The Pursuit of ’Appiness
The photographs accompanying this article are part of Eric Pickersgill’s series Removed (2014-present). Before each photo is taken, Pickersgill removes the sitter’s phone, leaving only a strangely vacant gesture (image: Eric Pickersgill).
Silicon Valley’s tech giants have recently become concerned with their customers’ “digital wellbeing”. But how well-equipped are the makers of our devices to wean us off them?
Every spring since 2013, tech-industry professionals in Silicon Valley have gathered at the Habit Summit. The conference, organised by the author and consultant Nir Eyal, brings together entrepreneurs, behavioural scientists and designers to “share their hard-won insights on how to build habits”. Speakers have included representatives from Twitter, Meta, Google and Airbnb, delivering talks and workshops on topics such as “How Twitter built user habits” and “Investing in habit-forming businesses”.
Eyal insists that getting people hooked on their devices can be a good thing. “When used appropriately, habits can help people live happier, healthier, more productive and more connected lives,” he said during the opening remarks of the event’s 2014 edition. Of course, getting customers to use devices and digital platforms habitually – that is, with “little or no conscious thought”, by Eyal’s own definition – also benefits the makers of those devices and digital platforms. “Creating habits supercharges growth,” he declares. “The longer a user engages with our product, the more they’re worth to us as a customer.”
This is about as concise a description of the “attention economy” as can be found. The longer you spend on your smartphone – scrolling, tapping, posting and interacting – the more data you generate about your interests and preferences. That data is then monetised by being traded with advertisers who wish to target receptive audiences. “If I want to reach women between the ages of 25 and 30 in zip code 37206 who like country music and drink bourbon,” writes Jonathan Taplin in his 2017 book Move Fast and Break Things, “Facebook can do that.” Like most free-to-use online platforms, Facebook is essentially an advertising company. Although you’re a user, you’re not its customer. You are, in fact, the product.
There is a powerful economic imperative, then, for tech companies to keep users on their platforms for as long as possible and to do so with the help of interface design. As to ensuring that we don’t overuse our devices; that our habits don’t slide into addiction; that we don’t keep scrolling when we’d rather be doing something else – well, what’s their incentive for that? There is no Hippocratic Oath for techies. Legally, Facebook and Google are governed by contract law, which assumes a peer-to-peer relationship between user and provider. They are not bound by fiduciary law, which applies when the provider is deemed to be in an asymmetrical power relationship to the user and ensures that any information shared between the two parties is employed only in the user’s best interests. Traditionally, that form of law applies partly to lawyers, physicians and priests. But who do you reckon has more detailed information about your most shameful desires and your most crippling anxieties: Google, with its complete record of your search history, or a priest?
The Habit Summit grew out of Eyal’s research for his bestselling 2014 book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. It has become something of an industry textbook for entrepreneurs hoping to emulate the addictive feedback loops of Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. “Innovators build products meant to persuade people to do what we want them to do,” writes Eyal. “We call these people users and even if we don’t say it aloud, we secretly wish every one of them would become fiendishly hooked to whatever we’re making.
Hooked pays special heed to user-interface design, one of the most important tools for holding people’s attention. It breaks down features such as pull-to-refresh (invented by Loren Brichter for Twitter in 2008), which it analyses as an example of a “variability reward”. “Research shows that levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine surge when the brain is expecting a reward,” Eyal writes. “Introducing variability multiplies the effect, creating a focused state, which suppresses the areas of the brain associated with judgement and reason.” Never mind that what you actually see once you’ve refreshed your inbox, Twitter feed or YouTube page rarely feels like a reward. It’s the anticipation that is thrilling and, by extension, potentially addictive. “Although classic examples include slot machines and lotteries,” writes Eyal, “variable rewards are prevalent in many other habit-forming products.”
The study cited by Eyal in this passage is a 2013 paper from Socioaffective Neuroscience & Pathology entitled ‘Pathological Gambling and the Loss of Willpower’, which ought to give readers pause. Nevertheless, he insists that designing habit-forming tech products has nothing to do with addiction. For anyone concerned, Eyal writes, “it’s important to recognise that the percentage of users who form a detrimental dependency is very small.” Pathological addicts – even those hooked to the most habit-forming products, including slot-machines – make up only one per cent of the total number of users, he explains.That, at least, is according to Eyal’s source, a 2010 white paper from the American Gaming Association.
“I turn to Twitter for information, but leave, long after I’ve satisfied my initial impulse, with a galloping sense of panic. Why can’t I just stop?”
Ten years on, it is becoming increasingly evident that habitual smartphone usage is leaving many people feeling permanently distracted, frustrated and depressed – if not pathologically addicted. In the past decade, Facebook alone has been the subject of a swathe of studies in the American Journal of Epidemiology and Computers in Human Behavior, among others, which have found that frequent use of the platform is correlated to higher rates of envy, depression and loneliness. As John Lanchester writes in his 2017 London Review of Books essay ‘You Are the Product’, “there is a lot of research showing that Facebook makes people feel like shit.”
Facebook is not the only culprit here. When the entire business model of free-to-use online services relies on maximising “time on device” (a gambling industry term), there is hardly an app that does not in some way employ variability rewards or other design tricks to keep us engaged. As a result, reports of smartphone addiction and other internet-related disorders have risen steeply in the past decade. Recently, a study from King’s College London found that roughly a quarter of young people use their smartphones in ways that would qualify as addiction. “We don’t know whether it is the smartphone itself that can be addictive or the apps that people use,” said Nicola Kalk, one of the report’s authors. Perhaps it’s an amalgamation of both?
Taken across the world, the images recreate the poses in which the sitters often unwittingly find themselves: ignoring their surroundings and absorbed in a hand-held device.
The tech industry has made moves in response. In 2018, Apple launched Screen Time for iOS, a feature that tracks your smartphone use and delivers a bracing weekly report (“Your screen time was up 8% last week, for an average of 2 hours, 33 minutes a day”) and a detailed breakdown of app usage. That same year, Meta (which owns Instagram) and Google (which owns YouTube) introduced features that let users track their time on each of their platforms and ask for stop cues after a set amount of time. The British journalist Paul Lewis interviewed a number of Silicon Valley engineers in 2017 – Justin Rosenstein, the inventor of Facebook’s “Like” button, and Loren Brichter among them – in what became an explosive Guardian long read. As it turns out, they were all fearful of the features they had unleashed on the world. “Everyone is distracted,” Rosenstein lamented. “All of the time.”
Even Eyal, the organiser of the Habit Summit, seems to have sensed a paradigm shift. His latest book, published in 2019, addresses not the entrepreneur wishing to hook their user, but the user driven to distraction by the hook. Both poison and cure, addiction wizard and self-help guru, Eyal is a parable for tech in our time. His new book is called Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life.
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A pandemic is a hell of a time to be thinking about wellbeing, digital or otherwise.
I started working on this article while the official guidelines on Covid-19 containment in the UK, where I live, were to wash your hands frequently. Now, as I write, London is in lockdown and I am self-isolating in my flat. My digital devices – a laptop and smartphone – are lifelines providing connection to family, friends and colleagues, as well as access to essential information. I wouldn’t do without these products or the apps on them, but it’s also becoming evident that overusing them is detrimental to my mental health. Perhaps readers recognise themselves in this: I turn to Twitter for information, but leave, long after I’ve satisfied my initial impulse, with a galloping sense of panic at the interminable flow of facts, testimonies, analyses and conspiracies that eventually begin to coalesce in the blur of the infinite scroll. Why can’t I just stop?
Perhaps it’s the perfect time to ask this and do what I’d initially intended – namely, try some of the digital wellbeing apps that have appeared in the past months and assess how they work. In particular, I have been looking at a collection of so-called “Experiments” that Google began rolling out at the end of 2019 as part of its Digital Wellbeing initiative. The 11 Experiments include Screen Stopwatch, a smartphone wallpaper that tracks your usage in real time; a printable paper envelope that restricts the features you can use on your Google Pixel phone; and Post Box, an app that holds back notifications until you’re ready to view them. While some are by external design studios, most are made by Google’s own Creative Lab. All, however, are open-source. This means designers and developers can access and customise the code through the development platform GitHub, or even build their own software proposals. The Experiments are an effort, writes Google, “to encourage designers and developers to build digital wellbeing into their products”. Ultimately, the company wants to help us all find “a better balance with technology”.
A better balance with technology seems, generally, to mean less technology. That is the implication of the Experiments, at least, most of which impose restrictions or otherwise limit phone use. Take Desert Island, an app that acts as a “launcher”, meaning it replaces the home screen of a Pixel phone. To activate it, I need to select a few apps I know I will use on a given day: Messages, Phone, Calendar, Maps and Camera, for example. Instead of being presented with a full array of thumbnails when I unlock my phone, I land on a minimal display set against a white background. It gives me the time and date, a little illustration of a desert island, and, in list form, links to the apps I have pre-selected. It needs to be reset every 24 hours, although it took me only five minutes to figure out how to override and quit it.
There are obvious restrictions encoded into Desert Island, but its design operates subtly. The fact that my chosen apps are listed simply as “Gmail”, “Maps”, and “Camera” in plain sans-serif text creates a calm interface, rather than the usual busy patchwork of icons. Crucially, the listed apps do not feature notifications, a staple of most platforms and operating systems. These notifications are variability rewards in themselves. (What’s behind the red dot? An Instagram “like”? A message from a lover? An important LinkedIn notification? Usually nothing so exciting, it turns out, but that’s not the point). Tristan Harris, Google’s former design ethicist and now a prominent critic of manipulative tech, explained to Paul Lewis in the Guardian that designers at Facebook had initially conceived its notification alert as a blue blob, in keeping with the platform’s colour scheme. “But no one used it,” he said. “Then they switched it to red and of course everyone used it.” Now, the red notification blob is standard across platforms from Facebook to iOS, a universal sign for “tap me”.[1]
In addition to restriction, another strategy common to a number of Experiments is that of self-tracking. Screen Stopwatch, for instance, is a black-and-white wallpaper that tracks my phone use in real time. As soon as I unlock the phone, its three rows of numbers come alive. Hours, minutes, seconds: the last row ticks away at an alarming rate, mimicking the movement of an analogue flip clock. It’s visible whenever I’m navigating the home screen and is, quite frankly, a distraction in itself. Perhaps the point is to make the interface so stress-inducing that I’ll stay off it – a circuitous, and potentially counterproductive, route into digital wellbeing. Self-tracking is the main feature of Apple iOS’s Screen Time too (albeit presented less invasively) and it forms an important part of many tech companies’ efforts to promote a better relationship with devices. But based on my experience, I doubt its efficacy.
“The prevailing line in the media implies that digital experiences are inherently shallow and frivolous,” writes the digital anthropologist Theodora Sutton in her 2017 essay ‘Our Virtues and Devices’. It’s true: the increase in smartphone addiction has been accompanied by a rise of cold-turkey “digital detox” programmes (see, for instance, the quasi-spiritual Camp Grounded that has been running in California since 2013 – “an alcohol and drug-free environment where you[…] check all of your technology in at the entrance”) and a general consensus that using your phone is just bad. I, for one, have internalised this, often catching myself feeling insufferably smug about bringing out a book, rather than a device, on public transport. It’s an asinine impulse. Who’s to say that the young man fiddling with his phone opposite me isn’t texting a loved one? Or looking up a travel route? Or reading Wittgenstein? Using a device that has come to permeate most aspects of our lives – from how we travel, work and stay fit, to how we communicate, socialise, find information and love – shouldn’t be considered shameful.
“Perhaps the point is to make the interface so stress-inducing that I’ll stay off it – a circuitous, and counterproductive, route into digital wellbeing.”
Yet, it is precisely shame that I feel when I receive my weekly Screen Time reports or see the seconds, minutes and hours rack up on the Screen Stopwatch Experiment. Even with the information presented neutrally, self-tracking of this type will always be “a punitive matter,” according to game designer and academic Ian Bogost, writing in The Atlantic. Self-tracking attaches a blanket judgement to overall use and is a blunt instrument with which to quantify digital wellbeing. “[It] might make me more mindful,” Bogost notes, “but mostly by making my self-loathing more self-aware.” This is a dangerous tactic for tech companies to pursue. Scholars such as Sutton warn against capitalising on shame around device usage, arguing that it may make us feel worse. “In short,” she writes, “we don’t need another thing to feel anxious about.”
Instead, the most successful Experiments are those that make you think differently about the way interfaces are designed. Envelope is one of two Experiments by London-based design studio Special Projects. It’s something of an outlier, in that it straddles the digital-physical divide: it combines an app with a printable paper net that can be wrapped around a Pixel phone, changing both its appearance and functionality. “The issue of digital wellbeing is really complex and I don’t feel like we’ve solved it at all,” says Adrian Westaway, who runs Special Projects together with Clara Gaggero Westaway. “It was always meant to be an experiment and a provocation.”
It’s certainly not a long-term solution: Envelope transforms my phone into a device that can only make and receive phone calls from dial mode or tell me the time. Having migrated so much of my life onto my smartphone (it’s my calendar, map, camera, radio, newspaper, recording device and notepad, to name just a few functions) I couldn’t go through a normal working day without Envelope constituting a major bother. But that’s not the point – the paper wrapping doesn’t survive long in a pocket or bag, and it’s not meant to. The point, for me at least, is how my phone looks once ensconced within its paper casing.
The envelope has a radically pared-down design: 12 circles make up the grid of a standard telephone keypad, while below it two buttons signify call/hang up and a time prompt. Along the side of the Envelope, a line and plus/minus signs signify sleep/wake and the volume bar respectively. And that’s about it. When the envelope is painstakingly cut, glued and fitted around a phone, the accompanying launcher app lines up with the printed interface with surprising precision. I can tap the keypad through the 80gsm paper and the underlying app responds with a delicate pulse of white light in the shape of the button. The call/hang up circle shines either red or green, softly diffused through the paper. When I press the time-prompt button, it flashes four successive numbers on the keypad: 1, 1, 2, 9 for 11:29, for example. The sound design is gentle and vaguely skeuomorphic, harking back to the dual tone multi-frequency soundscape of analogue telephones.
“[Screen Time] might make me more mindful, but mostly by making my self-loathing more self-aware.”
“What we love about this is the physicality of it,” says Westaway. “It’s more than just another app screen.” This, I think, is the success of this particular Experiment. While restriction and self-tracking are both at work – the app informs me how long I’ve kept my phone encased once I’ve ripped the envelope open and quit the Experiment – it is the calmness of its interface, the absence of notifications and the intuitive simplicity of Special Projects’ design that leaves the biggest impression. Envelope draws clear inspiration from the minimalist Light Phone, first launched in 2017, with a second model, Light Phone 2, appearing in 2019. This is a low-tech device that has garnered a significant following despite the fact that it is, according to its own developers, “designed to be used as little as possible”. A small credit card-shaped feature phone that can call, text and act as an alarm, it has a bare-bones greyscale operating system that borders on the austere. Like the Light Phone, Envelope is an attempt to design “calm technology”, a term coined by Xerox Parc computer scientists Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown in a 1995 essay. Weiser and Brown were early to identify the growing need for designers to create interfaces that both “encalm and inform” – that is, provide us with information without demanding our full focus. “A calm technology,” they wrote, “will move easily from the periphery of our attention, to the center, and back.”
This is easier said than done. But the ambition is for devices not to pester us with constant demands but instead to present information subtly enough for the user to register it and decide whether or not to attend to it. As such, it’s an inversion of the manipulative “hook” model that has been so seductive to Silicon Valley in the past decade. Both concepts lay claims on the semi-conscious ways in which our attention can be directed but with very different desired outcomes. Envelope is a brief glimpse of what designing calm technology might look like and it won’t set you back the $350 price of a Light Phone.[2] “Ultimately, we wanted a solution that gives you a bit of space for a period of time,” says Westaway, “to figure out what the difference is between using your phone a lot and using it a little bit less.”
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In the summer of 2019, Republican Senator Josh Hawley presented a bill for the ‘Social Media Addiction Reduction Technology’ (SMART) Act in the House of Representatives. According to the bill, Congress had found that: “The business model for many internet companies[…] is to capture as much of their users’ attention as possible. To achieve this end, some of these internet companies design their platforms and services to exploit brain physiology and human psychology. By exploiting psychological and physiological vulnerabilities, these design choices interfere with the free choice of users.”
Before each photo is taken, Pickersgill removes the sitter’s phone, leaving only a strangely vacant gesture.
In response, the bill proposes to make it unlawful for social-media companies, in particular, to employ design strategies such as infinite scroll, autoplay, “engagement” badges and “the elimination of natural stopping points”.
Senator Hawley’s bill is still under review and notably has no co-sponsors. It has been criticised for being too broad in its formulations and too sweeping in its measures – The Verge’s Casey Newton “suspect[s] Hawley’s bill will not become law” for these reasons. But it is indicative of a slow awakening of US regulatory powers to the dangers of manipulative, attention-snatching user-interface design. Last year also saw the introduction of the bipartisan bill for the ‘Deceptive Experiences To Online Users Reduction’ (DETOUR) Act, which proposes that any online platform with more than 100 million monthly users cannot lawfully “[rely] on user interfaces that intentionally impair user autonomy, decision-making, or choice”. This is considered much more likely to pass into law.
Digital wellbeing will never be a priority for companies operating under the current business model – if people, en masse, began using their devices and platforms less, it would be directly correlated to a loss of revenue. Regulation may help and the bills that are beginning to appear are a start, however vague and ill-conceived. In the meantime, we will have to make do with short-term tools designed to help us resist getting distracted by features that are, themselves, designed to be distracting. When I reached out to Google for a commentary on the Digital Wellbeing Experiments, I received emailed responses to all of my questions, except one: “Is it in Google’s interest that people spend less time using Google’s devices and services?” It was a simple yes-or-no question and it was ignored.
1 To be fair to Google, the notification alerts on the Pixel’s home screen are pastel blue and pink. If you are not convinced that the colours of these dots matter, try going into your settings and switching your phone’s interface to grayscale – see what happens.
2 Although, unless some clever GitHubbers adapt it for iOS, you’ll need a Pixel 3a for it to work.
Words Kristina Rapacki
Images Eric Pickersgill
This article was originally published in Disegno #26. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.