class in product design

mao zedong wrote, “In class society, everyone lives as a member of a particular class and every kind of thinking, without exception, is stamped with the brand of class.”

this is just my casually considered opinion, but i suspect class bias is impacting design. i lived in the egalitarian mecca of silicon valley, california for a long time. class is apparent there, but there’s some sense that anyone can become rich. at least they can get lucky with some decent stock options, and not just those with degrees. some google masseuses i hear are now multi-millionaires, and how many companies do you even know that have masseuses? that culture i sense creates a denial of class, and the denial creates a blind spot. startup companies are in particular at risk when considering product designs. these firms are filled with upper middle class, well educated people. can they really overcome that kind of bias of viewpoint? i do think it’s possible but it requires we start by talking about class more openly, and with greater consideration. and it requires real ethnographic research to understand your customers, before designing the product.

someone asked me recently what i thought of the “where have i been” application on facebook — that shows a map of the world colored with your travel exploits — and they were surprised that my first comment. “it’s for the upper middle class”, i said. “they’re the only people who can afford to travel internationally really and to such an extent that they can brag about it.” i suggested a variation on the idea, which would automatically scale to the scope that one had actually travelled. so if one were poorer and lived in a state or province, then it could display how many nearby states or provinces one had travelled to. maybe even scaling down to show just how many nearby towns one had traveled to. that would, i thought, be improved class sensitivity in the design.

when i worked at apple years ago, the marketing department once described the united states households in three pie slices. the poorest slice was to be ignored, since they could not afford a computer in their home at all. the next slice was more interesting, but they could only afford a single, lower cost computer to share in the household. the last slice was the most wealthy. those households could afford multiple computers — one for each kid potentially — and faster connection speeds. from that qualitative research it was very clear the kind of class awareness apple needed. but web services and web sites are not selling expensive hardware. it is much easier for them to forget demographic differences in their customers.

consumer oriented startups serving web sites or software do not need a specific distribution channel or mainstream advertising. i suspect they get less feedback when they’re off the mark. they might cast a wide net, potentially across the entire internet, and when they’re out of touch with an economic segment how will they find out? brick and morter channels ensured a greater sensitivity, because that shelf space is expensive and usually tied to a demographic.

i mentioned all this to the fine gentleman who cuts my hair today, and he joked, “i aspire to be upper middle class someday, so i can join facebook instead of myspace,” clearly a nod to danah’s paper on that topic. so perhaps preferring a particular economic segment is not a bad thing, but it must help to know who is connecting more strongly to the product and why.

i don’t believe there is a simple answer to class in design, but we can start by looking out for our own biases when designing products. that includes our economic situation and what it may imply. class is another argument for using ethnographic methods and researching one’s customers before designing if possible to counter any blind spot bias concerning class. and as we try to expand products internationally it will only get harder to overcome our bias.

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