Good morning, look at me!
Did you ever notice that when your alarm rings in the morning, your iPhone tries to engage a long daily conversation with you?
Well, it tells you good morning. It is greeting you, and greetings are how you start a conversation usually, right? In the beginning, I found it nice and smart. I have been working a while on chatbots when I was at Hinderling Volkart and was very interested in “talking interfaces”.
But recently, I saw the introduction of a talk from Peter Smart talking at the Awwwards Conference.
I would like to focus on the first 5 minutes. What Peter is saying is right (at least in opinion) about the fact that User Experience Designer are more User Transaction Designer. And he’s also right when he says that we are doing as designers is extremely important.
Our role is to make to technology easier to use.
But now, we see a lot of articles reporting how many hours we spend in front of the screen, and this the kind of reports we see every year, and this amount of hours spend in front of a screen is rising over years.
But then I thought. If technology is easier to use, people should spend less time using it, because it’s faster, right? So why the stats are off the charts?
Well, you might have heard of the rebound effect.
When someone invents new and more energy-efficient technology you might think it automatically will lead to energy savings — but you might end up with no savings at all, or maybe even an increase in energy consumption.
Source: https://esrc.ukri.org/about-us/50-years-of-esrc/50-achievements/the-rebound-effect/
Well, my opinion is that new digital products and services are not oriented to reduce our screen time. Most services want us to spend time with their products. It might be leading us to simplify the action of using a tech item such as a smartphone or make it faster (and more energy-efficient if we look at 5G), but will not necessarily reduce the time we spend using it, and it becomes an addiction.
If we come back again to the iPhone greetings in the morning, the nice part is that your device will have a sort of human feel by talking to you.
But the problem is (if like me you are a little too addicted to screens and do not use the snooze features when it is time to wake) that once you dismiss the alarm, your phone is going to show you some notifications you received overnight. And as you look at your screen, your phone may unlock with face ID, encouraging you to start a dialog with your phone… It wants you to use it.
And that’s we must as designers (UI designer, UX designer, and “It-sounds-nice-on-LinkedIn Designer”) make technologies less painful for users. But we should as well raise the awareness of the users in order to reduce screen time and having reel experiences.
This subject is far from being closed, and it will be the object of more articles/thoughts.
By the way: I am not a guru. While most articles might be more seen as “just a thought”, I am simply sharing my vision and feeling on our digital era and its impact on our daily life.
