Addictive by Design
Sebastian Deterding thinks the field of User Experience (UX) has a lot to learn from a children’s book called Momo.
In the book, and the movie based on it, Momo is a girl with an amazing gift. She can make people feel better just by listening to them. (But, you might ask, don’t we all have that gift?)
One day the Men in Grey show up, claiming to be from Timesavings Bank.
They start informing the villagers how many seconds they have left in their lives and how much of that time they are wasting. The villagers are shocked and start finding ways to save time, which they are encouraged to deposit in Timesavings Bank.
The more time-efficient they become, however, the less time they seem to have. Their lives become hectic and cold as they are drained by the Men in Grey, who are actually alien parasites that steal time and smoke it like cigarettes.
The point, of course, is that UX today does not seem all that different from the Men in Grey. Is UX about helping people…or is it about capturing more and more of their time?
This calls to mind the work of Ivan Illich, who became famous for his arguments about the manipulative nature of many of today’s products. In Deschooling Society (1971), Illich argued that people today are not only less active and less creative but also lonelier, living a siloed existence devoid of thriving convivial relationships.
In Tools for Conviviality (1973), Illich introduced the notion of “radical monopolies”, a concept he would later use to argue that professional groups and the rising culture of experts have created a sort of monopoly on many basic human activities.
Many of us, he argued, have been robbed of much of our knowledge for creation and reduced to mere consumers. This is not only less economically and environmentally sustainable, but is less psychologically rewarding, leaving people with a general sense of dissatisfaction.
Illich distinguished between what he called “convivial” and “industrial” tools. (For an excellent discussion, see Sanders and Stappers’ 2013 book, Convivial Toolbox.) A tool is “convivial” if easily used by anybody, and as often or seldom as desired to achieve a purpose chosen by the user (Illich, 1973).
Convivial tools allow users to enrich environments and express tastes in a noncoercive way. An example discussed by Illich was the landline telephone. It was noncoercive and inexpensive.
Industrial tools, on the other hand, are more coercive. An example is the automobile. Illich interestingly argued that if you divide the distance a person drives per year by all the effort needed to make that driving possible in the first place, then the real average speed or gain afforded by the automobile is less than four miles per hour.
A newer example of a coercive, industrial tool is social media. To quote Dan Lyons, social media is the new big tobacco.
Take Facebook as an example. Its users are not its customers, who are the people that pay for the ads on the site. In this way it is similar to television, but with an important difference: With social media, users not only provide their time, attention, and data, but also create all the content that advertisers then capitalize on.
What companies like Facebook and Twitter (I refuse to call it “X”) and Pinterest and Youtube have realized is that they can get users to work for them if they allow them access to each other’s attention. As someone spends more and more time on these sites, however, all of these “jobs” can start adding up. As our social media “work” spreads us thinner, it adds “digital stress” to our lives, driven by a looming sense of “connective obligation”.
Why do we do this to ourselves? The answer, which is probably no longer controversial, is that we’re addicted. We’re trying to “maximize rewards”.
A rat in a Skinner box will keep pushing a lever for food pellets. Humans will keep clicking and scrolling for a little dopamine—call them little “feelgood pellets”. Our response, just like the rat’s, boils down to reinforcement schedules. Our responses can be reinforced on a ratio or interval schedule, which are themselves either fixed or variable. (Here we’ll ignore negative reinforcement.)
In a fixed-ratio schedule a reward is obtained after every X number of responses. This produces a step function where each reward is followed by a respite, until another reward is desired, which produces rapid responses to generate the next reward.
Piecemeal work is an example of such a schedule. The most powerful schedule is variable-ratio. Here, the reward depends on the number of responses, but the number required is different every time. Since we can’t predict how many it will be, all we can do is respond at a steady rate.
This is the reinforcement schedule of slot machines. Slot machines are so successful that they’ve literally reshaped Vegas itself. As Schüll (2012) observes in his book, Addiction by Design, more and more gambling addicts are moving away from classic, more social games like poker and blackjack and gravitating toward solitary machine games like the revamped, electronic slot machine.
When it comes to likes or responses on Twitter or Facebook, these “feelgood pellets” happen after a variable (unfixed) amount of time has passed. This is a variable-interval reinforcement schedule. Though not quite as powerful as variable-ratio schedules (and therefore slightly less intense than gambling in a casino), variable-interval and variable-ratio schedules still generate a similar response pattern: Both produce a steady rate of responses with no predictable pauses or changes in rate.
But wait. Why only attend to one source of pellets at a time? Why not open multiple tabs? Why not compulsively sample multiple streams of media input, ever trying to maximize those little dopamine feelgood pellets? Enter the grim world of “media multitasking”.
Multitasking is, of course, a misnomer. What we’re really doing is task switching. The late Clifford Nass famously argued that media multitasking is not best thought of as an honest attempt to get more done. It’s more a form of distraction, a way of avoiding the real task at hand.
In other words, what we tend to call “multitasking” is often a form of procrastination. It has been argued that even people who begin media multitasking because they think it will make them more productive then continue it because it feels good.
And it also changes our brains.
Facebook of course would say this is absurd. Twitter too. They’re not Timesavings Bank. It’s all about connecting people of course. It’s like email, or smartphones. These are all just…“conveniences”.
And yet, like the villagers harassed by the Men in Grey, we find that the more “conveniences” we have, the less time we have, which will always be the case as long as our conveniences are themselves time-consuming—and they will be as long as they’re addictive.
UX Designers don’t work for Timesavings Bank…or do they?
Designer Erika Hall often shares the image below online. It’s an apt metaphor.
As long as time is money and the main mission of the company is to maximize shareholder value, then design will operate within a system where its main function is to capture people’s time, so that major shareholders can then smoke it, like cigarettes.
Until next time.