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

minimizedistraction.com

121–130 of 285 posts

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

#121

It's funny how almost all the comments are about technical aspects of the presentation or how he said it, and not what he said. He's right, FWIW. How many times have I had to yell "Hel-LO!" at some bozo staring at his phone & not watching where he's walking? However, how would you regulate this? If you created a metric of "attention-sucking" and set a legal limit on it, the web giants would immediately game it.

There's too much to type on a phone but...

Assuming it's possible to fix this through government action, it'd probably be by enforcing education that teaches values and mindful decision-making. Right now I think what we get is a collective mindset of enduring education, enduring the workday, and then distracting ourselves into oblivion. The things that suck our attention are the best pastimes because we can do them morning to night and never stop to deal with how sucky life and being self-aware are!

I don't think you can regulate how engagement is turned into dollars. But that engagement is addictive, and we are weak to it. So can it really be solved?

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

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the state of thinking currently? What's changed? The presentation was created eight years ago and leaked three years ago, but it has never appeared on HN before. What progress has been made?

Digital Wellbeing on Android was one major example of something that seemed to have come from this. I believe iOS also built something similar.

Oh, a notification that tells me a distracting device has been distracting me for too long, and that I should take a break. That's effectively nothing: it hasn't challenged the attention model itself. It's like if a casino had scantily-clad women wandering the floor offering men at the slot machines a free drink. They aren't doing that to help the gentlemen, they are just adjusting the incentives.

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

#123

A great thing I did couple months ago was to turn off iOS notifications for email and gmail. I don't quite recollect how email went from an asynchronous mode of communication to a near real-time mode of communication where people often respond within minutes of getting email. Changing my notification settings have reduced a large number of interruptions and I still end up opening the email app a number of times durin…

I did this years ago as well, my phone rings when i get a call and texts/imessages from contacts get an alert nothing else does

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

#124

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.

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

#125
The SF product designers have the power to influence billions, but there are no consequences. So long as there are no consequences, we'll keep asking questions and merely propising these hypothetical limiters to prevent the world from being distracted.

I have a feeling that the mechanisms of addiction are tied to evolved human instinct, and we will have to essentially fight back against our own genes to have any chance at succeeding. I like to view the author's suggestions as that being a part of that fight.

The fact that we were directly responsible for wiping out tens of thousands of species of life while remaining unaware of the destruction we wrought thousands of years ago should indicate that some kind of a limiter against instinctual human reward mechanisms is needed, technological or otherwise. We are going to eat ourselves.

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

#126
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…

In a similar vein, I've discussed with customers why it's not a good idea to slavishly follow conversions, in our case on our hosted corporate careers site product.

If job seekers are not well matched to a job, then we don't want them applying (i.e. a conversion)! That wastes everyone's time and good will. Instead, we want them to leave the process as quickly as possible.

It's not unknown to have one person at the customer banging on about realistic job previews, to discourage unsuitable candidates as soon as possible ("if you take this job, you'll be standing and lifting boxes in the warehouse for 5 hours a day"), while someone else is banging on about why/how the site's conversion rate could be increased.

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

#127

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.

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 alternative explanation is opt-out burn-out; people might just give up on the possibility of a high signal/noise ratio notification space.

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

#128

Presentations like these assume people are dumb animals not being able to control their lives. They need to artificially constrained to help them live. Saying bluntly, they need a nanny. I'm an active user or Google, Facebook, Apple, Twitter and all of them. I turned off GMail notifications for non-important mails. I unsubscribe/report spam promotional e-mail. YouTube autoplay is off (simply because the recommender i…

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

#129
A friend of mine worked at a company that at one point was searching for "that red light feature"— meaning, a feature in their app that would get users to check their phones while they're stopped at a red light.

Thanks, I hate it. I wish everyone would embrace the Humane Tech ethos (https://www.humanetech.com/), but it turns out there's a lot of money in being an asshole.

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

#130
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.

This is brilliant; too bad your marketing department was apparently run by broken robots.

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