https://njms.ca/posts/ethical-anti-design.html
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Ethical anti-design, or designing products that people can't get
addicted to.
2021-02-21 12:00:00 +0100
The Fediverse only solves half the problem.
2021-02-14 12:00:00 +0100
The 7 Habits of Highly Efficient People
2020-09-13 20:00:00 +0100
Ethical anti-design, or designing products that people can't get
addicted to.
2021-02-21 12:00:00 +0100
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[ethical-an] Why not take a break?
In the photo above, a Wii Remote is sitting on a table next to an
open window. People who grew up playing the Wii might remember it;
while playing Wii Sports, the game would give you a pop up window of
it with a message politely reminding you that you can always take a
break. While it might seem a bit counterintuitive, there's a couple
of different reasons why a game would tell you to stop playing. In
the case of online, subscription-based games, the company might
actually benefit from you logging off every once in a while (don't
worry, I'll get to social media eventually). It's not like you're
cancelling your subscription, and every second you're online chews up
valuable bandwidth. In other games, things like level-grinding, while
tempting, might ruin the experience. In a game like Pokemon, for
example, if you get your entire team up to level 60 before taking on
the Elite Four, you'll win, but not in the most glamorous or
satisfying way. The case of the Wii was a bit different. It seemed
like Nintendo was aware that their audience was mostly younger
children, and they felt the need to intervene when the player spends
too much time playing the game out of interest for the player
themself (and maybe the appeasement of the parents). That's not the
sort of thing we see often anymore, and I always wondered why.
Bandwidth isn't as expensive as it used to be. The mechanics of many
modern video games don't allow for level grinding anymore. Has
Nintendo stopped caring about our children? Well, the industry has
changed quite a bit. Today, many games benefit from having players
spend as much time online as possible. In the mobile game Clash of
Clans, players can prevent their base from being attacked by always
staying online. The faster you complete a game, the quicker you'll be
pushed to by its DLC or better yet, its Season Pass. Most obviously,
if you spend more time online, you'll encounter more players, some
with creative (and expensive) skins or other purchasable cosmetic
items. The more people like this you see, the more you may feel
pressured into buying them yourself. This is a worrying trend, and it
seems to be affecting most of the Triple-A game market. However, we
have someone else to thank for these company's drive to keep our eyes
on our devices for as long as possible.
In the case of social media, it was always in their best interest to
keep us online. Very simply, the longer you look at your screen, the
more likely your eyes are to come across an advertisement. Social
media companies have poured billions of dollars into refining
techniques to keep us engaged. I often joke that TikTok is the parent
function of this sort of thing: short, colourful, algorithm-tailored,
multi-sensory content that's constantly being streamed to you without
interruption. The only thing that could make it more addictive would
be if they IV-ed sugar directly into your veins while they were at
it. And still, TikTok probably invests billions of dollars every year
in refining their platform to make it as inviting as possible.
Instagram is following suit; the way they present content is starting
to feel more and more like TikTok with each passing month (especially
since they introduced Reels). It's no surprise my generation spends
so much time on social media, and nobody can blame them. As I was
researching this topic, taking a closer look at the user interface of
Instagram, my biggest challenge was to hold myself back from just
scrolling through the endless stream of algorithmically chosen
content.
It's scary to think about. So, I'll ask. All this user-retention
stuff is great, but what if it didn't have to be like that? Rather,
what if we designed products that weren't designed to be addictive?
Dark Patterns and the Fediverse
I get it, a big part of an app's addictiveness comes from its
usability, and the notion of designing apps to be less usable feels a
bit ridiculous. That being said, there might be a market for it. Last
week, I wrote an article called "The Fediverse only solves half the
problem" where I talked about the issue of dark patterns such as
infinite scrolling at length. The point is, FLOSS-abiding technology
has a philosophical obligation to put the people using it first. In
the case of social media, a big part of that was creating an
ecosystem (i.e. the Fediverse) where you didn't need to depend on a
central authority; an ecosystem where you could be in charge of your
own data. While the organization of the Fediverse was a big step
forward, we still have to deal with dark patterns.
Most open-source developers (myself included) don't have much formal
work experience in UI/UX design. That's why so much open-source
software is either extremely brutalist (see Blender) or very, very
closely related to the design of its proprietary counterpart (see
KDE). The Fediverse seems to fall into the second category.The UI of
Mastodon (and all of its clients) looks quite a bit like Twitter. In
a sense, this was probably intentional. The closer the UI designers
of Mastodon could mimic Twitter, the more newcomers would immediately
feel comfortable with the Fediverse. With that comes the problem of
dark patterns. Again, Twitter's interface was very intentionally
designed to maximize the amount of time per day a person spends
online. The Fediverse really doesn't need that, but it has it anyway.
That's why I'm proposing that we reevaluate the way we design
Fediverse interfaces and clients in light of how we can best strike a
balance between creating a positive experience and one that puts the
well-being of the person using your product first.
What is ethical anti-design?
Ethical anti-design comes in two parts. First of all, it's worth
asking more generally, what exactly is anti-design?
Github's "danger zone" where all the dangerous repository actions
happen
Aesthetically, anti-design was an Italian design movement that served
as a critique on consumer culture. While spiritually relevant, that's
not the kind of anti-design I'm talking about. Instead, I'm talking
about the much more pragmatic anti-design that's really common in
interfaces. Anti-design is kind of like the opposite of design:
designing not for usability, but for unusability. Again, somewhat
unintuitive, but it can be very useful. We've all encountered
anti-design many times in our lives. You know when the trash can on
your computer asks you to confirm before permanently deleting your
files? That's anti-design. Dangerous actions like permanently
deleting files are often necessary. That being said, the designers
want to make sure you don't do it by accident. That's why they
implement things like confirmation checks to make sure that doesn't
happen.
One of my favourite examples is how Github deals with repository
deletion. On the settings page of your Github repository, all the
"dangerous" actions are grouped together in a very scary looking red
box. At the very bottom of that box is the option to permanently
delete the repository. If you click on it, Github takes this shtick
one step further and asks you to type the name of the repository into
a dialogue box. This forces you to be fully, consciously aware of
what you're doing as you're doing it, and rightfully so. Deleting the
wrong repository could be frustrating, and if you're dealing with
coordinating a large number of collaborators, devastating.
Fortunately, it's not every day that you have to delete a Github
repository so the company is fairly safe in making it a reasonably
difficult thing to do.
Ethical anti-design takes these ideas and applies them to an ethical
code.
If we were all Marcus Aurelius then maybe we wouldn't need to worry
about social media addiction. The thing is, not everybody is a pure
being of stoic efficiency; most people respond really well (or
rather, really poorly) to behavioral design. Anti-design puts
interventions in place to ensure a person doesn't make dangerous
actions unintentionally. Ethical anti-design asks, "what else might
be considered dangerous, as per my ethical code?" As I've surely made
clear by now, one action that I consider dangerous is infinite
scrolling. So, if I'm designing an app and I want to apply ethical
anti-design, then I need to make sure the right measures are in place
to prevent the person from zoning out and scrolling through social
media all day.
What does ethical anti-design look like?
In the case of infinite scrolling, I think there's two routes an
ethical anti-designer could take to help the person using their
product scroll healthily: they could get rid of it or they could
interrupt it.
Before we had infinite scrolling, we had pagination. In fact,
pagination is still relatively common. Content is broken down into
separate pages. When the person scrolls to the bottom of the page, if
they want to keep looking at content, they have to click the "next"
button and wait for the new content to load. This feels a bit
antiquated now that we have effective asynchronous web applications,
but there are two key features here. First of all, the time it takes
for the website to load in the new content interrupts the otherwise
seamless scrolling. This period of time--being either an instant or
several seconds--forces the person to pause and maybe even think about
what they are doing. If they have a moment to reflect on it, then
maybe they'll know for themself whether or not this is what they
ought to be doing. The other component of this is the "next" button.
This button tells the person "that's all, though there is more if you
want it." This forces the user to actually think about what they're
doing, which helps to prevent mindless scrolling as well.
The other option would be simply to interrupt the infinite scrolling.
This could be very similar to pagination, or it could be very
different. Regardless, the way you go about doing it is very similar:
force the user to actively choose whether or not they want to see
more content and offer them an opportunity to take a pause. Imagine
this: you're scrolling through Instagram posts. After about twenty
posts, you encounter a button that says "Show More." To see more
content, you need to hold down the button for a little more than one
second. As you do this, you're shown an animated circle that
completes once the time is up. Once that happens, twenty more posts
are shown. This ensures that you aren't relying on the person's
network connection to break up their scrolling, giving just enough
time to make the user completely aware that this experience isn't
continuous. The button, again, forces the user to physically interact
with the interface to see more content. In practice, this would be
very similar to pagination, but it would feel much more natural to
someone who is used to infinite scrolling being the norm.
However, infinite scrolling isn't the only thing that causes social
media addiction. Another way they hook us is by getting us into the
numbers game. In my generation, a lot of one's self-esteem comes from
your followers, your follower to following ratio and how many likes
and comments you get on your posts. In reality, I haven't encountered
many people who are seriously judgmental about this sort of thing;
most people are harder on themselves about it than anyone else ever
could be. Interestingly enough, this is something that Instagram
actually seems to be aware of. They've redesigned the profile page a
number of times to change the emphasis on people's follower count,
and more recently, they've updated the look of posts to hide the
number of likes they've received. It's still technically possible to
see how many likes someone else's post has received, but you have to
jump through enough hoops to make it not incredibly worthwhile. I
would also consider this ethical anti-design: people are tempted to
compare themselves to others online, and Instagram is intervening.
Personally, I think this could go much further. For an example,
Instagram already shows mutual followers on a person's profile page;
what if they didn't show your follower count at all? If we were to
use social media as a way to connect to people we know, then your
follower count shouldn't really matter, should it?
Where's all this going?
Behavioral design is as problematic as it's standard practice among
the social media giants. Naturally, these dark patterns have leaked
into the Fediverse. The only way for us to to escape these patterns
is to make an active effort to avoid them. It won't be easy; I too
have a hard time bringing myself to use websites that still use
rudimentary pagination, but at the same time, that's kind of the
point.
If I haven't already made it super obvious, I intend on developing a
new Fediverse client that applies ethical anti-design. My plan will
probably take this idea to its extremes. The goal here isn't
necessarily to create the Fediverse client everyone will use, but
rather to demonstrate what this sort of thing could look like. My
hope is that ultimately, other developers will be inspired by it and
try to work these ideas into their own projects. I don't have a lot
of information on it right now because frankly I'm still very early
in the process, but if you want to hear more about it I'd encourage
you to follow me on the Fediverse where I plan on talking about this
project quite a bit and right here on this blog where you can expect
to see a more official announcement in the coming weeks.
If this is something you'd be interested in working on or in any way
helping out with, I'd love to hear from you!
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