This was made in 2013: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tristan_Harris
A call to minimize distraction and respect users’ attention (2013)
31–40 of 285 posts
Re: A call to minimize distraction and respect users’ attention (2013)
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
The enforced ~500ms loading time between slides is a killer. Why not preload and display them immediately?
On mobile, the slides switched instantly. On Firefox Desktop it's like from hell.
For me, using Firefox on a Mac, the slides also switched instantly.
Re: A call to minimize distraction and respect users’ attention (2013)
#33For other readers: this seems to be an internal google presentation made public to tell engineers to respect users' attention. I guess as a user of the website it didn't respect my attention enough to make me want to click through the whole thing. I dropped out after twenty or so clicks, having read less and less stuff after a few slides.
Agreed. Ironically, the slideshow format is extremely 'low density', and frustrates my ability to quickly read what they have to say. I didn't get all the way through it either.
It's meant to be clicked through quickly in a live presentation, like a tv show, not the 'book page' style that most people have a harder time with absorbing. It's not a blog article.
Re: A call to minimize distraction and respect users’ attention (2013)
#34Being made to nibble little bites of text one at a time is a distraction. Images depicting clumsy or irrelevant metaphors of easily understood things are a distraction.
I had exactly the same thought.
But perhaps the author wanted to drive the point home :-)
Re: A call to minimize distraction and respect users’ attention (2013)
#35This is great and all of it true, but the needs of these companies are counter to the goals presented here. Ad funded products need to steal time and attention to be profitable. Apple might be in a position to do something, but Facebook, Twitter, and Google depend on ad revenue. Even subscription companies like Netflix are hyper focused on engagement. I was daydreaming yesterday about a national mandate to shut down…
Speak for yourself, but some of us don't have social media.
Re: A call to minimize distraction and respect users’ attention (2013)
#36This is great and all of it true, but the needs of these companies are counter to the goals presented here. Ad funded products need to steal time and attention to be profitable. Apple might be in a position to do something, but Facebook, Twitter, and Google depend on ad revenue. Even subscription companies like Netflix are hyper focused on engagement. I was daydreaming yesterday about a national mandate to shut down…
Yeah to be honest this feels like a Googler trying to deal with their guilty conscience by starting a "movement" that fundamentally cannot go anywhere because it runs entirely counter to the economic incentives that animate ad tech companies.
Tristan Harris, the author of this presentation, wound up leaving the company.
I guess it didn't work.
Re: A call to minimize distraction and respect users’ attention (2013)
#37Being made to nibble little bites of text one at a time is a distraction. Images depicting clumsy or irrelevant metaphors of easily understood things are a distraction.
It seems like this is a leaked internal presentation from Google, not meant for public consumption.
That's what I take away from "Google Confidential and Proprietary" in the bottom right.
Some more context over what this is and who wrote it would be immensely valuable.
Re: A call to minimize distraction and respect users’ attention (2013)
#38This presentation is from 2013. It's a historical artifact that helped kick off the movement to fight distraction in its early days, not the state of the art thinking of the current day.
Obviously, a lot of the concerns it expresses are still very relevant.
Re: A call to minimize distraction and respect users’ attention (2013)
#39For other readers: this seems to be an internal google presentation made public to tell engineers to respect users' attention. I guess as a user of the website it didn't respect my attention enough to make me want to click through the whole thing. I dropped out after twenty or so clicks, having read less and less stuff after a few slides.
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Re: A call to minimize distraction and respect users’ attention (2013)
#40Oh wow, that's from 8 years ago. And then it got leaked outside of Google 3 years ago it seems -- this article [1] provides a ton more context.
Just for context, and before people start accusing Google of hypocrisy or anything -- these slides never represented an official (or unofficial) Google position or anything. They're not PR. They're just a single employee's opinion in slideshow form, an opinion he was trying to build support for internally.
Whether you think it made any kind of impact is a fun thought question though.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/10/17333574/google-android-p...