The first thing you have to “just know” is that product designers are really smart people and if you ask what do these product designers design, the answer is probably everything around you and everything you can think of. But let’s focus just on the designers who design digital devices, apps, and their interfaces. And what makes these guys powerful is that they know exactly how people are interacting with the product all the time – It is a privilege not a lot of designers have (They even often do A/B testing in real-time). They even measure how addicted we are to our devices with a euphemistic unit "User Engagement".
I wrote this article specifically for people who are addicted to mobile phones or any digital device for that matter. The thing here is, some people know that they are addicted to their phone and they are better off, there is another category of people who don’t know or don’t care whether they are addicted to their phones. It is difficult to cure the latter.
To be clear, Designers design these products and services to make this world a better place, and they are doing it. If you are spoiling your life away on your mobile phones It is your fault, at least to an extent. And “user engagement” is how most of those companies make money and that’s how capitalism works.
As I have said many times in my previous articles, acknowledgment is always the first step towards eradication, and the same is true for this case too. First, you have to recognize whether you are addicted to your phones. In this matter, actually google provides us with a really good tool- Digital wellbeing. To be honest, I never thought I was wasting 2-3 hours a day on my mobile phone before using the tool.
Let me tell you one thing, you cannot “will” your way out of this addiction – or for any addiction. If you try it, I bet you will probably fail in a few days. Even smokers or drinkers can only effectively let go of their addiction when they do it systematically. This is where the first step comes-up. I call it Un-design. It means, you have to find and understand the design elements in the product or service, that is put in place deliberately or inadvertently, makes you addicted to a product or a service. You have to think like designers to get out of this addiction.
I will elaborate on some of those…
Let’s start with an evolution story…. Back in the days, when we (Homo sapiens) were foragers, it was difficult to find fruits like apples, oranges, cherries, or grapes. But those fruits were extremely healthy. So, over time our mind developed (by natural selection) a predisposition to be attracted by bright colored fruits; The same is also presumed for our penchant for sweet-tasting food. The same way we are now glued to those screens, which is just rife with bright moving colors all around. So, it is not at all surprising that we cannot take our eye off our phones. That's why you can hardly see muted colors on your phone.
Most of these design elements exploit some evolutionary quirk in our brain, which were developed as mechanisms that might have helped us survive in the ancient days, but not so relevant now.
Another similar example is the exploitation of our brain’s rewards system- “Dopamine”. It is a neurotransmitter. If you look at the root word here – Dope- you can get a hint of what it does. Dopamine secretion is linked with a lot of functions, but the consensus is that it is a “feel-good” hormone. But the brain has a knack of being enigmatic, and if people come up with refuting evidence, I won’t be surprised. The point is, take it with a grain of salt. But what is irrefutable is that brain has a reward system and it gives a “dopamine shot” every time you see a notification on your screen and it is engineered. And it is the force that makes you reach your phone when you see a notification, however busy you may be. And it is the lifeblood of Facebook (Said by one of its co-founders Sean Parker). This has happened to me several times. I am working or reading and suddenly some notification pops up. I just pick it up to see it and before I know it, I have been glued to the screen for half an hour.
Another quirk in our brain in which these Tech giants thrive on is FOMO”- Fear Of Missing Out. It is psychological anxiety resulting from not being connected socially- Basically, thinking others are having great fun and you are missing out. It is real when, say, your friends went out on a trip, and you are busy. But these social media sites, with their systematic notifications, can create and exploit this feeling. Here you aren’t missing out on anything, but the social media site makes you think so. But I think it is more inadvertent than engineered because this could be considered manipulation.
Another design tactic is almost a universal principle. “X flows in the path of least resistance” and X can be substituted with Current, Forces, Fluid, and in the field of design, your mind. This is something like the fundamental principle of design – reduce the resistance for the users. The lesser the resistance it is to use the device, the more the user engagement will be. Most major UI/UX updates in the OS or specific apps are focussed on reducing the resistance to operate- either by increasing the speed or by making it more "user-friendly".
What I have said above constitutes a very small number of design tactics in the book for designers, but I have mentioned the important ones. There are a lot more. But getting familiar with these basics can help you to Un-design the products.
Once you can Un-design products and services and see the design elements, you can counter design them. You have to use the design principles and do the opposite of them. Truth be told, this is the only way you can get out of your mobile phone addiction. And one has to give credit to Google, Apple, and even Netflix (they almost bully us into binge-watching by design and It deserves a separate article), that they provide us means to do it (Despite them doing this because of antitrust and other litigation reasons).
There are a lot of things we can do, but I will tell you about the things that I did that worked. And if you have any intention of slowly reducing your phone usage try them.
- Use digital wellbeing or the Apple equivalent to understand your usage.
- Color is a very powerful tool in making you glued to the screens. Make it Greyscale/ Monochrome. Even if you don’t have a direct way of doing it on your phone, you can do it in the developer options (for android).
- Turn off all but the important notifications – Calls only.
- Don’t use the fingerprint reader/ Face ID even if you have it. Unlock it every time with a PIN or a password. In this way, you are increasing the resistance.
- Mute all your contact’s statuses. Because the tiny notification on top of the “Status” bar will lure you in and you will end up seeing everyone’s statuses. Even mute all the “talkative” but trivial groups.
- DO NOT have the addicting apps on your home screen and make it minimalistic. Keep it as difficult to reach as possible. If you are using a Samsung phone, you can create folders in the menu and can increase the resistance by another step. I even went as far as to “disable” YouTube from the settings, so that when I have to go to YouTube, I have to go through settings and enable it and continue using it. With the amount of data we are using every day (at least 1.5 Gb), we can even afford to uninstall and re-install every time we need to use those apps
For example, this is my home screen...
But at the end of the day, It is up to you. Design can only get you so far…
P.S - I have never been addicted to phones on crazy proportions...
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