A transcript of Episode 225 of UX Podcast. Nir Eyal, author of Hooked and Indistractable joins us.

This transcript has been machine generated and checked by Tristan Schaaf.

Transcript

Per Axbom
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Computer voice
UX podcast episode 225.

James Royal-Lawson
Hello, everybody. Welcome to UX podcast coming to you from Stockholm, Sweden. We are your hosts James Royal-Lawson

Per Axbom
and Per Axbom.

James Royal-Lawson
We have listeners in 190 countries from French Polynesia to Belarus. Now, today, we are going to be talking to near Nir Eyal, who is the author of Hooked which many people in our industry would have read and be aware of. And then recently is also released as a follow up book Indistractible.

Per Axbom
Yep. And I think it was a couple of months ago now that I wrote a blog post. I think I was in a somewhat emotional state as everybody knows who listens to the show. I work a lot with ethics these days. And I have issues with the way that a lot of people in the industry actually apply persuasive methods without thinking a lot of the devastating consequences that they sometimes can have. And I got word that Nir Eyal had released Indistractible and then Nir has written the book Hooked with lots of techniques you can use to get people to use your product more often and it’s written to well make more money by having more people use your product more often. And Indistractible is written as a book that helps people not get hooked. So stay away from that. So I thought there was a huge piece missing here and I sort of went on a rant, criticising first the book that teaches people how to create habits. And then you have this book that also helps people not get into habits, but I feel that both books really fail to acknowledge the industry’s responsibility in creating these products in the first place. So I feel that there’s a huge chunk missing of how to make sure that you follow up on ensuring that people do not get harmed that there’s no negative impact in these techniques that you’re using as a designer.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, and Nir read your blog posts and got in touch with us and asked if we’d be okay for him to come on the show and talk about some of the things that you raised in your blog post and talk about his his books in general.

Per Axbom
Yeah, this was fantastic that he reached out and let’s listen to Nir.

Per Axbom
Thank you so much for doing this with us.

Nir Eyal
My pleasure. Thank you.

Nir Eyal
And I just wanted to start off by asking you and for our listeners, to just give us a brief background on how you came about writing the books both Hooked and Indestractible.

Nir Eyal
Yeah, so I started out in product design and started two tech companies, and the second of which was in the gaming and advertising space. And this was started in 2007. So back when apps didn’t mean Apple apps or iPhone apps because apps on the iPhone didn’t exist. The Apple App Store hadn’t launched yet. So apps back then meant Facebook apps back when people were throwing sheep at each other remember those days it was kind of ridiculous,

James Royal-Lawson
Poking each other.

Nir Eyal
Yeah. Exactly poking each other. And so I had this front row seat to see many of these companies kind of come and go, some of them would get millions of users and do really well and others of them would kind of burn out. And I had this front row seat to see how these companies were built, and was really fascinated by the deeper psychology of how they worked. Many of these companies were started by people who took a class with BJ Fogg who I knew well at Stanford when I was there. And that kind of propelled my interest into the field. And then when my second company was acquired, I had some time on my hands. And I was trying to figure out what to do next, what company to start. And so I, I was trying to figure out how to allocate my human capital and came up with this idea that habits would be increasingly important that as the interface shrinks as we go from desktop to laptop to mobile devices, to now wearable devices and auditory devices, like the Amazon Alexa, that habits become increasingly important. There’s just less real estate on a screen to trigger people with an external trigger. And so we have to rely upon habits and so that’s why I started to you know, do a lot of research and spend a lot of time in the Stanford library and interviewing people in the valley who were starting companies like Twitter and Instagram and Slack and Snapchat and these various companies and kind of wanted to dive deep into how they do what they do so that we could democratise these techniques. And so lots of different companies, not just the gaming companies and the social media companies could use these same techniques to help people engage with healthy habits.

James Royal-Lawson
Right. I mean, I remember that around that time. Yeah, it was, I think we went through a similar kind of phase as well, where there’s a lot of curiosity around how the mind works, and how that really did become so applicable to the work we were doing as designers and creators of websites and products.

Per Axbom
And I think it came along with Daniel Kahneman and Richard Thaler, winning the Nobel prizes in economics with Thinking Fast and Slow and Nudge books. So we were all really hugely interested in and we were trying to prove our worth as designers as well. I think

Nir Eyal
That’s right. Yeah, the conversation was, yeah, everybody was complaining about how technology was so hard to use, and only the geeks could use it. And you had to have a PhD to know how to use technology. And today, of course, people are complaining about the opposite problem. And now things are too good, right people and things are too usable. And so that’s a big part of why I wrote my second book Indistractible, Hooked is all about how to build healthy habits and Indistractible is all about how to break bad habits.

Per Axbom
And that and that sort of when I bought your book, and I don’t remember when you came out with Hooked what year it was, but it was a few years ago. And I was really intrigued by it. And I think it was thinking, so how could I potentially use these things? But then, of course, and the thing that gets to me when I more and more diverse into ethics is, well, the habits are unconscious. And so you say you use them to create positive habits, and that sounds wonderful. But if they’re unconscious, how would you get consent for something like that?

Nir Eyal
Because you could plan for circumstance to allow a habit to occur. And so this is a big misperception and I think it deserves clarification. Habits are not addictions. An addiction is a persistent compulsive dependency on a behaviour of substance that harms the user. A habit is simply an impulse to do a behaviour with little or no conscious thought the key word there being impulse. It doesn’t mean it’s mind control. It doesn’t mean it’s something you can’t resist. It means it’s an impulse. And 40% of what we do every single day, this is from the work of Wendy Wood, is out of habit. It’s not something that is harmful. It’s something that is actually beneficial to us because it lets us offload a lot of this cognitive load that we have to carry around with us to do a lot of behaviours that benefit us with little or no conscious thoughts. So how would this work? One of the apps that is in the new edition of Hooked, Hooked was published in 2014. The second edition is coming out. It’s available now actually. And one of the products in the book is an app called fit bud. And fit bud helps people get hooked to extra sizing in the gym. So outside of the gym, though the app is useless. But when you’re in the gym if you’re someone like me who hated working out, and now you go to the gym and you ask yourself, What do I do? Right? What’s that’s the internal trigger the uncertainty of what do I do next? Well, that what you do next, if you’re habituated, is you habitually you have the impulse with little or no conscious thought to open fit bud and fit bud tells you exactly what to do in the gym, an app like Kahoot that gets kids hooked to online or to in classroom learning. While they’re learning while they’re in the classroom. They are habituated, right. So those are the kind of products that I think can use this type of methodology to utilise habits to offload a lot of the cognitive work that goes along with oh my gosh, what do I have to do in the gym? And I can’t remember exactly and am I doing it right? And it happens in the fitness space and education in enterprise software. I mean, you name it across various industries. The problem I think is not that a few companies like Facebook and Twitter etc, are so good at getting a sucked in the real problem for the UX design community is that most products suck. nobody’s getting addicted to enterprise software, for God’s sakes, nobody’s getting addicted to educational software, we want them to be hooked. We want them to be habituated to these products, because they themselves want these things. And if they use these products, they would clearly benefit them.

Per Axbom
So that would be the form of consent that I actually choose to use the product and I hope that it gives me back what it intends to do.

Nir Eyal
Absolutely, absolutely. And look, your if you think as a business owner or as a UX designer, that that you can use this technology and play people like puppets on a string, that’s stupid. You’re going to lose those customers. because fundamentally, if you don’t provide value to your customers, none of this stuff works. I mean, I say in the book very clearly that the reward phase of the hook has to scratch the user’s itch. The internal trigger, if the internal trigger is uncertainty than the reward has to give people assurance and agency. If the internal trigger is loneliness, it has to connect people, the variable reward has to connect people together. There always has to be an itch scratched by the product or the product just won’t be used. This isn’t this isn’t mind control. I never claimed it is. And I, I wouldn’t advocate anyone think it is because that’s crazy. Anybody who’s built products knows how difficult it is to get people to change their behaviour it is not so simple, then you can just you know, say I want you to do whatever I want to do if that was true if this stuff was so powerful and such mind control and we could addict people to anything, we would all you know be perfect weight and have Arnold Schwarzenegger arms and have a perfect you know, wonderful education and do everything we. It’s still hard. This isn’t easy stuff. I think what these methodologies allow is to make the process easier for people who are motivated and consent to using these products to help them do things they otherwise would not do.

James Royal-Lawson
I think we can… There’s a lot of debate discussion about how you define exactly addiction or habit forming I mean, you said about addiction would be what you harm yourself. But you could also say that addiction is also where it causes harm for others. So some of the situations where we’ve created, we’ve got people hooked, created a cycle reward where they keep on using stuff, it can impact on others outside of that direct use. I mean, you yourself, I think, in the book of example, about timeboxing, and to time box, time with your daughter, to make sure you spent time with your daughter, that’s a derivative of being hooked on something else and not being able to let go of it, you then have to take care of something else in a way which maybe isn’t optimal, and damages that third party.

Nir Eyal
So I think there’s a few different issues there. One is about externalities. And externalities we have in all sorts of context. This is something that’s been widely studied by economists. And there are ways to deal with that as long as we keep our heads on straight. I think what happens is a lot of folks have a fear based approach as opposed to a harm based approach. We can take care of external harms. through some thoughtful action, right? We identify what the harm is exactly to other people and make sure that we restrict that harm. You know, there’s various ideas out there how we can do this with pollution using carbon taxes, for example. That’s, that’s a classic example of an external externality that can be then change through some kind of market mechanism. We can do all kinds of things to make sure that we stop the negative effects. For example, if you think about, you know how we’ve been here before when it came to secondhand smoke, I remember in the 1980s you know what people would smoke when I grew up, people come to my house and just smoking each other’s living room. My mom, I remember, she was an early adopter. She kind of you know, she was one of the first people of her friends that said, You can’t smoke in my house, and she lost friends because of that. Can you imagine if someone came to your house today and smoked in your living room? That would be ridiculous. You would kick them out they wouldn’t be your friend anymore. If if they smoked in your living room back then if you didn’t let someone smoke in your house. You were considered weird. Well, that’s what’s happening right now. So what human beings have always done is two things. When we face a problem we face, something that hurts us as a society, we develop what’s called a social antibody. We develop ways to either adapt our behaviours, and adopt new technologies to fix the last generation of bad technology. So Paul Virilio, the philosopher, said: when you invent the ship, you invent the shipwreck. And of course, we’re going to have lots of bad consequences when it comes to technology. Duh. There was never we invent the ship, you invent the shipwreck. That doesn’t mean you stop sailing ships. When was the last time you heard about a shipwreck almost never. Why do we stop sailing ships? No, we made ships better and safer. And that’s exactly what we’re doing today with our technology. So we need to stop this cynicism. That makes people say, Well, I’m not going to go into tech because they’re all shysters and they’re all trying to manipulate us and say, No, we need to go into tech to fix it to make it better. And so today, what we see happening is that and what I’m trying to do with Indistractible is to perpetuate new norms so that it’s now no longer acceptable to use a device in front of your children. It’s no longer acceptable to use it inside a meeting with your colleagues. It’s no longer acceptable to use it in front of your friends at lunch or dinner. That is exactly what I’m trying to do with Indistractible is to spread the social antibodies. But we don’t want to throw out the baby with the bathwater, we can still keep the best aspects of these tools and these psychological techniques to help us do good things and build healthy habits in our life while doing away with the bad aspects. But this takes time and this takes information takes us adopting these new techniques and that’s exactly the point of Indistractible. But again, it’s not the techniques right because you know, in the in the first edition of indestractible there’s in fact only one case study in the whole book. The one case that you do remember what it was in the very back of the book, the last chapter.

Per Axbom
No.

Nir Eyal
You read hooked, right?

James Royal-Lawson
I didn’t read the last chapter. Ran out of time.

Per Axbom
the Bible case?

Nir Eyal
That’s right. Yeah, the Bible app, why didn’t I profile, a video game, or social media, I profiled the Bible. Because the Bible app uses the exact same techniques I was kind of doing a little bit something tongue in cheek here showing how persuasive technology did not start with cell phone technology. Right, hooking people to various ideas. Whether they are true or not, is a very old practice. Persuasion is a very old practice. But what this particular app is doing in the Bible app is hooking people to engaging with Scripture. Now, if you think religion is a good thing, and it brings people together, then you think the use of these techniques is wonderful. Now, if you think that religion is a force for divisiveness in the world, and separates people based on sectarian grounds, then you think using these psychological principles is terrible in the Bible app, and I wanted to use that example to show people subtly, but it’s the same way with social media. That is the Bible app. Good. Yes. Is the Bible app bad? Yes. Is social media good? Yes. Is social media bad? Yes. It depends on who is using it, how much you are using it, what you are doing when you use it and what you would be doing instead of using it. So what I’m for is not pro tech or anti tech, what I’m for is nuance. We need to stop with these silly, bifurcated black and white answers of good versus evil. That’s silly. These techniques can be used for good and we should not stop using them. However, we should also recognise when the ends don’t justify or when the means don’t justify the ends, I should say, and when the techniques are used for some kind of nefarious purposes. That’s exactly what Indistractible is about how do we as individuals look at our lives and say, Hey, you know what, that particular app is not serving me. I want to stop using it. Well, I’m giving you the play by play exactly on how to do that.

Per Axbom
But not necessarily stop using the app but turning off notifications and finding strategies for coping with the app. Either though, was more designed to distract you. You’re trying to remove those aspects of the app, I guess,

Nir Eyal
Right. That’s a good point. I should say. It’s not just stop it. If you want to stop it great. What do I care, you want to stop using Facebook, screw Facebook, stop using it. But if you don’t want to stop using it, if you want to moderate your use of it, I advocate for that as well. For example, one of the techniques in the book I talked about is about hacking back, that we think users are powerless. And we think users are addicted. We tell people that they’re getting hijacked by their you know, their brains are being hijacked. That is bullshit. We just stop telling people that because it makes it true. It’s called learned helplessness. When we tell people there’s nothing you can do, and it’s manipulating your brain and it’s hijacking your brain. They believe it and they stopped doing something about it. So what I want people to do is to stop being blamers the blamers say, Oh, it’s all the technology’s fault. It’s Facebook, it’s the iPhone, the shamers this is what I used to do. It’s all my fault, right? I I am deficient. I must be lazy. I must have an addictive personality. There’s must be something wrong with me. Neither of those techniques are very helpful. The right way to be is to be a claimer not to blame or shame or but a claimer a claimer says it’s not my fault. I didn’t invent Facebook. I didn’t invent email. But you know what, it’s my responsibility. These things are here. They’re not going away. I’m not going to wait for the government to change them. I’m not gonna wait for these companies to change these products. I can do something about it right now. For example, you can turn off notifications. I mean, how simple is that? Two thirds of people with a smartphone? Never do that. That takes 10 minutes. Can we really complain that technology is so addictive, and we haven’t taken those little doesn’t take

Per Axbom
For who does it take 10 minutes for that’s that’s sort of what I’m thinking. Doesn’t it requires a special kind of tech savviness to do these things that you recommend?

Nir Eyal
Does it? You tell me.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, my mom wouldn’t do that quick. I can you that.

Per Axbom
I help my wife all the time, just moving around apps.

James Royal-Lawson
I’ve gotten away for him to see it or a question to post you. Say you’re 13 year old girl with anxiety issues. Your entire class at school uses a Snapchat. How does that girl become indestractible?

Nir Eyal
Same exact techniques. I think that we follow the four steps of the indestructible model, we master the internal triggers, we figure out, you know, where you started anxiety issues, why does she have anxiety issues? What’s going on in her life, we have to deal with that deeper need for why we look for distraction in the first place. I think that’s a very, very important place to start for all of us. And you know, the Achilles heel of habit forming technology is that we must realise that all habit forming technology attaches to an internal trigger. And the reason we get distracted The reason we look for something to take us out of our present state, is because we feel some kind of uncomfortable emotion we want to escape from, and we don’t have the tools to deal with it in another manner. So that’s the first place to start with children and adults, that it comes down to making time for traction. I would argue there is nothing wrong with using social media as long as you’re of appropriate age, certainly not before. For the age of 13. Why? Because the companies themselves tell you don’t use our product until you’re 13. I don’t understand. My parents complained to me about their kid using Snapchat at 10 years old. I mean, the company themselves says don’t use it until you’re 13. I happen to think I think it’s better to wait until college, you know, until after high school personally, that’s my own advice. But everybody needs to decide that for themselves. And then so we can make time for traction. There’s nothing wrong. There’s not been even one study that shows that two hours or less of age appropriate screentime has any deleterious effects on children. Not one study, not one. What are we freaking out about? It’s the 5,6 or 7 hours a day of screentime that’s not extra… That’s not school screentime that’s extracurricular school screentime that’s where we start seeing small negative effects on well being, small negative effects about the same size as eating potatoes. I’m not kidding. That is literally the effect size. It’s 10 times less than having a poor night’s sleep. So we need to keep this in perspective, then media has filled us up with this idea of this tech Boogeyman. And we all want to believe that this is happening to our kids. But if you look at the data look at the work of Andrew szalinski from Oxford University. He outlines exactly why most of these studies, they are not pre registered. They are looking for correlation and causing it causation, and calling it causation. And for the most part does not exist. So no study shows, but even besides that, let’s say you don’t believe me, just stick with two hours or less of extra curricular screentime as long as that time is planned in their day. There’s nothing wrong with it. And we as parents need to respect that time. Because look, what would they have done in previous generations? What did we do? We talked on the phone, we watch TV and we wreak havoc on our community, we vandalise things. That’s what we did. So we need to recognise that there may not be anything wrong with necessarily spending some time on these these products, then hack back the external triggers. I think that what is really causing any of the correlation with negative well being when it comes to the psychological well being is not the devices itself. It the overuse of the devices at night. So I advocate for in my book, hacking back technology by making sure that kids do not have any screens or anything in their rooms that may interrupt sleep. So that includes older technology, no TV, no radio, certainly no cell phone in their rooms at night. Why does a kid need a TV in the room at night? I don’t understand why. So anything that can interrupt sleep should not be in a kid’s bedroom. Okay, because sleep is much more important. For psychological well being then you know, any negative effects from using social media. And then finally, the last step to becoming Indistractible is to prevent distraction with pacts. So, you know, the metaphor here is pools. You know, swimming pools kill thousands of children, thousands of children drown in swimming pools. But does that mean we should not let children swim in swimming pools? No, it means we should teach kids how to swim. And so one of the best tests to know if a child is ready for technology is do they know how to turn it off. So maybe if a child can’t put their phone away when Come to the dinner table, maybe they’re not ready for that technology, if they don’t know how to use Do Not Disturb on the phone that comes built in for free. If they don’t know how to turn off when they’re doing their homework, guess what, they’re not ready for the technology. And I don’t give a shit. If all their friends are using it, we pay the bill as parents. And so it doesn’t matter if your kid wants to go jump in the pool, if they’re not ready for it. If they don’t know how to swim, you don’t let them swim, you’d be crazy as a parent to let them do that. And the same thing goes for our technology. For some reason people think that the iPad is an iNanny. And I don’t understand that logic, any form of media, whether it’s a book, I’m not going to let my child walk into a library and just read any book. That’s crazy. There are lots of books she is not ready for as a child, right? And I wouldn’t let her watch just any TV channel. There’s lots of things on TV, she’s not ready for it. And there’s lots of things on the internet she’s not ready for. So if you’re going to give your kid a form of media, it has to be age appropriate. And we have to make sure that they have some basics around how to use it without having some of the deleterious effects. Now what I don’t think is helpful is what a lot of tech critics do, they scare the crap out of their kids. And they’re creating these techno phobic kids who think that they’re the computer is infecting their brain. And meanwhile, we want our children to be tech literate so they can have some of the jobs of the future. Right? We know the jobs of the future are going to require tech literate children. So we don’t want to scare them. We want them to understand the cost of using technology is not that it’s melting your brain. It’s that you are spending time doing one thing at the cost of something else, time away from your friends time away from playing outside time away from playing with mommy and daddy. That’s the price of using too much tech and you know what kids from a very, very young age, understand that.

Per Axbom
So there’s the saying that kids don’t do what you say but they do what you do. So they of course, look at you as parents and see what you do. And that’s the behaviour they copy. So I think there’s a risk there as well. And I think that’s what you’re addressing in Indistractible is that yes, we are in fact using the technology in many wrong ways, because you have so many tips for turning off notifications for managing email for managing meetings for managing chat groups. So obviously, there is something going on there that has to be managed.

Nir Eyal
Absolutely. I couldn’t say it better myself, you know, kids are hypocrisy detection devices. You cannot tell your kid stop playing fortnite while you’re checking email on your phone. You can’t do that. Okay? So the best thing you can do is to become indestractible, yourself, set a good example, and teach these very same techniques to your kids and to your grandma or whoever else might be struggling with using technology in a way that’s distracting.

James Royal-Lawson
And I think the I mean, we were very privileged. I mean, we are, I think we can say that we’re, we’re quite self aware. We’re tech savvy, we work in the industry. We’re aware of the techniques in Hooked that we can deploy in our approach and things. But there’s eight billion People in the world and we are in a special group that are privileged. Isn’t it our responsibility then to reduce the number of external triggers to protect these vulnerable groups? Because a lot of people, I’m going to go out and say the majority of people are not going to be capable of following advice or things that you suggest in Indistractable.

Nir Eyal
I think that’s very paternalistic. This is exactly what people said in the United States when they wanted to prohibit alcohol. They said, Yes, we can hold our booze, but you see the lay people, they’re not smart enough to hold their liquor. So let’s let’s do prohibition let’s ban alcohol because they’re not smart enough to be able to drink responsibly. I don’t think that’s a good way of looking at thing this techno prohibitionism reeks of eliteism. These products are great, right even the things we keep vilifying like Facebook, like Instagram, like Snapchat, you know, we’re above them. But for many people, it’s their connection to other individuals. You know how many people I speak with who are in the middle of rural America 100 miles from any living soul. And their choice of what to do in the evening is to watch fox news or to interact with other people on Facebook, I would much rather have people interacting with each other. And it’s not just about conspiracy theories. I mean, people do a lot of great stuff through social media as well. And so we need to stop vilifying it and balance out all the good stuff that these people are doing as well when they’re using these products as well. And then in terms of are they capable, I think they are certainly capable. And again, the solution is not to stop using these techniques. I mean, external triggers are wonderful. Remember, external triggers can either lead us towards traction or distraction. If an external trigger prompts you with a notification that says, hey, it’s time for that meeting. It’s time to go work out. It’s time for, you know, the lunch with your friend, whatever it might be. That’s wonderful, right? It’s time to check your blood sugar. It’s time to take this online class, whatever it might be the external triggers are wonderful if they lead you towards traction rather than distraction. So it’s not the technique itself. It’s how it is applied. Right? It’s to what ends it is used. And I think people, it’s not a very difficult lesson. This isn’t rocket science to ask yourself this fundamental question. Is the external trigger serving you? Or are you serving it? That’s the fundamental question. anyone of any socio economic class race, colour, creed, can ask themselves that simple question and start taking back the time in their life to make sure that these external triggers are not that, they are not serving the external triggers, and rather the external triggers are serving them, not just with technology. I mean, look, the average American today watches five hours of TV. Where’s the conversation about how manipulative and coercive TV is, right? We don’t have that conversation. Why? Because it’s an old boring technology. That’s not exciting anymore. That’s why. But that is a much bigger problem way more people are, quote unquote addicted to television to Fox News than they are to Facebook way more people. And so we don’t talk about that because it’s boring. We only blame the new scary technology because we haven’t adapted and adopted yet. And so I am much more optimistic about our ability to adapt and adopt around interactive technology. And it’s our job as UX designers, we need to preach the gospel of how we should use persuasive technology more, not less, in order to fix the bad aspects of the last generation of technology.

Per Axbom
I’m going to let that be a perfect ending to our interview. Thank you.

Nir Eyal
Thanks so much.

James Royal-Lawson
So many things to talk about and think about and contemplate. I think one, one overreaching aspects of me is, or one way describing how I feel after this interview, is I think a lot of the analogies that Nir uses make me feel a little bit uncomfortable. Because I think that they, I think they simplify the situation we find ourselves and over simplify, and perhaps even trivialise, the situation we currently find ourselves in. If I just take the the ship and shipwrecks analogy as an example there, they said, we didn’t. We don’t stop sailing ships around because of shipwrecks. But when it boils down to it, shipping is one of the industries that’s been regulated longer than almost anything else. We’ve got laws going back, you can trace laws back 1000 years. And with this lots of international agreements and, arrangements about how you can make shipping safer to reduce the number of shipwrecks and reduce the number of problems to improve the working conditions and minimise the danger sailors find themselves in or even passengers find themselves in when using ships. I mean, it’s in many countries or not most countries. It’s not legal to set sail from a port. Unless your ship is seaworthy on these very specific things. I say what is what makes something seaworthy we have we have governance to make shipping safe. Where is our governance? To make the tech safe?

Per Axbom
Exactly, I think you’re touching upon what essentially made me write that article in the beginning. Is it this disconnect between who is responsible for what. Can we build anything and and people have to be responsible for themselves and their reactions to that and how they manage. Everybody wants to steal our attention, everybody wanting to push or nudge us in one direction. But it’s up to us to find techniques to avoid all those things. So I think just by writing and Indistractible, I think Nir also acknowledges that there is a struggle going on here, there is a struggle. But it’s unclear who’s responsible for instigating that struggle. So our way to win that fight is to take responsibility for our own behaviour by changing many of the defaults that are designed to distract us. But what is missing for me is what responsibility is in the hands of the company’s profiting, the ones putting those defaults in place? And how much should be expected of the average citizen to keep changing and adapting to many of the persuasive techniques that are put upon us all the time?

James Royal-Lawson
I wouldn’t even say average ’cause I think that’s part of the problem there that the people most affected by some of this or not the average person, that are the vulnerable people, the people who are less privileged than, than me, you and Nir. And I think you know, when we’ve… One of the things that we learned as design It’s one of those early early things is that I think back to doing usability testing and stuff. And one of the things you kind of reassure your test participants is it’s not your fault. If something goes wrong, it’s not your fault as a user. It’s the interfaces systems fault. We use this phrase a lot to kind of reassure people. No, if something goes wrong, it’s not your fault. If what we’re saying here is, actually is your fault as it’s you is that’s got the capability and and the ability to change things. But that’s not true.

Per Axbom
Yeah that’s the feeling I get as well, yeah,

James Royal-Lawson
we can make things more difficult or more easy for you to have control over.

Per Axbom
Yeah, it’s about transparency really, as well. I mean, giving people the option to have feedback, but to be able to give feedback to be able to react to that you also have need to be aware of what’s going on. So for me ethics is not about what the app accomplishes like the Bible app, that’s it’s fine. If you want to read the Bible more, then you use that app. And it’s transparent about it doesn’t matter if I like religion or not, is it? Is it transparent about what it’s trying to accomplish? And I think it is, well, other apps that I sign up to maybe to connect with my friends and communicate with them, and keep tabs on them. Maybe they’re designed to attract my attention in ways that I didn’t sign up for that weren’t transparent to me. Or if I sign up for a news app that’s attracting me with these techniques to spend more time with it, and essentially, then taking time away from something else. And that’s not transparent to me unless I stand back and reflect on it. But not everybody has that ability to stand back and reflect on it.

James Royal-Lawson
And it’s also the matter of an alignment. One thing is transparency, but I mean, if you look at Facebook, for example, that when I sign up for Facebook, I don’t sign up the Facebook to consume advertising whereas Facebook exists through selling advertising. Facebook wants me to be engaged more, even though they might say the kind of the of the high level, you know, wordy things that say they want to connect the world or whatever. But when it boils down to it their reliance on revenue from me consuming advertising.

Per Axbom
Yeah, and I agree with Nir. I mean there are tonnes and tonnes of benefits with Facebook. And that’s often what makes these tools so dangerous when I say dangerous is that since you’re not aware of the being hooked on them part of it of the experience, and it also makes it more difficult to just say I’m going to leave this app because it doesn’t create a lot of benefits for me. So how do I make sure that the harm or how it steals my attention? How do I make sure that it doesn’t do that? And that is to be fair, what Indistractible is about. But my concern is that we don’t all have the acumen to follow that advice. And that is where someone has to step in and help those that don’t.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. And also we’re talking about, you know, maybe you could say first order and second order levels of being hooked. It’s like Facebook initially, using Facebook as an example. You know, initially they using techniques to get you maybe hooked on using Facebook. But then over time, Facebook has become woven into the fabric of our social interactions and networks. So backing off of Facebook for me, wouldn’t be a matter of just disabling notifications. If you know stop quitting Facebook would mean I’d have to I would impact my relationship to other individuals. It’s not just about me, it’s it’s about my relationships in large because he’s because he’s grown into that over time. It started off as a product as an app and it’s grown into something bigger.

Per Axbom
Right. And I think a lot of people also miss that. There are solutions out there digital services that a lot of people benefit from, at the exact same time as other people are harmed by them. Which means that it’s not enough to say that you build a service that harms people and people will stop using it. Well, no, because there is still a good chunk of people that are profitable that love it. And then there are those people that are harmed by it. And I like to use the electric scooter example. So a lot of cities around the world now have electric scooters that you can hire or rent on the street. And people leave them all over the place. And, of course, cities also have people who are, for example, visually impaired, who are in wheelchairs. And those people are not the users of this technology. But their lives have been significantly impacted because they now have to navigate around these scooters in a way that they didn’t have to five years ago. So five years ago or maybe even for 20 years, they’ve had a route that they always use. But now that route cannot be used anymore because they’re always these random obstacles that pop up. But they are and these people are invisible because they’re not users of the of the scooters. And their people who use these scooters are not thinking about these people either. So it’s not transparent. the harm that is happening here is not transparent to anyone.

James Royal-Lawson
Or it’s, it’s actually considered to be collateral damage. That you know,

Per Axbom
Exactly, edge-case.

James Royal-Lawson
There’s not enough people affected, impacted. So the ones that are impacted, there are too few to care about. Yeah, that’s an age old question. These kind of ethical things. It’s like how much damages is okay.

Per Axbom
Exactly. I think yeah, that’s probably the, the gist of the problem is how can markets make sure that these people don’t get hurt, and if they can’t do we need regulation?

James Royal-Lawson
all this said, I think everyone listening should read both of Nir’s books.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, I think Hooked is really useful to make you aware of some of the techniques you can you can use and also is a starting point to help you reflect on how just because you can do something doesn’t necessarily mean you should. And I think a similar thing with Indestractible it has some great tips in there. And if you put an American lens on and think about the target audience of the book, then I think this very useful practical things that people could do. Not completely convinced all of it is applicable to maybe all of Europe or the world, but it’s some very good stuff.

Per Axbom
I was actually going to say I mean for a person like me, and my lifestyle as a consultant and Freelancer and travelling. That some of the advice there I’m probably going to follow. My concern, of course, then always is that there’s a segment of people who these tips and advice don’t always work for and we’re not thinking about them enough. There’s always this piece missing. And I think it’s that piece. I’m trying to get at all the time

James Royal-Lawson
Oblivious design, is what we’ve talked about before. That’s what we’ve called it. And I think it’s quite evident here as well.

Per Axbom
Please follow us or subscribe to the show, if you don’t already. Our entire collection of episodes is available on Spotify and on our website, so it would take you five and a half days non stop to listen to them all. You’ve all got something to do over Christmas then.

James Royal-Lawson
And if five and a half days is a little too much, then a suggestion of just one episode to listen to next is Episode 164: engaging with compassion with Eric Meyer.

Per Axbom
Remember to keep moving.

James Royal-Lawson
See you on the other side.

James Royal-Lawson
I used to be addicted to the hokey Cokey no sorry, say again. So Per, I used to be addicted to the Hokey Pokey

Per Axbom
really James. So how did you quit?

James Royal-Lawson
I turned myself around.

This is a transcript of a conversation between James Royal-Lawson, Per Axbom and Nir Eyal. Recorded in November 2019 and published as Episode 225 of UX Podcast. 

This transcript has been machine generated and checked by Tristan Schaaf.