âThey failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.â – Aldous Huxley, Brave New World.
In Britain, according to research by Ofcom, UK adults spend over 50% of their average waking day, using media and communicating online.
We spend 8 hours and 41 minutes using tech to text, talk, type, game, listen or watch. Amounting to 20 minutes more than an average nights sleep, recorded as eight hours and 21 minutes.
Is this really our time well spent?
At the end of January, theMediaFlow team attended UX Oxford, a monthly event focused on User Experience. UX Oxford gives the opportunity to digital professionals to talk about their experiences in their design projects. Januarys talk was lead by Tristan Harris: Product Philosopher at Google, and James Williams: Special Projects Lead at Google. They presented their concepts on âThe Design Ethics of Distractionâ.
âWhat if technology could distract us less, and respect our time & attention more? What would that world look like – and how could it be built? This question has been the focus of the design ethics work and thinking in our personal and professional lives over the past two years.â – Tristan Harris and James Williams, The Design Ethics of Distraction.
We have reached a pinnacle in online communication. Â The sharing of information is fluid, and thoughtless, allowing users to be in the know, every second of the day.
Previous design goals of major tech organisations include fulfilling the active consumer needs, by developing mobile tech that allows us to be connected on the go. Their aim was to increase our personal productivity and enable communication to be âinstantâ.
âWin by being good at getting people to spend time exploiting biases in the brainâ – Tristan Harris and James Williams, The Design Ethics of Distraction
However, the constant mindless, and sometimes-accidental indirect interruptions, distract us when there may not be personal or professional value. This disturbs workflow, and could ultimately decrease productivity. Tristan and James state that we need to work towards a âHuman Design Goalâ and produce High-Quality communication and relationships that allow âconscious interruptionsâ based on values and priority.
In the time spent reading this, you have probably paused to check your emails, maybe replied to a tweet, and read a new message. Â As a UX professional Tristan claims, âeven knowing about intermittent variable rewards, it doesnât helpâ. We are all tech users, and we are all allowing ourselves to be distracted.
Cross platform capabilities allow distractions from multiple devices; the simplest solution would be to just switch off or ignore notifications. Yet, the flow of information is so fast and unfiltered to the individualâs desires, that as a user, we have a fear of missing out. To prevent this constant distraction, Tristan and James believe that we need to implement a system that presents middle ground, and gives the user choice.Â
âWe need to restore choice, we want to have a relationship with technology that gives us back choice with how we spend time with it. We are going to need help from designersâ – Tristan Harris and James Williams, The Design Ethics of Distraction
Whether we are sending an important email, or sharing a cat video to a colleague, they are notified the second we press send, before we consider if it is of value. Â After a distraction, it takes us 23 minutes to refocus our attention. The average smartphone user deals with a large volume of notifications, mostly from messengers and email each day. According to a study by Telefonica Research, we receive 63.5 mobile notifications on average per day.
If it takes 23 minutes to refocus after a distraction, this amounts to 24.3 hours of refocusing time. Tristan states that technology makes us at ease with âbulldozing each others attentionâ. We are constantly distracted, and even when we do decide to switch off these interruptions, we have conditioned ourselves to âself-interrupt every 3.5 minutesâ.
The current Internet Economy is measured in âtime spentâ, whether this is meaningful content or serendipitous and mindless browsing. Tristan and Jamesâ objective is to create a new system to make sure it is our time is spent efficiently when we are online. Â Tristan presented a User Experience, which would allow the user to be more to be considerable to the recipientsâ current availability.
The Gmail UI example offers the user a choice, counteracting the mindless messaging, and constructing a behavioural change. Tristan declares that change is ânot going to come from willpower, its time for a new systemâ. By considering Nancyâs priorities and state of mind, the user sharing the information can also decide whether they believe it to be something of value to Nancy.Â
âIt is likely that mobile users will check their phones more frequently to make sure that no âimportantâ or âurgentâ message has been missed. This should be considered when designing systems to reduce the number of interruptions from notifications.â – Telefonica Research, An In-Situ Study of Mobile Phone Notifications
As daily tech users, and professionals in a digital industry, we need to reconsider how we juggle our necessity to be connected, and manage our online presence, but also to switch off and be productive. Before we can implement a new system, we need to correct our behaviour first and quantify our time.
Tristan Harris and James Williams are developing a framework at Google to help product designers facilitate conscious choices for users, give his TEDx talk a watch: âDistracted? Let’s make technology that helps us spend our time wellâ
– This article was originally posted on theMediaFlow blog –
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Anna Youngs 