In today’s digital world, money is made off of users’ attention. The longer a company can keep you in their app, the more ads you’ll see (or the more data they’ll collect about you), and the more money they’ll make.
Tristan Harris, former Design Ethicist at Google, calls this the “attention economy.” Companies’ profits depend on (copious amounts of) your time and attention. So, as Harris writes in How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds, “Product designers […] play your psychological vulnerabilities […] against you in the race to grab your attention.”
For instance, apps are designed like a slot machine, giving you intermittent variable rewards. Sometimes the reward is a new email, a photo you were tagged in, or a news notification. And sometimes it’s nothing… so you’re compelled to check again in 5 minutes. Apps also provide bottomless newsfeeds and autoplay. Since the stimulation just keeps coming, there’s never a logical stopping point. It takes more psychological effort for you to leave the app than to keep consuming the content. Hence our concerns around digital health.
To counteract this, Harris has founded the nonprofit Time Well Spent (TWS). His goal is to encourage app designers to respect their users’ time and wellbeing.
Companies like Apple and Google have a responsibility to reduce these effects by converting intermittent variable rewards into less addictive, more predictable ones with better design. For example, they could empower people to set predictable times during the day or week for when they want to check ‘slot machine’ apps, and correspondingly adjust when new messages are delivered to align with those times.
Hmm, “responsibility”? That seems a little loose to me.
As of a few weeks ago, the TWS site proposed a label for well-designed apps, akin to the organic label for food and the LEED label for buildings. But, in researching TWS today, I couldn’t find any mention of it on their site anymore (just the image below)! Perhaps TWS no longer suggests industry labeling.
Instead, the TWS site now proposes a series of “What ifs?” for Apple and Google and a “design checklist” for other app developers.
That’s nice. But will this encouragement — this ethical cajoling — be enough?
It’s my (cynical) belief that app design won’t change unless the companies behind them are monetarily incentivized.
Header image by Kidiladon from Noun Project