Editor’s note: this is a guest post from students in the Master of Human-Computer Interaction (MHCI) program at Carnegie Mellon University, who have been working with CR to imagine and design AI agents that help solve common consumer problems. Read on to learn about their design process and check out other installments in the series.
Welcome to our blog series! We come from across oceans, from big cities, suburbs and manufacturing towns. We represent a palette of diverse identities, nationally, ethnically, generationally and religiously. Together, in close collaboration with our clients at Consumer Reports (CR), we embarked on a seven month project where we researched, designed and iterated on an Agentic AI concept for CR that facilitates interactions between consumers and businesses. Our imagined solution empowers people to advocate for themselves effectively when interacting with customer service, in a way that aligns with CR’s mission and the value it can create for consumers.
The “Consumer Conundrum”
Since the dawn of civilization, businesses have wielded an asymmetry in information to their advantage. Whether it was the vendor in the Roman colosseum boastfully promoting “the best” beer, dairy companies creating meaningless distinctions between “Grade A” and “Grade B” milk, or Big Tobacco obscuring the true damage of cigarettes to the human body, companies have a long history of prioritizing self-interest over the interests of their consumers. This has created a timeless, evergreen conundrum for consumers:
Information asymmetry benefits businesses often at the expense of people.
In the early 20th century, advocates like Upton Sinclair began demanding change. This eventually led to the first consumer protection laws in America, resulting in the Meat Inspection Act and Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906. It also led to the creation of the Bureau of Chemistry, which later was reformed to the Food and Drug Administration in 1930. These organizations set out to provide assurance to the public, informing them that the production practices of a given product were government regulated and approved.
However, despite these new consumer protection laws, corporations used the relatively lax rules on advertising to continue growing in profitability. This resulted in a new danger, rooted in the same consumer conundrum: Information asymmetry through false advertising. In response, Consumers Union (now Consumer Reports) was founded in 1936. As a non-profit organization, CR served as an arbiter of truth, informing and guiding consumers through the pre-purchase phase of the customer journey to ensure they got a quality product.
Technological breakthroughs towards the end of the century would kick off a wave of new innovations in e-commerce. Consumers, for the first time, could now shop and execute transactions entirely online without ever entering a store. This new technological paradigm transformed people’s interactions with businesses. Specifically, by providing increasingly digital services, communication channels and products during the early 21st century, companies engineered an environment with more UX touch points later in their customer journey.
This got our team thinking. CR has historically supported consumers through their pre-purchase journey, offering unbiased ratings and reviews of products, and advocating for more consumer rights. But as technology radically transforms the marketplace and consumers’ lives, we wonder, do consumers need support when interacting with companies in the post-purchase phase?
Our early guerilla research affirmed this phenomenon and we identified a common pain point across domains. After speaking with consumers in their daily lives, people found that requesting assistance from customer service in order to make a request or complaint could be excruciating. Whether it was on the ground with our guerilla interviews on the streets of Pittsburgh, or in more focused research methods that my colleagues will discuss, we found more and more opportunities for CR to leverage their brand equity accrued in the pre-purchase phase to help consumers advocate for themselves in their post-purchase journeys.
Together, as a strategic partner to CR, we seek to explore this new problem space in the AI age. How can CR meet people in this contemporary moment? Aside from merely guiding users, how can we leverage technology to further empower them?
In 2022, CR released Permission Slip. What is novel about Permission Slip is that it acts on users’ behalf. As of today, millions of data privacy requests have been sent using the application, saving users countless hours of their time, cognitive load and emotional bandwidth. Could more be done to empower consumers using Agentic AI? With these thoughts in mind, it really piqued our curiosity when CR presented us with a challenge:
Design an AI-powered agent that mediates interactions between consumers and companies around terms of service and privacy policies.
Equipped with the brainpower and resources of the world’s leading institution on Human-Computer and Human-AI Interaction, we tackled this challenge through a comprehensive mixed-methods research approach. We leveraged emerging technology and prototyping materials alongside traditional methods to “deep dive” into how CR might helpfully mediate interactions between businesses and consumers. Through this research we return to the timeless, omnipresent problem of The Consumers’ Conundrum, and how CR might meet consumers’ needs in the digital age (especially given the clear pain points around modern customer service).
Next time…
Continue to follow along with us over the next few months through this blog series. We’ll dive into the details of our research methods, design processes and prototypes, and how we’ve reframed this original problem statement over the course of our semester. We hope the work we produce through this capstone project will inform CR on how to further protect and empower consumers to exercise their rights and create a more fair, accountable, transparent and ethical marketplace for all.
