Free apps are the fast food of the digital world

You know how it is: if you take your eye off the ball for a moment, you can easily find yourself browsing or scrolling away for a couple of hours without even realising it. The online world is like fast food: satisfying in the moment, but afterwards you ask yourself: was this really necessary?

Technology is often used in an unhealthy and excessive way. And that’s hardly surprising: many online services and products are deliberately designed to be addictive. Insights from behavioural science and principles of persuasion are applied to capture as much of your time, money and attention as possible.

As designers, we want to do something about this. Together with you, together with our clients. We feel a great sense of responsibility to treat the physical and mental health of digital technology users with care. But how exactly? How do we tackle this massive problem? How can we make our relationship with the online world a bit healthier again?

If the app is free, you’re the product

As we’ve already said: clever designers at big companies are working every day to make their service or product as appealing as possible. A good (and obvious) example of this is free apps, such as Instagram, TikTok and Candy Crush.

The Instagrams, TikToks and Candy Crushes of this world make their money from advertisers. So it’s important for them to keep you on their platform for as long as possible. The maths is simple: the longer you’re online, the more adverts you see; the more you interact with adverts, the more they make. Your time and attention generate money. 

All sorts of tricks are used to keep people on their platform for as long as possible. These days, it’s quite easy to create something that’s ultra-addictive. Especially if you catch people at a vulnerable moment. When they’re just going online to play a game, or when they’re on social media. Those are the moments when you ​‘switch off’, when you’re trying to relax. You’re not at your sharpest. You’re looking for entertainment. It’s reprehensible that companies have entire teams of qualified psychologists working to exploit those moments of weakness. That algorithms are trained to show you exactly that one thing you’re most likely to click on.

These kinds of free apps should be banned. And we’re not talking about a weather app, a ruler app or a stopwatch – we’re talking about free apps from big companies that use people’s time and attention as a product, without them even realising it.

As well as the obvious examples of Instagram and TikTok, there are plenty of other examples of tricks used to encourage people to spend an unhealthy amount of time online. These are examples that are perhaps a little more subtle:

• Autoplay on YouTube. After each video, you automatically move on to the next one, meaning you end up watching for longer than you actually intended.
• Free games like Candy Crush. You can’t actually ​‘finish’ them, but they do constantly ​‘reward’ you with little dopamine hits every time you clear a level.
• Streaks on Snapchat. Every day you interact with someone, your streak increases. If you miss a day, you lose part of it. Snapchat’s designers know exactly which psychological principle they’re tapping into here: loss aversion.

Why is spending so much time online actually a problem?

You might ask yourself: what’s the big deal about spending a lot of time in the online world? What’s the big deal about me being the product? We’ll highlight three reasons for you.

#1 It doesn’t make us happy – quite the opposite
After spending hours scrolling or binge-watching a series, you generally don’t feel happy about the time you’ve spent. Looking back, you think: I didn’t need to do that. Ultimately, spending endless amounts of your time on addictive digital products or services doesn’t make you any happier. And that makes sense: they offer short-term rewards, but they do nothing for the things that make you happier as a person in the long run: building relationships, becoming good at something, learning something new, or taking a little longer to think things through.

#2 We’re finding it harder to concentrate
People’s attention spans are getting shorter and shorter. We get distracted more easily. We pick up our phones without thinking and start scrolling. This comes at the expense of focus, of deep concentration – and that is exactly what you need to get better at something, to learn something new, to build something of value. The ability to sustain that is gradually disappearing. We’re losing that ability. This is partly down to how social media, games and other digital products have ​‘trained’ us: we’re used to getting a new dopamine hit every few minutes.

#3 We’re becoming increasingly insecure
In the digital world, we receive instant rewards far more often than in the real world.

Take education, for example: you learn maths and language using a digital tool. Every time you complete a small task correctly, you get a digital pat on the back, a reward, a little success jingle. The whole idea of working on an assignment, investing several days in it, and only then finding out whether you’ve done it right – that hardly exists anymore. Because children are so used to constant validation and rewards, they become more insecure in real life. Keeping yourself on track, rewarding yourself, doing things out of intrinsic motivation – that’s becoming increasingly uncommon, and therefore more difficult. As developers of digital technology, we need to give this some thought. That constant reward isn’t always a good thing, even if you’re doing it with the best of intentions.

How are we going to sort this out?

It goes without saying: creating a healthy relationship with digital technology doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a huge challenge. And we need to sort it out together.

The government has a role to play
First and foremost, the government has a major role to play. Making the online world healthier is a regulatory issue – but there’s hardly any regulation in place at the moment. Legislation is in the pipeline, (primarily) to protect children online. It just takes a long time. The legislative process is slow. We can push for this as much as possible and try to put it on the agenda, but above all, we must also take action ourselves.

Designers and developers have a role to play
As creators of online services and products, we know all about the patterns that can be used to persuade people. We can steer users in a particular direction quite easily. So we must always ask ourselves: am I designing something that is primarily good for my client’s bottom line? Or am I doing something that contributes to the well-being of the end user – not just for the next five minutes, but for the rest of their life? And what does it do for society? Is it good in the long term? These questions must be central – in all the work we do, in every project. Creating healthy technology must be a requirement, a design principle. That also means that sometimes you have to make tough choices, that you have to exclude certain clients. For example, we do not work for the online gambling industry. 

We can only build a healthy digital world by working together: designers, developers and companies that bring products and services to market. It is our shared responsibility – so let’s rise to the challenge.