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A call to minimize distraction and respect users’ attention (2013)

minimizedistraction.com

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Re: A call to minimize distraction and respect users’ attention (2013)

#131

Post by lamontcg »

Bjartr wrote: post #61
lamontcg wrote: post #46

Make junk mail and spam e-mail illegal to start with. Then start doing something about regulating advertising. In an ideal world intrusive advertising would be banned and we'd have to go looking for ads to find them instead of them constantly demanding that we pay attention to them. But that'd entirely blow up Google's whole business model.

> Make junk mail and spam e-mail illegal to start with. CAN-SPAM[0] does exactly that for US businesses. Any email from a US business that is for advertisement or otherwise promotional (as distinct from transactional[1]) then it: * Must not have false or misleading from/to/reply-to * Must not have a deceptive subject * Must be labeled an ad * Must include a valid physical postal address * Must have a clear and conspi…

> CAN-SPAM[0] does exactly that for US businesses.

No, I said make it illegal, and I meant exactly that.

Re: A call to minimize distraction and respect users’ attention (2013)

#132

Post by BoxOfRain »

acituan wrote: post #127
mindwok wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Makes me wonder what these kind of notifications are really worth. All they do is make me immediately mute the app from ever notifying me again, and leave a bad taste in my mouth. How many people are really seeing this and impulse purchasing an Uber ride somewhere? I suspect close to zero.

I would guess the number of people who have opted-out of the notifications are either not reported, or the aggregate opt-out ratio doesn't make a ding on overall notification conversion rates. In other words, people don't have a uniform frustration tolerance to irrelevant push notifications, and losing the most irritable segment might be 'worth' it if the majority of the population is still getting them. An alternati…

Yeah, I know this is an anecdote but most people in my life just put up with a constant stream of buzzing and pinging. I’m very much in the habit of not allowing any notifications to begin with, especially in my browser, but I’m in a minority I think.

Emails are even worse, I unsubscribe from the vast majority and block the ones I can’t (Hermes are utterly revolting for this noise generation, three non-unsubscribable emails and three texts per delivery!). The pathetic signal to noise ratio of email makes it utterly worthless as a means of communication for me, if it were up to me I’d do away with it altogether!

Re: A call to minimize distraction and respect users’ attention (2013)

#134

Post by musicale »

scotty79 wrote: post #99
Zelphyr wrote: post #90

All I've heard for the past 12+ years is "engagement". The singular focus on that one word to the exclusion of everything else is astounding to me. As if it is some magic incantation on the part of BizDev (or whatever they're called these days) that instantly transmogrifies users into profits. At one company I worked at, we had a digital product that was part of a suite of services our company provided. It was useful…

When you are in finances I think you hear "money" quite often.

Which makes it even more puzzling that marketing would insist on something that burns the company's money and the customer's money with zero (or negative) benefit.

Re: A call to minimize distraction and respect users’ attention (2013)

#135

Post by SantalBlush »

mindwok wrote: post #124
dorkwood wrote: post #118

I received a notification from Uber on the weekend. It said something to the effect of "it's a nice day today, why don't you take a ride?" I've never told my phone to fuck off faster. How many people out there were in the middle of an important task, only to have their phone ask them if they wanted to take a car somewhere for no reason? The collective man-hours of distraction being generated must be staggering; years…

Makes me wonder what these kind of notifications are really worth. All they do is make me immediately mute the app from ever notifying me again, and leave a bad taste in my mouth. How many people are really seeing this and impulse purchasing an Uber ride somewhere? I suspect close to zero.

They're not impulse purchasing a ride, but you can bet they will be thinking of Uber when the time comes that they do need a ride.

Re: A call to minimize distraction and respect users’ attention (2013)

#136

Post by musicale »

monocasa wrote: post #115
Zelphyr wrote: post #90

All I've heard for the past 12+ years is "engagement". The singular focus on that one word to the exclusion of everything else is astounding to me. As if it is some magic incantation on the part of BizDev (or whatever they're called these days) that instantly transmogrifies users into profits. At one company I worked at, we had a digital product that was part of a suite of services our company provided. It was useful…

> Finally I said, "Look. We shouldn't be trying to make our customers spend more time in this product any more than LG does trying to get us to spend more time in our refrigerators." It fell on deaf ears. Considering how hard it is to find decent, non-smart appliances these days, it seems to have fell on deaf ears at LG as well.

"Look how many hours our users spend watching Netflix on our new refrigerator and using our connected mobile fridge app!"

Re: A call to minimize distraction and respect users’ attention (2013)

#137

Post by caturopath »

dorkwood wrote: post #118

I received a notification from Uber on the weekend. It said something to the effect of "it's a nice day today, why don't you take a ride?" I've never told my phone to fuck off faster. How many people out there were in the middle of an important task, only to have their phone ask them if they wanted to take a car somewhere for no reason? The collective man-hours of distraction being generated must be staggering; years…

It's galling that using notifications for ads is allowed by the marketplaces.

Re: A call to minimize distraction and respect users’ attention (2013)

#139

Post by musicale »

perihelions wrote: post #103
cmehdy wrote: post #2

For 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.

If anyone wants the plain text transcription of the slides, this site appears to have that: https://digitalwellbeing.org/googles-internal-digital-wellbe... > "A Call to Minimize Distraction and Respect Users’ Attention." > "by Tristan Harris." > "I’m concerned about how we’re making the world more distracted. And my goal with this presentation is to create a movement at Google to create a new design ethic that aims t…

That is so much better. Slide shows like this are an annoyingly distracting waste of people's time and attention!

Like a simple list of 10 items which is made into ten web pages that you have to click through individually - wasting your time and attention to trick you into viewing more advertising.

Re: A call to minimize distraction and respect users’ attention (2013)

#140

Post by dang »

ChrisArchitect wrote: post #109

(2013)? come on plenty of discussion more recently than that about the topic: The growing body of evidence that digital distraction is damaging our minds https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16098847 We live in an age of distractions, dealing with constant mental stimulus https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26207184 My year with a distraction-free iPhone https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8251334 The Death of Soci…

What's wrong with 2013? Historical material is welcome here, and I assume one interesting point about the OP is how relatively early it was.
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