What designers can do about internet addiction

In 1996, Dr Kimberly Young was one of the first scientists to warn against the addictiveness of computer use. That’s right, 25 years ago. Fast-forward to today, dark patterns are still rampant, and by forcing us to spend more time inside and online, the pandemic has accelerated the harmful effects of these mechanisms. Let’s take a look at Internet addiction, persuasive & addictive patterns, and what designers can do to avoid them.

Internet Addiction Disorder

Imagine an addict. What do you picture? A syringe? A bottle of wine? A little mountain of white powder next to a credit card? How about… a phone?

Unlike chemical addictions that may come to mind more easily, Internet Addiction Disorder (IAD) is not caused by a substance. It is part of the behavioural addictions, along with gambling disorder, gaming disorder, and more. That doesn’t make it less serious, and it can still dramatically affect someone’s life.

Just like chemical addictions, Internet Addiction Disorder includes the following symptoms:

• Mood alteration
• Loss of control
• Pleasure derived from the addiction
• Withdrawal: anxiety and/or irritation when the person can’t access the Internet or their devices, cravings
• Tolerance: to dopamine and other pleasure neurochemicals, which means they need to keep producing them in high levels to avoid withdrawal
• Continuation of the behaviour despite its negative impact on other areas of life, such as work or close relationships

How do you tell a bad habit from an addiction? Compulsively reaching for your phone doesn’t mean you’re addicted to it. The time you spend online isn’t a useful criterion either: what if the reason one spends 7h per day on social media is that they’re a social media manager?

There are several IAD tests that you can find online, but you can mostly tell addiction from bad habits with the following:

• One’s Internet use negatively affects other areas of their life, yet they keep at it
• They plan their life around their time online
• They can’t control their Internet use

Treating Internet Addiction Disorder can involve a variety of methods, from cognitive behavioural therapy to pharmacological treatments. The one constant though, is abstinence. Reducing time online is the single most important item to check off the list when it comes to tackling this disorder. And yes, you guessed it: spending less time online is particularly difficult since digital devices are omnipresent. Changing your environment is key to recovery, by removing the devices around you, and potentially changing where you spend time and who you hang out with. Being around people who are themselves present in the moment and not absorbed by their devices, and avoiding the places where you used to be compulsively online are critical ways to avoid triggers.

Here’s how marketing and psychology professor Adam Atler put it in his book Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked:

“This is why most heroin users struggle to stay clean. […] They see friends who remind them of a time when they were addicts; they live in the same homes; they walk through the same neighborhoods. Nothing changes once they’re clean, except the fact that instead of giving in to the addiction, they’re resisting it every day. This is why the temptation is so great. What else are they supposed to do when every sight, smell, and sound rekindles the moment of bliss that follows a hit? […] And even the most determined addicts-in-recovery will relapse when they revisit the people and places that remind them of the drug.”

Persuasive and addictive design

Some define “Persuasive design” as technology that “changes” human behaviour. I’m not convinced about this phrasing, because any design somehow shapes use and behaviour. I’d rather say that persuasion is a matter of degree. In this excellent article, service and experience designer Lennart Overkamp frames it this way:

“Ethics related to persuasion is about to what extent we may influence the behavior and thoughts of our users.”

So, how do we evaluate this extent, how do we identify persuasive design? Here are some powerful questions to guide our assessment:

• What is motivating the use of a given design decision?
• Are users feeling pressured?
• Would they react differently if they better understood how the product works? If it was more transparent or straightforward?
• Would they then feel deceived?

I believe the line between persuasive and addictive design lies in the frequency of the behaviour it encourages. Persuasive design might push you to make a one-time decision, while addictive design could keep you coming back. A pressing message saying that “You have one hour left to get it!” is persuasive design — even if the statement is true: design doesn’t have to be deceptive to be persuasive. A platform promoting endless badges, points and levels for you to gain, so that you keep using it day after day, is addictive.

User benefit is an interesting dimension to look at, but it’s not a criterion to categorise a design pattern as non-persuasive or non-addictive. Resorting to persuasive mechanisms can be framed as being in the user’s best interest, and user benefit is subjective. For instance, one could argue that a dating app sending you 4 notifications per day to complete your profile is good for you, because it will help you attract the right people. Meditation app Headspace uses a daily streak feature, creating artificial pressure on users so that they meditate daily if they don’t want to lose their streak.

Language learning app Duolingo features infamous passive-aggressive communication, via its owl mascot, urging people to keep using the app. Some find these techniques annoying, while others are grateful for the added pressure to stick to something they find beneficial and might otherwise struggle to be regular with. A radically mindful design would let users choose whether they want these persuasive and addictive mechanisms in the first place, whether they prefer the nudge or their unbridled agency.

Is the persuasion used to align user behaviour with goals that they themselves explicitly selected? Let’s look at the recommendations YouTube makes after you finished watching a video. What if, instead of pushing the video most people watched next — which can be harmful as recommendations promote more and more extreme videos — it pushed one from your own “Watch later” list?

As Tristan Harris aptly put it:

“And so the only form of ethical persuasion that exists in the world is when the goals of the persuaders are aligned with the goals of the persuadees.”

Design implications

Addictive design can bring a variety of burdens into someone’s life. An obvious one is spending more time online than they wanted to, but the drawbacks can also consist of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) and a sense of isolation, a drop in happiness levels, self-esteem and body image issues, dopamine dependency, and experiencing more outrage. Physiologically, addictive design can also lead to sleep issues and eye strain.

Here are some persuasive or addictive design mechanisms that designers should be careful with, or avoid entirely.

Variable rewards

The variable rewards used by many online platforms keep us scrolling or returning to a product because they provide us with dopamine surges we get hooked on. I’ve written about how this addictive system works. For instance, displaying an image feed with very aesthetically pleasing items next to ones we’re indifferent to, or sending completely irrelevant notifications mixed with very enticing ones are ways to induce rewards variability. As it turns out, we experience these addictive rewards even more intensely when they come from mood enhancing content, such as pornography, video games, dating platforms, social media, and gambling.

Scarcity and Urgency

You should only display that there is only 2 items left in stock, or only 4 hours left to participate in something, if it’s truthful and relevant. In terms of truthfulness, I’ve had the displeasure to notice that when opening the exact same page on my phone, and then a few hours later on my laptop, the countdown was starting from scratch on the second one. This means that the urgency presented there by NordVPN wasn’t real, but fabricated according to the time I visited the URL on a specific device. I could have cleared my cookies and re-opened it 3 days later, and the same countdown would have started again. When it comes to relevance, chances are there’s no reason to use distressing UI (e.g. bold and red font with an alarm clock icon) if there are 82 items left. Unless they’re going away faster than I say Yes to visiting botanical gardens, I promise there’s no reason to elicit pressure in your users.

Social media stories also create a sense of urgency: you have 24 hours to view them. The reduced friction (easily moving from one story to the next), induced FOMO, and variability of content are also addictive factors. If your product contains stories, you could downplay the ephemerality by extending their lifetime. For instance, I’d love to see week-long stories: calmer, more mindful, introducing a slower pace in your social platform. You could also add friction to regularly check with users that they do want to keep watching stories.

Last but not least, offers that renew every day have an addictive factor. Daily deals can create variable rewards since they encourage people to visit a platform and check new offers every day, which can be addictive. Below is an example from AliExpress (yes, with a mix of English and French).

Social proof and Authority

These can be used persuasively. Testimonials are useful, but some metrics don’t make any sense. Here are the “Top Rankings” from AliExpress, displaying the amount of followers a product has, the number of times it was ordered, and how many people have expressed interest in it. As you’ve noticed, none of these signs actually says anything about the quality of the item, or the satisfaction from people who purchased it. “3123 orders” and “605406 followers” are factice expressions of authority and create persuasiveness that’s irrelevant to people’s best interest. Alternatively, customer satisfaction would be a forthright and useful indication to share.

Reciprocation

Do you remember when we didn’t have a “seen” icon in messaging apps? Good old times. Have you ever felt more pressure to reply because of it? Do you feel that you need to reply faster and not “leave them on read” (we use such a telling expression)? Does it stay on your mind until you do so?

Source

I’m not advocating to remove this feature altogether, but rather that we should allow for personalisation. LinkedIn does it by letting you change settings on how it looks when you visit someone’s profile. Right now, you would be notified that I, Clo, visited your profile. However, if I were to select options that are bigger on privacy, you wouldn’t know exactly who the visit was from.

Twitter DMs and other messaging platforms also let you manage the read receipts that the people you chat with might get from you.

Technology-induced guilt or obligations

As I mentioned above, Duolingo’s owl is well-known for guilting and pressuring people into using the app, whether via its copy (“We haven’t seen you in a while”, “These reminders don’t seem to be working”) or its imagery (an illustration of the owl crying because I haven’t opened the app in a while? Give me a break). Likewise, a game “yelling at you to tell you that it’s “lonely” and needs you to play” is not a considerate interruption. Obligations are often artificially created by streaks, that many platforms use, nudging people into visiting them daily. The bigger the commitment, the bigger the pressure: if you are to lose your streak, a 3-day one doesn’t take as long to rebuild as a 256-day one.

Contrary to reciprocation that we saw just above, this pattern doesn’t involve anyone on the other end of the line expecting a certain behaviour from you. Pretending that users hurt someone or something is capitalising on their humanity against them, and literally nothing bad happens if they lose their streak, but it might still feel like it. If you display a character as sad or lonely, people’s empathy makes them feel that they’re actually disappointing someone. I don’t think technology-induced guilt or obligations should be implemented unless users have explicitly opted into them. Otherwise, you’ll make me feel just like the owl below. See? Annoying as hell.

Lack of friction

Inserting natural stops in the experience is a good way to avoid people being stuck in a ludic loop, which is an addictive pattern. You could use pagination instead of infinite scroll, or at least regularly verify with users whether they do want to keep scrolling. Even better: you could implement self-reflective check-ins. I covered this idea in my article on a mindful mobile OS. You could ask:

• How well are you spending your time? (on a 5-point scale)
• Are you happy with what you are doing in this instant? (closed question)
• What is your current activity bringing you? (open question, adds more friction because it’s not binary, but gives a greater opportunity for introspection)

Other examples of low-friction designs include 1-click purchases and auto-playing videos.

Gamification

Gamification consists of incorporating game mechanics into non-gaming software. Its whole point is to ignite dopamine surges with frequent rewards.

Gamification is particularly bad when it looks like this:

• Created your account on the app? You get a badge for signing up!
• Took your first photo? Get 25 points!
• Published your first post? Woah, level-up!

Google once congratulated me for having “spent time viewing an image”:

I see two issues with gamification. First, since our brain gets high not only on rewards but also on the expectation of them, it can have an addictive dimension. Then, a second-order consequence: if we get used to getting gold stars every 5 or so actions, we might start struggling with software that doesn’t give in to infantilising techniques. Please use parsimoniously.

Interruptions

We’re all familiar with being caught up in an article and when a pop-in suddenly blocks our view and asks us to subscribe to a newsletter. And how about being stopped dead in our tracks to download an app when we’re using a mobile site, as Reddit does?

These nudging interruptions can be frustrating and confusing, and particularly so to people with anxiety. My immediate reaction is that I just want this thing out of my way, and while these are persuasive design patterns, I only experience them as annoying ones.

Once more, interruptions should be used when they’re aligned with people’s goals and values, and promote their wellbeing.

So, what can designers do about Internet addiction?

Our design decisions have a direct impact on the habits, decisions, time, and overall cognition of many. Internet Addiction Disorder is gruesome and notably difficult to recover from. Even without causing it, persuasive and addictive design can still lead to anxiety, distractions, frustration, meaningless loss of time, and compulsive spending. I’ve tried to list positive alternatives to these patterns, and I invite you to share your own as well. It is up to each of us to create mindful design patterns and to favour digital wellness.

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Originally published at https://thistooshallgrow.com on November 25, 2021.