Most digital products want one thing from us:
- More time.
- Stay longer.
- Scroll further.
- Watch the next thing.
- Open the notification.
- Maintain the streak.943
- Come back tomorrow.
We have become so accustomed to this that sustained engagement is often treated as evidence of a successful digital experience.
But perhaps we are measuring the wrong thing.
What if a successful digital experience was one that let me accomplish what I came to do and then leave?
When attention becomes a measure of success
For many digital services, engagement makes commercial sense.
More activity can mean more opportunities to sell, advertise, recommend, learn or retain.
So organisations naturally measure it.
- Time spent.
- Frequency of use.
- Return visits.
- Clicks.
- Interactions.
The difficulty begins when these organisational measures start shaping the experience itself.
The system no longer simply waits for people to decide what they want to do.
It starts trying to keep them engaged.
At that point, the objectives of the organisation and the intentions of the individual can begin to diverge.
Busy does not necessarily mean valuable
Consider two customers using the same service.
One spends forty minutes navigating through recommendations, prompts and additional content.
Another arrives, finds exactly what they need in three minutes and leaves.
Which customer had the better experience?
Traditional engagement measures might favour the first.
But from the customer’s perspective, the second interaction may have been far more successful.
That exposes an important difference:
Time spent using a service is not necessarily the same as value received from it.
What would mindful technology look like?
Digital mindfulness does not require technology to become passive or inconvenient.
- Technology can still help.
- It can organise information.
- Enable discovery.
- Answer questions.
- Facilitate communication.
- Complete transactions.
- What changes is the objective.
Instead of asking:
How do we keep this person engaged?
the system can ask:
How effectively can we help this person accomplish what they intended to do?
Once that becomes the measure of success, entirely different design decisions become possible.
For a greenfield business
A new digital service has an opportunity to establish this relationship from the beginning.
Notifications do not have to exist simply to bring people back.
Discovery does not have to depend upon an endless feed.
Customer success does not have to mean maximising the amount of time spent inside the product.
Leaders can instead ask:
What does a successful conclusion to this interaction look like?
Sometimes the best answer may be:
The customer leaves.
That should not automatically be considered a failure.
For existing organisations
Established organisations face a more difficult question because engagement metrics may already influence product decisions, investment priorities and commercial performance.
The practical adoption challenge is therefore not simply to reduce engagement.
It is to distinguish between:
Engagement created because the customer is receiving value.
and
Engagement created because the system is designed to prevent attention from moving elsewhere.
Those are fundamentally different relationships.
Healthy use is also a leadership question
Digital wellbeing is often presented as the individual’s responsibility.
Turn off notifications.
Set limits.
Stop scrolling.
Spend less time online.
But there is another side to the relationship.
What responsibility does the organisation designing the experience have?
If sophisticated systems are deliberately optimised to attract attention, maintain engagement and encourage return behaviour, placing responsibility entirely on the individual creates an obvious imbalance.
Healthy use can therefore become a design consideration, not merely personal discipline.
A different measure of customer experience
Imagine replacing:
How long did they stay?
with:
Did they accomplish what they wanted?
Replacing:
How frequently did they return?
with:
Did they return because they chose to?
And replacing:
How much engagement did we create?
with:
How much value did we provide?
Those questions could generate very different digital products.
They could also create very different relationships between organisations and customers.
A question for leaders
Look at the digital services your organisation provides and ask:
If customers could accomplish exactly what they wanted in half the time, would we consider that an improvement or a problem?
The answer may reveal what the service has actually been designed to optimise.
That is the adoption question behind ICCA: Digital Mindfulness and Healthy Use.
It asks us to reconsider a deeply embedded assumption:
Maybe good technology should not demand more of our attention. Maybe it should respect the fact that our attention belongs to us.
The underlying ICCA work is openly shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence, encouraging discussion, challenge, adaptation and further development.
Perhaps the healthiest digital service is not the one we cannot put down. It is the one that does what we need and then lets us get on with being human.
#ICCA #DigitalMindfulness #DigitalWellbeing #HumanAutonomy #CustomerExperience #EthicalTechnology #BehaviouralNeutrality #Leadership #HumanCentredDesign #CreativeCommons
