Designing Time: How Digital Products Shape Our Lives
In today's digital age, we spend more time with our devices than ever before. But have you ever stopped to think about how digital products shape our perception of time, attention, and memory? As Gurwinder so astutely points out in "How Social Media Shortens Your Life," technology isn't just stealing our minutes; it's reshaping our entire experience of time itself.
The Hidden Power of Digital Architecture
When we think of digital product design, it's tempting to frame it in terms of usability, engagement, or revenue. But those are surface-level outputs. Underneath, design decisions are time-shaping mechanisms. Every scroll pattern, notification strategy, or recommendation algorithm is effectively a form of chrono-engineering, influencing how long moments feel, how memorable they are, and whether they contribute to a coherent sense of life well-lived.
The Trouble with Mainstream Digital Products
Most mainstream digital products are optimized for capturing attention, not enriching it. And when the business model is attention capture, the most profitable designs are those that keep you engaged while making you forget how long you've been there. That's great for retention metrics, but disastrous for the human experience of time.
Attention as a Renewable but Depletable Resource
Attention is often described as scarce, but in reality it's renewable, we wake up each day with a fresh supply. The problem is that digital environments can accelerate its depletion by scattering it too thinly, forcing constant task-switching, and offering too many shallow stimuli.
Narrative, Memory, and the Loss of Life's Shape
Our sense of time and identity depends on turning experience into story, with beginnings, middles, and ends. But many digital products are designed to resist closure. Without natural story arcs, the brain struggles to index experiences in memory.
The Attention Design Framework: A New Lens for Analyzing Digital Products
Introducing the Attention Design Framework, a new lens for analyzing digital products and understanding how design choices shape our experience of time. By examining flow structure, novelty design, and other factors, we can identify patterns that either enrich or erode our sense of time.
TikTok vs Duolingo: A Tale of Two Products
Comparing TikTok and Duolingo highlights the contrast between two vastly different approaches to digital product design. While TikTok thrives on autopilot usage, encouraging users to drift for as long as possible without noticing the hours pass, Duolingo builds in right-angle turns that encourage deliberate choice.
The Future of Time Design: AI and the Need for Time-Conscious Metrics
As we step into an era of AI-driven experiences, these patterns won't just persist; they'll adapt and intensify. The next question is whether AI will simply inherit the attention-extraction playbook or become a new kind of partner in protecting our most finite resource: time.
The Call for a New Design Ethic
We are still in the early centuries of the digital city. We have the chance now to decide: will our digital streets be mazes without exits, or routes that lead somewhere worth going? As builders, researchers, and leaders in this space, we can design products that shape the lived texture of human life.
Author's Note
This reflection isn't a declaration that I've solved the balance; it's a reminder to myself that the balance must be the work. As someone still learning how to navigate the tension between business targets and the better life of the user, I recognize that long-term business health depends on designing for long-term human health.