Why We Need to Design for Attention

Reflections After A Month Sans iPhone

I had been without my iPhone for a month since Perú. It’s funny how little I had missed it. I missed having a high quality camera on the go to feed my itchy hand wanting to capture strangers and chase light. I missed listening to podcasts on my commute. I missed having a expense tracker right in my pocket and a meditation timer handy. That’s it — I didn’t miss the phone itself as much as I missed these specific functions_._

The modern day smart phone is an incredibly powerful machine, so powerful that it almost seems stupid that I’d be using a $700 piece of rectangle just as a glorified camera and podcast player.

Returning home after the trip, I considered whether I should replace my phone immediately. The thought, in fact, frightened me. At that point, I had been iPhoneless for a week and, to be honest, loving it. The thought of purchasing a new phone carried a weight — yes, there is the hefty price tag, but beyond that, it was the weight of all the power and potential packed in this little thing.

It is a power that reminds me of the first time I shot a gun. Shooting down a backyard hill, I knew I was safe, yet with the gravity of a gun held in my timorous hands, I breathed heavily, afraid they would betray me somehow.

One little iPhone and it could give me access to the Internet, to communication, to creating pictures on the go, to consumption, to distraction. Suddenly I was aware of its power to glue me to Instagram, standing outside the bathroom door and scrolling mindlessly for twenty minutes before I had to shower; its power to pull me unnecessarily back into memory and nostalgia as I dived into the Camera Roll; its power to break my thumb into an automatic twitch, to feed my eyeballs repeatedly with non-urgent information. It’s wonderfully powerful tool — and I feared that replacing my iPhone would betray me somehow.

At the recent Apple release, Jony Ive responded to a reporter’s question about the iPhone’s impact on society: “Like any tool, you can see there’s wonderful use and then there’s misuse.”

“Perhaps,” he clarified, “constant use.”

One of the most important, I believe, yet under-noticed lesson we need to learn is this: how to wield the power of our phones and screens. Our personal devices are entering into all of our personal and private spaces, be them physical or mental, at a rate that we cannot just learn passively how to master them. In passivity, we find ourselves submissive to the power of access and the mass of information, to which we trade our time and attention.

We all have been there: fidgeting with our phones in hand, opening and closing apps when we know we have no reason being there. Finding this info here or checking this info there because it’s so easy, but not because it’s urgent, or even necessary. Checking non-urgent notifications, refreshing pages, rereading texts. Going down rabbit holes of links and pages because it’s all so convenient, right there in your hand, all within reach of your thumb and drying eyeballs.

Don’t get me wrong — I think the smartphone is a net good to the world. But, another power we need to cultivate and create in our lives, I think, is the power to self-limit.

In 2015, WNYC’s Note to Self podcast launched a project, Bored and Brilliant, encouraging its listeners to rethink their relationship with technology, especially their smartphones, to create space for boredom and creativity. In an interview with WIRED, host Manoush Zomorodi says:

There’s that thing that everyone says — “It’s not the tech’s fault, it’s people’s fault.” I just don’t buy it. When I was a teenager, I didn’t have the television with me in my pocket everywhere I went…

…[In regards to forming good tech habits] I think it’s really hard, especially since the technology learns from what you do and the designers and coders then change it to overcome what you’ve done...It’s a constant sort of vigilance.

Our problem today is not access to information — our problem today is attention. We have access to information, but often lack the attentional access to make sense of this information.

Is there a way to design for attention? Let’s think about it from the perspective of design: is there a way to create technology that helps us use technology better? Can we design for digital mindfulness and minimalism?

Long-term, we must begin to build our internal strengths. It isn’t just skills like computer technology. It’s the old-fashioned basics of self-reliance, motivation, self-reinforcement, self-discipline, self command.

— Steven Pressfield

We are becoming skilled in creating technologies that would have been considered magic in the previous centuries, but what’s more important is building internal strengths that are, incidentally, being robbed by uncareful and unmindful use of technology. And it is not necessarily that we are weaker in character — the notification screen, the social media feed, the infinite scrolling, the ping here, the ping there — so much of our digital access is designed to specifically target our psychology, making us addicted to distraction.

These questions come to mind:

1. Can we create AI that harnesses our self-discipline?
2. How can we intentionally design difficulty to better design for attention and positive user experience?
3. How can we modulate our attention?

Instead of flipping from app to app without purpose, what if we can create AI that tells us when we need to stop? For example, a program that alerts the user if they have been on the Facebook app too long, or after noticing that one has been flipping through apps without engagement. What if more than alert, the apps in crime shut down? Or, AI that mutes notifications in real time when it knows you are doing deep work? One example, though not quite AI, is the new iOS feature that mutes all notifications when the phone detects that you are in a moving vehicle, so you focus all attention on driving, not on that new potential text.

A significant part of good user experience focuses on ease of use and access. Yet, good user experience can, by virtue of being good, becomes bad user experience thanks to abuse. One example is infinite scrolling — it enhances the user’s experience scrolling through their social feed or photo dash. Just a continuous swift, smooth motion of the thumb, and voila, more, more, more brain buzz! Yet when the brain is zapped with all these pictures without stop, consuming and then over-consuming, the soul is left zapped clean, empty. I remember disabling infinite scrolling on my Tumblr app back in middle school, after realizing how convenience led down a hole of wasted time. Is having such easy access actually making us happy?

Two analogies come to mind that can help us think about this. One is the Pespi versus Coke taste test. Pepsi has a sweet taste coupled with a citrusy burst that wins in sip tests. Yet, soda is not drunk in sips — it is drunk in cans, in bottles, in fat soda cups. In more “longevous” taste tests, Coke wins. “Pepsi, in short, is a drink built to shine in a sip test,” writes Malcolm Gladwell in Blink. Sugar wins in small quantity, but in a whole bottle, it’s just overwhelming and undesirable. The sweet burst of dopamine when we consume new content on our phones, or that beautiful gliding ease of use in an app — when easy access to what we need leads us to easy access to overconsumption, we are poisoned by sweetness.

Another analogy that came to mind is of overeating and leptin, the satiation hormone. Leptin is one of the many hormones regulating hunger and satiation, it is released by fat cells to tell the brain that the body is being fed and feeling. A theory posits that eating slowly or eating smaller portions can help prevent overeating because it gives the body enough time to talk through this hormonal communication channel. In short: you need time in order to know enough is enough. When looking at our phone use, such easy access — to Instagram, to searching a random thing on Wikipedia, to email — can rob us of the critical buffer time for us to recognize: Enough is enough, I am digitally satiated.

We incorporate modular design in the design of so many things: cars, programming code, furniture, management systems. The iPhone is modular thanks to its apps that can each focus on a specialized function: this app does this, that app does that. What if we think about not just modulating function, but also modulating attention? Pay attention to this and only this. Okay. And now pay attention to that and only that.

One lovely design that is intentional about designing for fuller attention is the new Google Pixel phone. Writer Mark Wilson calls its clock the phone’s “best feature.” Its always-on display shows the time, the date, and a small row of apps with recent notifications.

“Tell me if this sounds familiar: You want to check the time, so you pull out your phone. But as soon as you turn on that screen, time suddenly becomes the least of your concerns. You remember to check email, then figure out you might as well read up on Twitter and Instagram, too. Before you know it, 15 minutes or more have passed.”

The display, which is monochrome and simple, serves the need of our increasingly watch-less society. Sometimes, yes, our smartphone is just a glorified watch. It’s wonderful to learn that this feature was well-thought out and intentionally-designed, as Allen Huang, the product manager on Android UI and Pixel’s display says:

“The goal was just not having to turn on your phone as often. And one of the key aspects of our design was keeping the notifications minimal, so it’s not quite as distracting and [constantly pulling you] down the rabbit hole.”

Last week, I finally got a new iPhone. I removed a whole page of apps, deleted Instagram, re-downloaded Moment to track my phone use, walk with it on airline mode whenever I can, charge it in the bathroom so it doesn’t sleep by my bed. Just like how I drop-proofed it with a case and Gorilla Glass, I am attention-proofing the iPhone so I can focus on taking pictures and listening to podcasts and using the phone when I need to — and not let the phone use me, splitting my attention in distraction.

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Thank you so much for reading + sharing your thoughts. You can find more of me on Instagram, at my poetry blog, and at my website. Want my articles in your inbox? — subscribe here.