Notifies. Displaces. Closes. Repeat...

The interface of a smartphone is like a giant switch, which is always on. We constantly live with an irrational urge to turn it off.

This excitement is not intrinsic to the use of the device; there are numerous design decisions that have led to our relationship with mobiles not being entirely healthy. There are many people who, saturated by their daily use, have been obliged to almost hack the default options offered by the terminals (disabling notifications, activating accessibility options such as black and white mode, minimising the number of applications installed...). all with the intention of restoring their brains and even preventing joint injuries to their hands.

But how did it all start? Why did the pioneers in the design of mobile applications and operating systems make such decisions?

Aza's infinite soup

The year is 2006, the golden age of blogs. At that time, the best way to find out what was new on our favourite sites was through content aggregators (or readers). RSS), a programme that captures syndication feeds from websites and displays what's new. Some people still use them, but they are not very popular. Back then, most of them were desktop programmes that had to be downloaded and installed, with interfaces full of panels, hierarchical trees with content folders, scrollbars... all in all, a rather tedious experience.

A young man Aza Raskin, who at the time was working at Humanized, develops together with his team a new paradigm for your RSS reader: the infinite displacement, This functionality allows you to read content continuously without having to make any effort to navigate.

Raskin devised this new paradigm with all good intentions, to prevent the user from abandoning his line of thought while reading, thus avoiding having to break the reading flow to dive through folders and navigation menus.

Its creator had been inspired by a popular psychological experiment published a year earlier: The bottomless soup bowl, based on the premise that if you give someone a bowl of soup that is automatically replenished in secret, they will eat more than usual. The subjects in the experiment, despite having consumed on average 73% more soup than the capacity of the bowl, did not feel that they had consumed more, nor did they feel more satiated than those who had eaten a normal amount of soup, simply because they had consumed more soup. they had no visual signs that the soup was finished.

These findings were consistent with the wisdom of the popular saying: “eat with your eyes before you eat with your stomach”. Basically, if we put a lot of food on a plate, we tend to increase our habitual intake as a rule of thumb, as this influences our consumption expectations and reduces our self-control. It seems that people use their eyes to count calories, rather than the memory of their stomachs.

12 years later, the same Raskin said in an interview with the BBC, He said he felt guilty about having created this pattern of interaction, as it had spread as a standard on most social networks. Many designers, pressured by companies' economic goals and business models, had been forced to invent ploys to get people to spend more time on applications:

«To get the next round of funding, to increase the share price... the amount of time people spend on the app has to increase. So when you put so much pressure on that number, you start inventing new ways to get people hooked.”.

As with food, the use of the infinite scrolling pattern to load irrelevant content took this problem from the stomach to the brain, saturating our minds with more information than we can assimilate.

Visual cues can lead a person to underestimate or overestimate amounts of consumption, whether of food or junk information. By removing referential elements from interfaces such as the scroll bar, pagination, or page marks from the last visit, we are deceiving people, making them lose their ability to control and breaking one of the most basic mental models that exists: the conception that things usually have a limit or a capacity.

The problem is that this pattern of interaction has contributed to addictive behaviours, we don't give our brains time to assimilate information, we just keep scrolling compulsively, loading new content. Although infinite scrolling is intended for serendipity in contexts of leisure use (browsing a film catalogue or an image gallery), people don't like to leave things halfway through, We feel uncomfortable when we start something and don't finish it..

Leaving a task unfinished usually generates a certain amount of worry. Completing it releases this tension and we feel relieved, generating a certain sense of well-being. Reading diagonally through a piece of content, checking its size to weigh our effort and, somehow, verifying or reaching the end of the page, frees us from that small task that we have self-imposed on ourselves.

But why are we so worried about this?

The memory of Bliuma's waiter

Professional waiters have an incredible ability to remember orders from different tables, no matter how complex they are, and are able to deliver them to the right person. This ability attracted the attention of the Soviet Gestalt psychologist and psychiatrist Bliuma Zeigárnik, In the mid-1920s, after observing a waiter on a terrace who was able to hold several orders in his head while the tables were not being served.

This virtue did not seem to have much to do with sustained mental effort, but rather with the ability to hold these incomplete tasks in short-term memory. As more orders were generated and not served or paid for, the waiters seemed to become irritated.

Dr. Zeigarnik tried to reproduce this hypothesis by conducting experiments in her laboratory at the University of Berlin, under the supervision of Lev Vygotsky. During the study, participants were asked to complete various tasks or puzzles, some of them were interrupted midway through the exercises and asked to start working on other tasks, which made the participants quite restless. When in the final interview the subjects were asked to recall which tasks they had completed, Zeigarnik concluded that people who had not completed tasks, as well as being more restless, were better able to recall them in more detail than those who had been allowed to complete them.

When we have several things to remember in our short-term memory (shopping lists, orders, numbers to do operations...), we have to list them continuously to retain them in our mind, otherwise they would disappear. This requires a lot of mental effort, which naturally increases the longer the list. Our brain tends to remember only those tasks that are incomplete, otherwise we would go crazy retaining unimportant details.

Moreover, this concern can last for a longer period, a weekend or even a holiday, as we tend to worry about those things we have not been able to close.

Television scriptwriters know how to use this psychological weakness very well. cliffhanger effect, and the main reason why the majority of the first world population is hooked on TV series. In interaction design, this effect is often used by including progress bars, steps, task lists... incomplete visual elements that encourage us to continue with a process.

Remember me

Until the advent of search engines such as Google and later smartphones, people were more likely to use physical objects to evoke our thoughts and feelings. external memory, The memory uses cues from the environment to help us remember: shopping lists held by magnets on the fridge, class notes, books that remind us of ideas...

But now this external memory is not managed by us, we have delegated these capabilities to technology, forgetting all the information that we think is irrelevant, being certain that whenever we need something it will be available on search engines like Google, and that in any case, when the time comes, we will already receive an alert reminding us that it is time to pick up our children from school.

But in any case, these notifications, if they remind us of relevant tasks, are often useful for our day-to-day lives, or at least this was the case in the early days of smartphones. When Apple launched the iPhone, in the first version of iOS In 2007, notifications were only offered in the system's own productivity apps, basically limited to text messages, missed calls and new emails. It took two years for push notifications to be offered to third-party apps, opening Pandora's box to a cacophony of push notifications and a cacophony of push notifications. ushering in the era of the care economy.

Our nervous system is optimised to perceive changes in the environment and react in milliseconds; it is a natural defence mechanism resulting from millions of years of evolution, which we share with the rest of the animal world. But unlike Aza's soup, it has a limit, and can become saturated by an excess of stimuli, generating hypersensitivity or even anaesthesia, as a defence mechanism.

Moreover, the curious thing is that, as much as we are aware of these mechanisms...

╳ We find it hard to avoid these traps.

 

More entries from Design