It’s time to rethink phones
By: Nixie Melendres
Tags: Smartphones, UX, Design Thinking, Ts, Product Design

It’s time to rethink phones

I am annoyed by my phone. Ok, so not necessarily the object itself, but what it represents. When I think about how irritated my phone makes me, I have to remind myself that it’s in fact working exactly as it was intended to: it’s got me hooked, I’m never far from it and I know it wants my attention. The problem with it is that it’s not as easy to use as I believe it should be and can be. It’s not the phone’s fault, it’s the way it’s designed and what it was designed to do: everything.

I’m a digital designer and I help build products or tools intended to simplify or improve routine tasks. I work to create simplicity and ease of use throughout the user’s interaction, and I try to reduce the friction that comes from things that don’t work as well as they could. My job has led me to think a lot about how design functions as a part of our lives, but for the last few years, I find that frustration and anxiety about how my phone and all its capabilities work is really slowing me down. It’s making communication — its initial intended purpose — harder than I want it to be and I’m overwhelmed by the communication itself.

From my perspective, we’re all becoming digital hoarders. Like our packed closets and garages, we stuffed our phones with dozens of tools that all do variations on the same themes — share information, communicate with others, find what we need, and consume tsunamis of random and often useless information — and we’re drowning in duplicates. And because these tools speak to one of humanity’s most fundamental default settings — impatience — my feeling is that we’ve just amplified our addiction to urgency.

Creating more impatience in ourselves is doing exactly what the phone wants from us, keeps us hooked and available, but what I believe it’s also really good at is stressing everyone out. I want more of my time back, and I’m sure many other people feel the same way as well.

All of my work has led me to become focused on digital wellness, which is finally starting to become an area of focus for digital designers, as well as users of the products we create. Why? Because our digital lives were built to become addictive, which is the opposite of wellness. I know that the constant distractions of all my phone can do actually makes me less efficient, less clear in my communications, and more anxious, much of the time. Rather than being quick and effective, I feel as though I have become slower and there’s a low-grade pressure to stay on the ball through the dozens of communications that assault my brain and senses each time I reach for this thing. I find that typing on this tiny screen is cumbersome and so error-prone, I don’t even do it anymore and I resort to sending voice messages instead. Isn’t this what the whole device was built for?

I’ll put this another way: I find that while I’m doing one task, several notifications pop up screaming for my attention, and my train of thought is derailed. My mind is immediately elsewhere and the mental effort required to pull my thoughts back to my initial task, while I’m making a mental list of the other tasks calling my name, raises my blood pressure. So, what started as a simple thing quickly becomes a mental challenge I didn’t sign up for. I just wanted to text my mom, and now I’m doing mental gymnastics prioritizing the order and importance of the other demands my phone made on me, in the ten seconds since it’s been in my hand. It feels as though my phone and I are sharing a blood supply and the blood is constantly being diverted away from where I need it, so though it’s just a tool, a device, I feel like I’m routinely trying to guide the phone back to my brain because I am in fact the driver of this little thing. What I realize is that I’ve put a lot of effort into creating my own solutions for how to interact with my phone to create less friction in the last few years, but it was exactly that: effort. This is not how this was supposed to work.

Some designers might argue that this complex capability and all our phones can do is a benefit by solving so many problems at once, but my experience tells me that I’m responding to the kind of addiction designers built into the technology in the first place. This represents the multiple mental models we consider when we put these pieces together.

Breaking one mental model to shift into another — texting my mother shifting to responding to an urgent work email — should be as simple as it sounds, though we all know that it breaks from one way of thinking into another, and this shift causes stress and has become intrusive.

Digital designers are trying to address this, and I’m sure we’ve all noticed the screen time reports that emerged in the last few years, as though this subtle reminder that we’re all constantly staring at the phone will convince us to put it down and do something else. But how are we going to solve the problem of the decades of intentional design that led us to be so deeply connected with these devices in the first place?

Photo by Yiu Yu Hoi via Getty Images

Digital wellness is trying to remind us that we have a life outside the digital world, harmonizing our health off-screen with our increasingly intrusive screen lives. This switch is proving really hard for many people to make, and I know I’m having trouble making this change and looking away. Since technology has given us all these tools intended to speed up everything we do, the consequence of all this speed coupled with the volume of how much interaction we’re expected to be contributing to is more than I believe we can handle, while still being well, psychologically. We’re now addicted to the urgency to engage that so many of us feel. The detrimental effect on our brains is well documented, and being constantly bombarded with dozens of new tools at our fingertips daily is fraying our nerves.

According to Harvard, 73% of us experience anxiety over losing our phones, the average smartphone user unlocks it 150 times per day, we spend nearly 11 hours per day on our devices, 60% of college students say they’re addicted to their devices, 87% of Millennials say their phone is always with them no matter where they are and we tap, swipe or click an average of 2,617 times per day. I find these statistics humbling because they illustrate that our dependence on our devices is impeding our productivity, our ability to be independent of them, and how we feel.

The stress and anxiety this has created in me have been building for a few years. Where does this come from? The constant, nagging feeling that I’m always missing something, there’s always a demand on my time that I’m failing at, there are too many small things going unchecked and unread. So, like many others, I’m trying to de-prioritize my engagement with the phone, by doing things like using as many shortcuts as I can to make it easier, turning off notifications and more importantly, not using it as much as I used to.

Can our phones be simpler, less intrusive and less stressful? Digital interactions should be easier, perhaps fewer of them and these tools should deliver the promise of what they were in fact built for: to make our lives simpler, rather than trying to do dozens of things simultaneously, which makes us less effective at all of them.

I know that many of us are seeking a form of simplicity that currently eludes us. We want quieter, less aggressive demands on our time and more than anything, most of us are struggling to calm our frayed nerves from the last few challenging years. Digital designers have made things that we hope consumers not only want to have but come to feel they must have.

This is where my concerns for our well being really come together. Unpacking and divesting of this hoard feels to me like tossing things we think we may need tomorrow, next year, in a decade, and it has the same psychological markers as getting rid of the material clutter in our lives.

We think our digital lives are simple, but they’re not essential. My phone isn’t actually critical in my life, though it feels like it has become just that. I barely even use it as a telephone nowadays, I use it as a gateway to an increasingly stressful digital life.

Image by Maddie T

Obviously, there’s value in being able to do all the small tasks we do on our devices, and yes, we’re able to solve all kinds of small problems at our fingertips, truly effortlessly. That’s the unquantifiable benefit all of these tools have conferred on our lives, and as someone who makes these things, I am grateful to see how much we can accomplish so easily.

We wanted these many diverse tools to reflect the capabilities of how our minds work, but instead, we’ve created more chaos, more distraction and more stress. So instead, I’m naturally feeling inclined to take a step back, to reduce the noise, because I find that so much of what I’m doing digitally is actually unnecessary to my life.

As good design focuses on making things beautifully functional and intentional, why does it feel like this phone is designed to make us dysfunctional? It’s kind of a design paradox.

Feeling this way for the past few years has changed my relationship with my phone, putting it into its proper context. It was once a telephone, made to allow humans to communicate with other humans in different places. We can occasionally check a few data points that interest us, or are helpful to us. But the rest of it, maybe we don’t need at all. Maybe we aren’t noticing that we are truly overwhelmed by our devices, our daily companion that we spend hours a day with. But if we take a step back and think, what kind of relationship do I have with my phone? perhaps we’d be met with an awareness that could be used to fuel our wellness. Perhaps the many digital product leaders and inventors out there can be met with more empathy to a society of millions of users and truly recognize that our phone innovation actually needs innovation.