There are two kinds of companies, those that work to try to charge more and those that work to charge less.
- Jeff Bezos
The same is true for attention. There are technologies made to capture as much of your attention as possible, and others designed to stay out of your way.
The first category includes feed apps (Facebook, Twitter, Insta) with infinite scroll; video apps with autoplay; and apps with too many notifications. The second category includes utilities like Venmo, Waze, and Shazam, and apps like Five Minute Journal.
Which kind are you working on?
In the early days at Google, they had a beautiful KPI. They tracked time spent on google.com--and the goal was to make it as short as possible! The better the search algorithm, the simpler and faster the page, the quicker people would find what they were looking for.
This is the opposite of the Average Session Time metric many apps use today, where you're trying to keep people "engaged" for as long as possible.
This is the opposite of the Average Session Time metric many apps use today, where you're trying to keep people "engaged" for as long as possible.
We need calm technology. Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to remove.
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