Designing products to respect downtime
Studies show that we spend somewhere between 2.5 to 4 hours on our phones every day. Other research claims that it’s not our fault — being human means we have the urge to connect with people, and the related necessity to be seen, heard, thought about, guided, and monitored by others reaches deep in our social brains and far in our evolutionary past.
With advertising as the primary business model in the digital economy, a battle is being waged for our attention. The battlefields are our mobile phones and the weapons in use are the features that trigger and feed these human needs — amongst the arsenal are notifications, likes, comments, streaks and a whole set of variable rewards triggered everytime we look at our phones.
But it’s much more than just how many times we check our phones. It is widely understood that mobile phone addiction can present a range of more negative effects. A study last year by the Royal Society of Public Health examined both the positive and negative effects of social media on young people’s health. Amongst the negative effects found were anxiety, depression, bullying and feelings of negative body image.
Moment is an app that records your mobile device usage. It regularly polls users to ask how they feel about the time they spend on different apps.
Note the average time spent in apps on the unhappy side of the chart. What these apps also have in common, is that most, if not all of those services have purposefully created experiences based on a clear understanding of the levers that tap into those core human behavioural needs.
As people who create mobile digital products, what responsibility do we have to our users to ensure they have positive experiences?
The debate is underway and there are signs that it is starting to be taken more seriously. Instagram has recently created a wellbeing team with the focus of making sure users of that service feel good about using it.
Our thoughts on human centric design
At Cookpad, this is a something that we think about a lot. Our mission is to Make everyday cooking fun which by definition means our ultimate success will be whether we can support our visitors to enjoy a real world activity — cooking.
In other words, our goal is to use technology to help people enjoy their offline time, rather than hijack their downtime.
Recently, we’ve been following the thinking of the Time Well Spent movement co-founded by Tristan Harris. You can read about Tristan’s story, but in short he is at the head of a movement that wants to give people back control of their digital lives and urges product creators to take a more responsible, more humane line when it comes to creating more rewarding experiences.
So, what does that mean for us and how we think about how we develop Cookpad?
Principles for humane design
We are defining a set of product principles which directly align with our mission and will ensure teams can autonomously make decisions, but result in positive humane design throughout the product.
1. Push notifications only from another human which require an immediate response
Our belief is that the product should push notify you about human activity that requires an immediate action or response. For example someone has sent you a chat message whilst cooking that needs a reply straight away: ‘I’m missing an ingredient! Can you offer an alternative?’. We should never use notifications to “game” product reengagement.
2. Cooking is the key action
Our goal is to encourage cooking so we optimise the experience to promote users to cook each others recipes, not just like them or comment. There is nothing more rewarding than to know someone has cooked your recipe!
3. Personalisation on the likelyhood of you cooking or creating a recipe
Personalisation on feeds, search and other recommendations are aimed at finding you something to cook or inspire your creativity. The goal of personalisation or machine learning should not just be how much of your attention the product can capture.
4. Communication to reduce loneliness & connect with other cooks
Our communication tools should always be safe to use and help you connect with other cooks in the community. For example, whilst we want to create an open community, new chat conversations start with an invitation. This gives users the control to decide who they would like to talk to, just as they would offline.
5. Respect users time on and off screen
Cooking and sharing food is fundamentally an offline activity, which we aim to enhance with the product and not replace or hinder. For example, we are doing a lot of research into making recipe creation an enjoyable experience, which adapts to the cooking process rather than changing it.
6. Mission focused metrics
Inline with our mission to Make everyday cooking fun we ensure that key lead metrics that drive our product retention are focused on the behaviour we want to promote. The number of recipes published and cooked sit at the top of the hierarchy, well above more common engagement metric such as impressions or likes.
7. Building your cooking muscles is the only habit we promote
Habit forming design or gamification should only be used where it helps build a user’s cooking skill, repertoire or creativity.
How are you designing your products?
The conversation on the responsibility of product designers to respect human downtime is just beginning. We would love to know your thoughts and experiences below.
- What humane design principles do you apply to your product?
- How do you encourage this thinking in your organisation?
- Have you ever withheld or changed a feature because you felt it was not in your customers best interests?
- Is this the best way to ensure products are designed with human well being in mind? Do you have a better one?
