The Interface Goes Public

Interface design used to be a private choice. Regulators are making it public — and someone has to translate between the two.

The IRRATIONAL TECHNOLOGY blog is part of a wider educational initiative and consultancy aimed at helping people and organisations understand the digital world, from a critical design perspective and an autonomy-based approach.

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Every screen you touch was shaped by decisions you never saw and had no way to contest. For twenty years, that was simply how it worked.

Tech companies decided how their products look and work. They said this was part of their creative freedom and saw outside rules as unfair limits. At the same time, these companies studied how to keep us engaged with their apps and websites, often by making it hard to change settings or by hiding important information, such as what happens to our data.

As people noticed how these choices affected their lives, big questions arose. Should we prioritise companies’ creative freedom to design digital products, or public protection, especially when those choices can hinder informed political decisions? When social media sites make changes that provoke anger or division to keep us engaged, should there be limits? Where do we draw the line between companies’ right to create and their responsibility to protect people?

These questions are central to policy debates. Frameworks like the Digital Services Act (DSA) in the EU illustrate how regulators establish boundaries around transparency, user control, and equitable design practices.

the rules are already here

In March 2024, the European Union required Apple to show a clear choice of web browsers during device setup. Before, finding the option to pick a different browser was hard. After the rule changed, smaller browsers like Opera and Aloha saw their user numbers more than double in a year.

The age-design codes changed the default settings of millions of accounts, forcing platforms to make privacy and safety features more prominent for young users. This impacted how easily children can be protected online and showed that regulations can reshape the default user experience. The DMA forced Apple to rebuild parts of its system, requiring major changes to the App Store and device setup in Europe, demonstrating that even the biggest tech firms must adapt to comply with public rules.

Meanwhile, approaches differ across regions: the European Union takes a strict regulatory stance with detailed design standards, focusing on user rights and market fairness; the United States pursues sector-specific rules and emphasises industry self-regulation. New proposals like the FTC’s click-to-cancel rule show increasing interest in direct intervention.

Each case points to a clear trend: external forces are shaping interface design outcomes, bringing private decisions into the public sphere. What was once a product decision — argued in a design review and settled by an engagement metric — is becoming a question of public law. The change is not that companies stopped designing for their own ends. It is that a second party now has standing to look over their shoulder.

the history of persuasive design

Persuasive marketing has existed for around a century, since Edward Bernays pioneered public relations and propaganda. These techniques convinced women they needed to shave all their body hair, buy every latest gadget, and constantly keep up with trends. In the 1920s, he had women walk in the Easter parade smoking cigarettes and called them “torches of freedom,” turning a habit the tobacco industry wanted to sell into a statement of independence.

Social media and persuasive design are part of this history, using the same techniques to collect and sell data. So why are we only able to advocate for change now?

The difference is not the intent but the record. Bernays worked in the dark: his methods lived in his head and his memos, and by the time anyone could study a campaign, it was already over. Digital persuasion runs on measurement. Every nudge is tested, every variant logged, every response counted — because that is how it is made to work in the first place. The same instrumentation that makes a feed more persuasive also makes it legible. For the first time, the machinery of persuasion keeps its own receipts.

A/B tests, variant copy, internal memos and analytics logs showed exactly what these design practises were meant to do. The documentation of this by the companies themselves wrote its own downfall — their paper trail transformed scattered practices into a recognisable pattern. Naming those practices created the vocabulary regulators and lawmakers needed to describe harms, draft rules, and demand remedies.

But this has two sides. Regulation catches visible manipulation, so it shifts to untraceable areas. It moves into the personalised, model-driven layer unique to every user and leaves no record. For instance, a social media feed is determined in real time by algorithms adjusting content to provoke specific reactions—what angers or delights you, what keeps you returning. These tailored feeds change with every refresh, leaving no shared interface for regulators. There is no single screen to point at, no fixed artefact to subpoena. The rule you write today describes a version of the feed that no longer exists by the time it passes. Regulation will always be one generation behind the practice.

Regulators are developing strategies to bridge this gap. One approach is to require algorithmic audits, where independent experts review how a system ranks or filters information and treats users. Other methods include ongoing monitoring of outputs, establishing complaint mechanisms for users to flag manipulative outcomes, or creating standards for documenting changes to companies’ algorithmic systems. None of these fully solve the problem of a moving target, but each one turns a private, shifting system into something that can at least be described from the outside.

None of these measures is perfect, but they offer starting points for making the invisible parts of digital design more accountable.

the emerging civic designer

This shift changes how we use and design technology. Companies must follow new rules rather than their own ideas.

A space opens for a much-needed designer: someone who can read an interface and explain it in terms a regulator understands. This is less about inventing shiny features and more about auditing digital products, translating complex user flows into plain language, and spotting manipulation or hidden friction. The skills needed mix UX research, accessibility standards, regulatory fluency, and an understanding of how algorithms shape user experience at scale.

In practice, this might mean sitting with a single checkout flow and marking every point where the design leans on the user — the pre-ticked box, the opt-out buried three taps down, the “no thanks” greyed out beside a bright confirm button — then writing it up so someone who has never opened a design tool can see the pattern for what it is. It is close reading, applied to software. The work is not glamorous, and that is part of the point: the harms hide in the boring parts of the screen, the defaults and the small print, and someone has to be paid to take them seriously.

I’ve built this skill set through personal interests and natural strengths. The same goes for legal professionals with creative backgrounds — we’re figuring it out as we go. A true civic designer would need training that does not yet exist — programmes blending design, technology and regulatory knowledge, built through partnerships between government and academic institutions. Recruitment could draw on people with backgrounds in compliance, ethical technology and user research, or second experienced designers out of the private sector. Public bodies may lean on NGOs and consultancies to build auditing skills while standards are still forming. But the role is defined less by any programme than by a stance: treating an interface as something that must answer to the public, not only to the people who shipped it.

What can designers do next? Designers can start by building their literacy in regulations affecting digital products, following developments in accessibility, privacy, and safety standards. They can document design decisions and reasoning in straightforward language, as if preparing evidence for a third party. Training to conduct interface audits, identify dark patterns, and summarise findings for policymakers will also be useful. Engaging with legal and policy teams early in product cycles can help spot risks or conflicts before launch. Designers can contribute to resources defining best practices in this space. Even small steps, like writing a one-page justification for a key user flow or creating plain-language summaries of interface changes, can build habits that support this new design capacity.

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Despite government and advocate efforts for better oversight, the biggest obstacle isn’t a lack of ideas or legal tools—it’s money. Building true, independent capacity to monitor and audit the digital world costs real resources, and that funding isn’t there. The experts to spot dark patterns, audit algorithms, and translate tech for policymakers are in the private sector or underfunded NGOs. Without substantial investment, public oversight will lag behind private industry.

What are the options for this new public role? Possible models include direct government funding for independent interface audits, industry levies on tech companies, or partnerships among regulators, universities, and nonprofits. Crowdsourcing, philanthropy, and civic tech collaborations can help, but each approach has trade-offs. Public funding offers stability but can move slowly and get caught in politics. Industry levies must be set high enough to matter and kept free from corporate influence. Philanthropy and ad hoc partnerships are flexible but rarely provide sufficient scale.

The best route is a patchwork of funding sources—something resilient enough to balance independence, sustainability, and capacity to grow with evolving technology.

The interface will keep looking the same either way. The cookie banner will still appear, the setup screen will still offer its choices. The question is whether anyone with the skill to read those screens is being paid to read them on the public’s behalf. Right now, mostly, they aren’t.

Without that investment, all the discussion about meaningful oversight will remain just that: discussion.