Change practice questions.

While a technology is new it can still be shaped easily, but almost nothing is known about how it will be used; by the time its effects are documented it is embedded in contracts, skills and institutions and is expensive to change. Which difficulty does this describe?

• The power to steer a technology and the knowledge of what needs steering arrive at different times
• Users take up a technology faster than manufacturers are able to supply it to them
• The effects of a new technology cannot be measured by any method now available
• Every state writes a different rule for the same service, so a global technology faces contradictory legal duties in different markets

Answer: The power to steer a technology and the knowledge of what needs steering arrive at different times

This is the control dilemma described by David Collingridge in 1980, and it explains why interventions in digital society usually arrive after the practice has already been reshaped. It is an argument for staged rollouts and reversible design rather than for waiting until the evidence is complete.

A mobile payment service reaches 4 per cent of adults in its first year and 55 per cent by its fourth, then adds about 2 percentage points a year, and the remaining non-users are mainly older, rural or without formal identity documents. Which conclusion is best supported?

• The technology has been superseded, which is why almost nobody is joining the service now
• The service has left the steep phase of adoption and the non-users who remain are the hardest to reach
• Figures of this shape show that the survey undercounted rural households badly
• The service will reach every adult in the country within two further years if the present rate of growth continues

Answer: The service has left the steep phase of adoption and the non-users who remain are the hardest to reach

Diffusion runs steeply through the users for whom adoption is cheapest and then flattens against groups facing cost, skill, coverage or documentation barriers, so the remaining non-users are a policy question rather than a marketing one. Reading a flattening curve as decline is the standard error.

The QWERTY keyboard layout was designed in the 1870s to suit mechanical typewriters, yet it remains the default on touchscreen phones that share none of those constraints. Which idea about technological change does this best illustrate?

• an early design choice persists because the cost of switching outweighs the gain
• a new technology spreads along an S-shaped curve from early experimenters to the late majority
• manufacturers deliberately shorten the supported life of the devices they sell
• the number of transistors on a chip doubles roughly every two years

Answer: an early design choice persists because the cost of switching outweighs the gain

This is path dependence: once training, tooling and habit accumulate around a standard, alternatives such as the Dvorak layout cannot win even if they are better. The error is assuming change is driven by technical merit alone, when installed base and switching costs are social forces that can freeze a design for a century.

The consumer group Which? reported that more than 5,800 bank branches in the United Kingdom closed between January 2015 and early 2024 as everyday banking moved to apps and websites. Which statement names something the change removed rather than something it added?

• The ability to check an account balance at any hour of the day or night
• A route to completing a transaction without a card, an app or a connection
• A record of each transaction that the customer can consult later on
• The requirement to prove identity before money is withdrawn from an account

Answer: A route to completing a transaction without a card, an app or a connection

Every change makes something newly possible and something else newly impossible or expensive. Balances and records survived the move online; what disappeared was the fallback that needed no card, no app and no network.

A council's online form for reporting a broken street light is completed by far fewer residents than the telephone line it replaced, although it asks fewer questions. Most residents stop at the first screen, which asks them to create an account and confirm an email address. Which single change would best test whether that requirement caused the fall?

• Shorten the form by removing two of the questions it asks about the fault
• Add a progress bar so that residents can see how many screens remain
• Allow a report without an account and compare completion rates
• Publish the average time the council takes to repair a reported street light

Answer: Allow a report without an account and compare completion rates

A test varies the suspected cause and holds everything else constant, so removing only the account step and comparing completion rates isolates its effect. Shortening the form or adding a progress bar changes something other than the account requirement, so neither could show whether that requirement produced the drop.

Since November 2020 Brazil's central bank has operated Pix, an instant payment system that spread quickly among adults and businesses. A market trader who accepts only cash finds that fewer customers now carry banknotes. In the course's stakeholder vocabulary, how is this trader best described?

• A user of Pix whose costs have risen since the system was introduced
• A regulator of Pix, because the trader sets the terms of each sale
• A developer of Pix, because the trader's choices shape how it is designed
• A non-user of Pix who bears a cost of its adoption by others

Answer: A non-user of Pix who bears a cost of its adoption by others

Stakeholders include users, developers, operators and regulators, and also non-users: people who never touch a system yet carry its consequences. The trader accepts only cash, so he is not a Pix user, but he loses sales because others adopted it.