Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Skjoldbroder Stay back, app! I don’t want nothin’ to do with you! (credit: Jeremy Bishop via Unsplash)

Do you have a bank account where money is deposited and monthly payments withdrawn every month, without you having to think about it?

Imagine how crap it would be, if your bank account wanted to engage with you every single time you wanted this done. Or if the individual deposit or withdrawal wanted your attention. Yet this is precisely how so many apps are behaving — they want to engage with you, send you notifications, and updates, and news … and get you to use the app as much as possible. Because that’s good, right?

NO! Let’s aim to build un-engaging apps and services instead. It’s the attention economy for God’s sake, so let’s build stuff that purposefully does not waste your attention. Most apps should sit quietly in the background, doing its thing, so that you don’t have to. We could build stuff like..

An email client that only disturbs you if a mail requires your attention — such as a bill you need to pay, or a member of a whitelist wants you
A banking service that keeps track of your accounts and only gets in touch to warn you about irregularities or obvious ways to save cash.
An app that tracks your utilities (power, water, heating etc.) and only disturbs you if it has practical suggestions for saving money (or if an anomaly occurs and you need to deal with it)
A traffic service with one purpose only: to alerts you if you should take an alternate route home (say if there’s been an accident on the highway and a queue is piling up)

These examples would be invisible most of the time, except when they provide value to me as a user. How’s that for a good user experience?

I would keep those kinds of services, precisely because they would be both invisible except where relevant and valuable. So let’s get cracking, and stop this nonsense about wanting to engage with our users. The name of the game is providing value to people — so let’s keep our eye on the ball, people!

Thanks for reading 🙂 I don’t really mean that we should stop trying to engage our users — but let’s try and do it where it makes sense, and learn to recognise whether we should build an engaging or un-engaging service.

have a great weekend!

Oh… it’s only Thursday.

It’s time to build un-engaging apps was originally published in Prototyping: From UX to Front End on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It’s time to build un-engaging apps

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