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Harris’s goal is to have product designers sign a kind of hippocratic
oath, swearing to design products that don’t take advantage of users.
“There is a way to design based not on addiction,” he says.
Joe Edelman, who helped Harris with the research for Time Well Spent,
compares the tech industry to Big Tobacco before the link between
cigarettes and cancer was proven: giving customers more of what they
want, even if it’s harmful.
Nir Eyal, author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products,
explains that software, especially social media, is designed around
an idea described by researcher B.F. Skinner in the 1950s: variable
rewards. Skinner, experimenting with mice, found that providing the
same treats every time a mouse pressed a lever was less motivating
than varying the rewards. Mice who received either a big treat, a small
treat, or no treat when pressing the lever pressed far more often than
mice receiving the same treat every time. Mice receiving variable
rewards also kept pressing the lever for much longer after the treats
stopped coming than the mice receiving consistent treats, who stopped
pressing almost immediately.
Though using this research in software design might seem sinister, Eyal
says it can be beneficial when used in the right way:
“
If used for good, habits can enhance people’s lives
with entertaining and even healthful routines.
If used to exploit, habits can turn into wasteful
addictions.
Eyal disagrees with Harris’s idea that software designers are
consciously building products we’ll become addicted to. There’s
nothing wrong with using this research in human behavior when
designing software, says Eyal. He says it’s simply new and unknown,
making people like Harris wary:
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