#11: Birth a Button
Instructions
Look at a program or app you use regularly—slowly.
Notice what choices are available—and which aren’t.
Consider what you’d love to have instead.
Sketch or design it.
Throw your phone in the ocean. Or at least, put it away.
Bleep the Bloop?
I’ve worked on apps and websites for a couple decades, and have been lucky enough to meet some great designers and developers. To see the internet from the backend is thrilling—and terrifying. A colleague worked on a YouTube logo, and his hours of care (and love for gaming) came through as he iterated the design. Of course, in the end, his fingerprints were invisible on the final design and it was released into the wild, simply another set of pixels that users' eyes scrolled across and then plunked at (or not). Technically, I can’t even reveal who the person is, or where I met him, but it’s a great logo (now sunsetted).
Image: YouTube Gaming previous logo
Digital design is a tremendous amount of (mostly invisible) labor, and when presented on devices can come off as benign. But each seemingly mundane decision has massive implications as we live more of our lives online—and as the industry has been mostly male, white, and urban. Sometimes these choices made in fast-paced “disruptive” workplaces can have dangerous consequences, as in the built-in racial bias of facial recognition software or how Facebook’s recommendation algorithm siloes information on the platform.
Tech companies make changes constantly, and those often hide the intent or reasoning behind the changes to the user experience. When TikTok started eating Instagram’s lunch, Facebook swapped out the core Instagram creative button—post—with a Reels link, and swapped out the key social action—heart icon—with a Shop icon.
Technology companies also actively use “persuasive design” to adopt the tricks of casinos to keep us addicted—excuse me—engaged. Tristan Harris, formerly of Google, explained the basic concept of menus and the illusion of choice.
Image: Tristan Harris (via Medium)
But often there are options, though they’re not always easy to spot. One example, GMail’s “schedule send” (a rip-off of Boomerang) feature next to the Send button.
Imagine the difference between sending someone an email on Friday night, which they feel the need to respond to on Saturday, which you feel the need to respond to on Sunday—or having it just land into their email on Monday morning without having to think about it.
Maybe you’d have a bit more of a “weekend”. Our ancestors fought hard to get time off, and we’re all like “BUILD MY BRAND! HUSTLE GRIND! WHY AM I SO STRESSED?”
Image: Ricardo Levins Morales’ print on the fight for the 8-hour workday
The Stuff You Can Do
Some very simple things you can do:
Take moments to pause and really enjoy and share things that are nourishing, inspiring, and/or fun online. People are doing some amazing stuff on TikTok—check out this person explaining mRNA!
Read Jenny Odell’s “How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy” — or this blog post of the presentation that inspired it. Odell’s next book is on time, and addresses the inequality of having control of our time.
Some other things to explore and experiment with:
Delete apps and/or reorder them to change the “AHH I’M UNSETTLED, PHONE PLEASE” moments.
Turn on Screen Time or similar apps for your devices to track your usage.
Test out an Offline Day, maybe once a month to start.
More than anything else, be friendly with yourself.
Smartphones and the internet are wildly new, so right now it’s like someone handed us a pack of cigarettes and a lighter with no warning and said “KEEP THIS WITH YOU, ALWAYS, YOU NEED IT FOR EVERYTHING”—and we’re judging ourselves for turning into a chainsmoker.
Image: Beetlejuice was a good movie.
Also, if you work in tech, make it better. Please.
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