Phones are designed to keep us engaged!
You cannot stop looking at your phone? But you are not alone.
Over 2.5 billion people have smartphones now, and a lot of them are having a hard time putting them down.
There are multiple reasons for this cause. May be a new app that met your requirement, or a suggestion for new location you may be interested in, or a new notification in your social app that makes you scroll down your entire day.
The problem is, our devices are designed to keep us engaged. They’re intentionally addicting. But if you understand the tricks that grab your attention, you can learn to have a healthier relationship with your phone.
Where, you know, Truman Show, you wake up and everything is sort of coordinated just for you. And you really don’t even realize it, but it’s coordinating just to entertain you, or just to engage you.
It’s not designed to help us, it’s just designed to keep us hooked. - Tristan Harris
It starts with turning off all notifications, except for when a real human is trying to reach you.
When you get a call, a text, or a message, it’s usually because another person wants to communicate with you, but a lot of today’s apps simulate the feeling of that kind of social interaction, to get you to spend more time on their platform.
If Facebook sends you a push notification that a friend is interested in an event near you, they’re essentially acting like a puppet master, leveraging your desire for social connections so that you use the app more.
But notifications didn’t always work like this. When push notifications were first introduced for email on Blackberries in 2003, they were actually seen as a way for you to check your phone less. You could easily see emails as they came in, so you didn’t have to repeatedly open your phone to refresh an inbox. But today you can get notifications from any app on your phone.
So, every time you check it, you get this grab bag of notifications that can make you feel a broad variety of emotions. If it wasn’t for random, if it was predictably bad or predictably good, then you would not get addicted. The predictability would take out the addictiveness. And, it’s effective.
Some apps even replicate the process of pulling a slot machine lever with the “pull to refresh” feature. That’s a conscious design choice. Those apps are usually capable of continuously updating content, but the pull action provides an addicting illusion of control over that process. In the future, we might see healthier ways of delivering notifications.
Research shows that bundling notifications, where phones deliver a batch of updates at set times, reduces user stress. Then, you have to grayscale your screen. The easiest way to attract your eye’s attention on a screen is through colour.
Human eyes are sensitive to warm colours. In eye-tracking tests like this one, they gravitate particularly to bright red. That’s why so many apps have redesigned their icons to be brighter, bolder, and warmer over the years.
It’s also why notification bubbles are red. A little icon with different colour doesn’t have the same impact on your attention as colour red.
But you can neutralise that distracting effect by selecting a greyscale colour filter in your phone’s accessibility settings.
Restrict your home screen to everyday tools. Make sure that your home screen, when you unlock it, doesn’t have anything except for the in-the-moment tools that help you live your life.
And by using daily basic routine apps like PhonePe or Google Pay for payments, Maps to get somewhere or OLA to commute, Calendar, etc. None of these are apps that user can fall into and then get sucked down some bottomless vortex of stuff.
If you’re not sure what counts as a bottomless vortex of stuff, it helps to filter out apps that use infinite scrolling.
Unlike pagination, where users have to click to load new content on another page, infinite scrolling continuously loads new material so there’s no built-in endpoint.
Video autoplay works in a similar way. These interfaces create a frictionless experience, but they also create a user’s sense of control and make it harder to stop.
Research shows that people rely on visual cues more than internal cues to stop consuming something.
So, a visual cue, like an endpoint, is better at telling you the right time to stop than your own sense of satisfaction. And because so many apps don’t have an endpoint, you have to build your home screen around the eventuality of distraction.
We check our phones a lot. Most of us drastically underestimate how often we do so. But technology might not always look this way.
There are ideas for alternative interfaces that give you functional choices and are more transparent about how much time you’ll lose with one action, versus another.
