concepts may actually inhibit understanding for new users who don’t share our cultural contexts.
I examine the opportunities these challenges present for new products, services, and startups to fuel entire markets and even change cultures through the power of design.
n this presentation from Fluxible 2013, Trip O'Dell argues that technology designers must move beyond their own cultural and economic biases—what he calls the "echo chamber" of high-agency, western-centric users—to better serve the next two billion people joining the internet.
Key themes include:
The Changing User Base (0:48 - 10:05): With the internet expanding rapidly, most new users will be from emerging markets, often accessing the web via mobile devices in rural or impoverished areas with lower levels of formal education. O'Dell emphasizes that "we are not the user."
Culture and Technology (6:58 - 8:00): He posits that technology and culture are symbiotic; therefore, designers must learn the cultural context of their users or risk creating products that are irrelevant or unusable.
Rethinking Literacy (21:34 - 24:09): O'Dell argues that functional illiteracy is not a lack of intelligence. Designers should avoid text-heavy interfaces and instead utilize speech, haptics, gestures, and visual metaphors.
Successful Paradigms (25:41 - 32:25): He highlights apps like WeChat (which uses voice, QR codes, and playful discovery to bypass keyboard barriers) and M-Pesa (a mobile money system in Kenya) as examples of technology that solves real-world problems for low-agency populations.
Design Principles (34:39 - 37:25): He encourages designers to "show, don't tell," curate text carefully, and create "indistinguishable" technologies that feel natural and do not require heavy reading.
Closing Example: O'Dell concludes by showcasing Whispersync and Immersion Reading (37:39 - 40:27), technologies he worked on at Audible/Amazon, which help bridge literacy gaps by synchronizing audio and text, allowing users to engage with literature in ways that may not have been possible through traditional reading alone.