Made By Design: What You Should Know About Addictive Interfaces Medium

Table Of Content

• Over 200k developers and product managers use LogRocket to create better digital experiences
• Editorial: Reversal of Harvey Weinstein’s conviction is disappointing, but a fair justice system is important
• When Playing Video Games Means Sitting On Life's Sidelines
• Is product design making us dumb?
• Dysfunction of the dopaminergic system in obese subjects
• Digital design ethics: from addictive design to humane design
• All Tech Considered
• Drugs of addiction and accumbens dopamine

In this article, I’ll dive straight into digital addiction — what it actually looks like and what causes it. I’ll also explain what gamification is and why it might not be a good thing before we get into the nitty-gritty details of designing ethical digital products and avoiding addictive design (and dark patterns overall). Every form of content that users are exposed to leave impressions on them, and train them on what to expect from the digital interfaces they use.

Over 200k developers and product managers use LogRocket to create better digital experiences

Google, for example, had for a while a person on board known as a "design ethicist." Now, you don't have a design ethicist on board unless you're concerned about the ethics of the products you're creating. This person, named Tristan Harris, worked at Google for a while and eventually there was a sense that perhaps they weren't responsive enough to some of his concerns. What they'll find is, for example, when you have to save [rescue] something, you spend more time playing than say, when you have to kill or find something. So what they'll do is they'll take the missions that aren't as successful and they'll cast them aside, and now they'll form three new versions of saving missions. They'll continue that process through generation after generation after generation. So what you're left with after, say, 20 generations is this weaponized evolved version of the game, or a weaponized evolved mission, that is maximally addictive.

Editorial: Reversal of Harvey Weinstein’s conviction is disappointing, but a fair justice system is important

Humane design is a term that is used to describe the process of designing products, services, or environments that take into account the wellbeing of people. The goal of humane design is to create solutions that are not only effective and efficient, but also safe, comfortable, and user-friendly. One way we can help promote humane design is by raising awareness about its importance and benefits. We can also encourage businesses and organizations to place greater emphasis on the user experience when designing new products or services.

When Playing Video Games Means Sitting On Life's Sidelines

To date, social media companies have responded by trying to screen and remove objectionable posts or lies. To be sure, this approach is often necessary to prevent egregious content that incites violence (a.k.a. dangerous speech). And yet, trying to moderate all other kinds of outrageous, erroneous content (such as hate speech and fake news) has remained an endless game of whack-a-mole.

Under the law, companies can be penalized up to 6 percent of their global revenues. See how design choices, interactions, and issues affect your users — get a demo of LogRocket today. Jumping off a sinking ship at the last minute is such a risky move, and considering that unethical businesses already suffer from poor brand reputation and social media scrutiny, perhaps it’s best for them to accept that the jig is up at this point. Hence, accepting that addictive design and unethical design overall isn’t welcome anymore might be a better mindset moving forward and a more profitable approach in the long run at least. This applies to social media, games, gambling, gambling disguised as games, and more. If you talk to experts in the industry they'll say something like, say, between two and four years from now just as most of us own smartphones, we will pretty much all own these virtual reality goggles.

There is still some debate if individuals are more susceptible under conditions of reward hyposensitivity (215) or hypersensitivity (216). There has also been discussion that energy density, but not sugar specifically plays the most important role in determining the reward value of food (217). Using a conditioned taste aversion paradigm, it has been shown that the aversive stimulus (in this case saccharin) would decrease DA release (78) while increasing ACh output (145). Furthermore, injection of neostigmine (indirect ACh agonist) is sufficient to provoke a conditioned taste aversion (146).

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Digital design ethics: from addictive design to humane design

Just like we now have privacy and accessibility laws, we’ll have addictive design laws too. So it’s clear that gamification isn’t necessarily a good thing (at least not anymore), and might be a positive framing of what actually boils down to dark patterns a lot of the time. It might be best to stop referring to gamification holistically and instead refer to the individual qualities of gamified products and the context in which they’re used. Addictive digital products also tend to have some kind of reward mechanism to keep users engaged. For a quick example, consider Duolingo’s in-app gamification experience, where they’ve expertly incorporated gamification, such as levelled progression, stages, and in-app rewards, all of which are elements of standard gaming experiences.

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By taking an empathetic approach to design, we can create products that are more inclusive and accessible for all users. The FA framework for understanding obesity is the notion that highly processed “hyperpalatable” foods have hijacked the reward centers in the brain thus impairing the decision-making process, similar to drugs of abuse. The sugar addiction theory bridges current gaps between food science and neuroscience, and between nutrition and psychology. This theory was originally developed from animal studies, however there is no shortage of compelling human data. While FA has been sensationalized in the popular press with headlines such as “Oreos More Addictive Than Cocaine? ” we propose that processed FA in humans is much more like caffeine or nicotine addiction than it is like cocaine or heroin.

Drugs of addiction and accumbens dopamine

You can move around in that world, you can interact with other things in that world, you basically are living in that world for all intents and purposes, and your brain often can't distinguish. There was a person I spoke to, he was a straight-A student, he was very high-achieving, and he was also on the football team at his college. He started playing World of Warcraft because he, as he described it, was quite lonely and he found that there were a lot of other like-minded people on the game. One hundred million, roughly, have played the game, and by many measures, about half of them have developed an addiction, at least temporarily. So that to me suggests that it's a weaponized game; it's an experience that's very, very hard to resist. We specialize in high-performing, conversion-focused, beautiful web and social experiences.

Technology was supposed to aim at easing people’s life, however we started to notice red flags in user behaviors. The more designs focus on drawing attention and engagement, the more users become attached to digital platforms. On the one hand social media platforms are reshaping our behaviors and habits, on the other hand they led to new terms and new emotional diagnosis in psychology. In this experiment, adult rats consumed less sugar after heightened exposure in the adolescent period, which is consistent with other findings (163, 164).

Due to the enormous pressure from users, some colleagues are trying to alleviate the problem. For example, Mark Zuckerberg is announcing some changes in their platforms under the motto “Time well spent”. Now you can manage your time spent on Facebook and regulate how many minutes you can surf the platform. On Instagram, there is a notification informing that you have seen all the posts from your friends in the last 24 hours. During our childhood, we are mostly driven by the Seeking System, and it has a crucial evolutionary importance in the development of children’s brains. As a child, curiosity is the main effect of the system and, as a result, it makes it easier and more fun to learn by being exposed to new stimuli — new places, images, sounds, people and tasks.

Is trying to design something 'too' fun (poorly worded) or dopamine-triggering/skinner-boxy unethical? For instance, I've been playing a game with daily login rewards and thought to myself "huh, this is fun, I should do this" - but then realized maybe I don't want to do that. Where's the line between making something fun that people will enjoy and something that people will...

Recently, other research has suggested that discussions of nutritional inequality emphasizing supply-side factors are less indicative of consumption patterns than demand-side differences (28), lending support to the food addiction (FA) hypothesis. Humane design is a relatively new field that focuses on making products, services, and spaces more user-friendly and comfortable for people. This can be done through things like ergonomic design, natural lighting, and color schemes that create a calm environment. In the workplace, humane design principles are often used to create a more productive and enjoyable space for employees. You may be reading this and thinking, “Okay, so people are checking their phones all the time, posting pictures of themselves on Instagram, and getting addicted to dorky little games, but what’s the problem? ” Well, starting with actual death, the CDC estimates that every day in the United States, nine people are killed and 1000 are injured as a result of distracted driving.

Well, as predicted, that moment took 10 minutes as that email led to me checking my backup Gmail account (mostly for student work) and responding to someone by finding a class assignment and emailing it. While I was doing that another three dots showed up on my Message app and I am finally back to writing. If it sounds tiring, it is and we are all feeling worn down by our tiny red dots. The regulation bakes in a regime of smaller fines for failures to produce requested information on time, as appears to have happened here. ByteDance could therefore face a penalty of up to 1% of its total annual income or worldwide turnover and periodic penalties up to 5% of average daily income or worldwide annual turnover specifically for this type of DSA compliance failure.

The problem is that as with other addictions we constantly need more and more dopamine to get to the point where serotonin tells us we are feeling good. Learning a new skill — a language, an instrument, a new sport, etc. — is usually more stimulating than watching a video on Youtube, but it takes a lot of time and energy to complete these tasks. When faced with the option of an easy or challenging reward, we are likely to choose the former one.

You can do basically whatever it is you want to do, so it's hard to imagine people will want to inhabit the real world, when there's this perfect virtual world right there ready for the taking. He developed an addiction pretty quickly because he found that it was basically a much better alternative world to the real one, and he spent a lot of time there. He played instead of sleeping, and his greatest binge was a 45-day binge where he played almost continuously. He paid a doorman in the building to bring up pizza, so by the end of this binge there were stacks of pizza boxes to the ceiling. In fact, much research shows that the distress induced by social media has been harmful to teens, especially girls. Moreover, social media companies like Facebook have conducted research that reveals similar findings (even though Facebook downplayed those harmful effects).