Name one place/time where you are in complete control of your attention
Whenever I am making good progress on any task, I feel that a lot of things that might have distracted me in another scenario don’t have any pull anymore. For example, when I’m doing an assignment or making something creative, I have no desire to go on my phone, or to interrupt my task in any way.
When has an app helped you do what you wanted? When has it moved you away from your own goal? – Youtube
Youtube is very helpful to find tutorials on a lot of softwares that I use for music and video editing. It’s super easy to look up tutorials and find hundreds of videos explaining how to use them. On the flip side, it has kept me awake late into the night on many occasions, because I’ve started a video and not went to sleep until I finished it.
Pick an app that is useful to you. Suggest a design choice that makes it remain useful but eliminates a dark pattern
Youtube
- It pushes attention by showing you recommended videos based off of watch history. It also has an autoplay feature, as well as an infinite scroll in Youtube Shorts.
- It’s very useful to find tutorial videos, or for entertainment.
- Users benefit from quick access to a huge database of videos and the ability to upload their own videos easily. The platform benefits from being able to show users advertisements or letting them pay a subscription to get rid of ads. Advertisers also benefit from being able to show a large amount of people advertisements through mid-video ads.
A design choice I would make to eliminate a dark pattern is to get rid of the infinite scroll and autoplay, as these are the main features that I find most distracting when using the platform.
An issue in the world – Social Media
Guardrails:
A lot of people use social media as a way to gain attention or distraction whenever they want, and quickly become reliant on it, causing the industry to stay alive.
Solution:
To completely remove the problems, social media would need to disappear entirely. To reduce the problems though, getting rid of the features that give that ‘fake’ attention and distraction would be helpful. Getting rid of the ability to like posts and having an infinite scroll feature would go a long way.
