Attention - the act of allocating some of your finite capacity to focus on something that you might or might not have committed to. 

Commitment and Attention are coworkers. Commitment can’t accomplish anything without Attention. Without Commitment, Attention can’t do anything important​​​. Commitment is the ambitious one. Attention, the energetic. Attention provides the fuel and Commitment the discipline. When they’re working together, they’re unstoppable.

Commitment enforces the decision to get a college degree. Attention does all the studying. Commitment is the one who understands which distractions to say ’no’ to and why. Attention has a little bit of ADHD, prone to chasing shiny objects. Commitment has to reel Attention back in from time to time.

This dynamic duo shows up not just in the big things but also in the small. Oldheads love to pine for the days of Blockbuster Video. When you left Blockbuster and drove home with the movie you chose, Commitment rode with you in the passenger seat.

Turns out, when we got instant access to information at our fingertips, it affected Commitment’s ability to do its job. 

You already know the scenario I’m about to describe. You’re sitting on your couch. You pick up the remote and launch Netflix. Commitment has left the building. Attention is unmoored. Attention keeps riffling through the genres. It’s taken 20 minutes to “decide” on a movie. Attention taps play. Eight minutes later, Attention is restless. Maybe Instagram? Maybe we didn’t pick the right movie? Is this movie even good? It turns out Commitment was the one who was making you watch the movie from start to finish. This is what happens when Attention runs amok. The experience suffers. So, oldheads pine for the days of Blockbuster. 

What if I told you Commitment is still with us? 

I find it interesting that Commitment seems to be clawing back some of its territory lately. As of this writing, people are flocking to the theater to see Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. The movie theater seems to be back in the zeitgeist this summer more so than recent years. I suspect this is happening because people are rediscovering Commitment.

I recently hired Commitment to pick out an album for me to buy. Yes, you just read that right. I purchased (with money) a music album. And then I proceeded to listen to that album over and over. I gotta say, the experience was a lot of fun. Commitment was ever-present. It reminded me of the iPod days. (Commitment thrived on the iPod just as it did at Blockbuster.) Ultimately what I got out of it is the reason why we listen to music in the first place - enjoyment in its purest form.

Fried Chicken Dopamine spikes quickly and then there’s a crash. It’s like when you eat a sugary donut; you get that burst of sugar-fueled energy and excitement, and then 30 minutes later you feel lethargic and sapped. Fried Chicken Dopamine always works like that. Quick spikes, flames out, doesn’t stay with you. Yeah, it’s definitely dopamine. But it’s not the only kind of dopamine. 

Painting a picture is difficult. You have to try to mix the colors correctly. You need to learn how to stroke the paintbrush just right. You mess up. You have to fix your mess-up. You try, and try again. It’s effort. But at the end, you have a painting that you made. You put effort into something, something that’s not trivial. You have the end result to show for it. You feel good about what you’ve accomplished. That gives you dopamine. Grilled Chicken Dopamine, to be exact. 

Grilled Chicken Dopamine is a slow burn. It doesn’t come to you in a rush all at once in the beginning. It builds slowly over time. It’s like when you’ve mowed half of the yard. You feel good because you’re moving your body. There’s a nice breeze outside. You look at the half of the yard that you’ve mowed already and it looks good. You’re happy with it, so you decide to keep going. You’re looking forward to the whole yard looking like that. 

Grilled Chicken Dopamine doesn’t come with a crash afterward. To the contrary - after you’ve built up the slow burn of Grilled Chicken Dopamine, it stays with you. You feel good about that picture you painted for the rest of the day. 

We all need a certain amount of dopamine in our lives to be happy. The key is to understand how you’re getting your dopamine. Pay attention to spikes, slow burns, crashes, and lasting happiness. Go Grilled, most of the time. Keep your Fried to a reasonable limit. Monitor it, take note, tweak things. Manage it. You’ll be all the happier if you do.

At times like this, we’re tempted to find relief in something, anything. We look for things around us that will pacify.

The smartphone is always near us. It’s in our pocket.

We pick it up. We don’t have a plan in mind. We just know we want to feel less bad. Maybe it’s boredom. Maybe it’s loneliness. Maybe we’re in a stuffy airport. Maybe it’s simply habit formed from previous experiences feeling bad. Maybe we have no idea why we feel bad and we don’t care to find out. We just know we want to feel better right now.

So we scroll.

We’ll take anything. Anything to alleviate us from the discomfort we’re having. We don’t want to think about the fact that we’re alone in a dark room, lying aimlessly in the bed. We don’t want to look at the backs of the heads of all the other people standing in the line ahead of us, most of whom are also looking at their phones. So we pacify.

More often than not, it’s some unhuman obligation of modern life that’s putting us in these kinds of unpleasant situations.

Look around next time you’re in a stuffy airport. Everybody’s pacifying. Because everybody’s uncomfortable.

Look around next time you’re at a wonderful party or family gathering. Nobody’s pacifying. Because everybody’s content.

Scrolling is our drug of choice, often. We’d rather pacify ourselves than confront the unpleasant parts of life head on.

What if there’s another way?

I’m doing it right now. Every time I make my finger press down on one of these keys, it’s like a little instruction: “Computer, please insert the letter ‘r’ into the place where the cursor is.” 

When I take a picture with my smartphone, I’m giving the computer an instruction: “Computer, use your on-board camera to take a photo right now, using the same instructions (zoom, flash, etc.) that I’ve already given to the Camera app.” 

“Zoom in a little bit.” 

“Submit this form.”

“Scroll down.” 

“Send message.” 

We don’t really think about it when we feed these instructions to the computer. We just do it.

People don’t want a drill. They want a quarter-inch hole. 

The product design community loves this quote, but in reality it’s not quite right. We’re a little too preoccupied with the drilling process. People don’t particularly care about making quarter-inch holes. In fact, they’d skip it if they could. What they really want is the happiness they get when they look at a sentimental picture hanging on their wall.

It’s very easy for us to lose sight of why we’re using computers. It’s very easy for us to lose sight of the computer’s place in the world.

We don’t like to think about the computer’s place in the world because it is a boring one. Are you zoomed in 52.1% or 53.4%? Who cares? But that’s an actual job the computer is doing. You just don’t think about it. And it’s a good thing that you don’t have to think about it. That tiny job is one of the many thousands of little jobs the computer is (and has been) doing for you whenever you take a photo! That is computing at its best - saving or modifying millions of zeros and ones that you don’t have to think about in service to your meaningful, human end goal.

You should never have to think about lighting up pixel #13,423. You should have think about if you want to take a picture of your dog, and why or why not. 

People don’t want a quarter-inch hole. They want the happiness they get from a picture on their wall. 

We people feed instructions to computers because of things we have going on in our lives, things we are trying to accomplish, and we are using the computer to accomplish those things. 

“Computer people” often make the mistake of thinking that the computer is an end in itself, because to a computer person, it is! Computer people enjoy computers because they enjoy computers. It’s their hobby. It’s the same thing as how golf people enjoy golf because they like playing golf.

The difference between computers and golf, however, is that you’re not forced to play golf in order to function in society. Non-computer people are forced to use computers to function in daily life.

Computer people are prone to enjoying the process of drilling a quarter-inch hole. Computer people like a good challenge. Writing software code by hand is an example of an instruction that is difficult to give to the computer. For computer people, the difficulty gives them the challenge they’re seeking. It lets them sink more effort into their hobby. 

On the other hand, non-computer people wish they could avoid the process of drilling altogether. They want it to be as easy as possible to give the computer instructions. The instructions are the means to the end. This is the majority of people. For them, it’s a problem if it’s difficult to feed the computer instructions. That wastes their time and energy at the expense of their goal. 

I suspect that LLMs will go down in history primarily as an innovation in the easing of feeding instructions to computers. It’s in the name: “language models”. Language is the medium of communication. When a person is giving instructions to a computer, they’re communicating. “Computer, can you help me find this news article?”

What I see missing from the LLM companies’ thinking is the human end goals. “You should learn AI so that you can use AI more! Why? To use AI!” The Silicon Valley companies are making the same mistake computer people tend to make: they assume that using the computer is the end goal. It isn’t. Not for most people, at least.

Someday, there might be a business leader who dares to ask, “What if we centered our focus on what AI helps people accomplish in their daily lives?” Questions like this have been asked before. But lately, we’ve forgotten about them.

But I’ve come to realize that friction isn’t always a bad thing. In fact, it’s often a great thing.

In your pocket you carry a keychain, because you lock your door when you leave the house. That’s friction: you’re making it more difficult for a total stranger to easily walk into your house.

The reason you have to brake your car at a stop sign or a red light is also friction: you temporarily inconvenience yourself instead of mindlessly zooming through an intersection so that you minimize the chance of a collision. You get a benefit - safety - from this self-imposed friction.

Good friction confers benefits. You exercise (muscular friction) for the health benefits. You study (mental friction) for the educational benefits. You work (economic friction) for the monetary benefits.

When there’s too little friction in your life, you run the risk of losing out on the benefits that come with it. If you’re not careful, it might make you an under-developed, unhappy person. That’s a price too high to pay.

Next time you encounter something that’s “too easy”, ask yourself why is it so easy? Who might benefit from this being so easy? Should it be this easy? If it doesn’t need to be, how would you benefit from a little more healthy friction?

Transcript

There’s something about machine precision that’s unhuman. You can see it, hear it, and sense it. If something’s “too perfect” that really means it’s too precise, too machine-like.

The false negatives are also interesting. For example, personally, I sense this when I hear the world’s best a cappella groups perform. In unison, they hit every note so perfectly that, to me at least, it sounds like an AI. Isn’t that odd? It’s as if too much practice makes you seem less human.

I was watching a Texas Tech football game the other day. Their quarterback flashed a complex sequence of hand signals with such fluidity, it was obvious he was extremely well-rehearsed. This prompted the sports broadcasters to mention how he is often so well-prepared that people will comment that he’s like a robot. There it is again: so much practice that it seems less human.

We see the reverse of this is also true, that imperfections can make something seem human. When we look at a hand-written note, listen to a live amateur performance, look at a painting, or read a hand-painted sign, it’s the imperfections we’re picking up on that make it seem more human. If someone accidentally does something that a machine would never do - like forget to dot an i - we pick up on the humanness of that.

We humans are imperfect. In a sense, allowing imperfections to show through is a form of honesty. In another sense, our human imperfections are simply being filtered about by precise machines.

ChatGPT has a certain writing style that’s not quite human enough. As a result, the #3 app in the ChatGPT store (as of this writing) is a “humanizer” - an extension that attempts to make AI-generated writing sound more human. (As a funny aside, apparently one of the giveaways that some text has been generated by ChatGPT is the inclusion of an em dash. As a detail-oriented technologist, I had previously been using the HTML escape code for em dash, &emdash;, manually in my writing because I like the way the em dash looks. However, all the other humans who don’t know code, won’t do that. Most people just use “-“, because it’s on the QUERTY keyboard. I have since stopped using the em dash in my writing, because I don’t want my writing to be GPT-like.)

Making an AI seem more human turns out to be a difficult software problem to solve. For humans, however, all it requires is being yourself.

There’s lots of opportunities to make software likable too. 

Good experiences are often the result of software acting like a likable person.

I log in to an app and see a message that says, “Good afternoon, Edwin. You’ve got (3) new messages.” That’s helpful. That’s like a person who thoughtfully wants to keep you in the loop. Or, maybe I go to delete something and the interface lets me know once I delete the thing, that action can’t be undone. This is good to know. I’m glad to know that before I choose whether or not to delete. That’s like a person making sure you’re properly informed before you make an important decision.

A likable person…

• Wishes you well, and means it
• Cares about how you’re doing
• Listens
• Proactively offers to help you with things
• Gives you a heads up
• Waits until you’re ready
• Respects your privacy
• Keeps you in the loop

By contrast, bad experiences are often the result of building software that behaves like an unlikable person. 

If you open an app and it immediately badgers you with a popup full of irrelevant information, that’s like a person who rudely interrupts. Or, maybe you log in and see on the top of the screen, “Welcome Customer”. That’s like that guy who won’t bother to learn your name. 

A likable person does not…

• Give you vague or incomplete instructions
• Assume your preferences
• Bark orders
• Repeat the same phrase over and over again
• Creep on you
• Try to be funny when you’re upset 
• Leave you in the dark 
• Let you struggle without offering to help

The thing I find useful about this rule of thumb is that it’s easy to apply to almost anything. You can always ask, “How would a likable person handle this situation?” Asking this will steer you towards all kinds of great practices like feedback, visibility of system status, and error prevention. 

Ultimately, we like likable people. If a company wants us to like them over their competitors, they should be likable too.

Ed Zitron’s Where’s Your Ed At
A skeptical take on AI
wheresyoured.at

Figma’s Newsletter, Shortcut
Product updates from the Figma team
figma.com/blog/newsletter

Jakob Nielsen’s Substack, UX Tigers
Jakob Neilsen writes about AI
uxtigers.com

Luke Wroblewski’s Writings
Luke W writes about AI and product design
lukew.com/subscribe

Nielsen Norman Group Newsletter
UX and usability newsletter from NN/g
nngroup.com/articles/subscribe

One Useful Thing by Ethan Mollick
An optimistic take on AI
oneusefulthing.org

​Sketch Email Updates​​
Product updates from the Sketch team
sketch.com/newsletter

Smashing Magazine’s Email Newsletter
Front-end development newsletter by Smashing Magazine
smashingmagazine.com/the-smashing-newsletter

We know that we’re seeing a rise in mental health problems. The question is… what’s causing them? I’m not prepared to truly answer that question because I believe there’s still lots of research to do to before we figure that out. One intuition I have developed, however, is that junk information exists and it impacts us regularly. 

We have an intuitive sense of what happens to us if we consume too much junk food, but what about junk information? Are there really negative consequences if we consume certain information? If there are, what are they? I suspect that - just like with junk food - if you consume too much junk information, your health will suffer.

Perhaps a definition for junk information would be: content that seems informative or enriching but has been created in such a way that makes it grab a little too much of your attention, ultimately leading to health problems if consumed in large quantities.

The constructive thing about this line of thinking is that it makes the path forward clearer.

We need to:

1. Learn how to separate the nutritious information from the junk information, and
2. Fill the majority of our information diets with the nutritious kind

Some amount of junk information will be okay, as long as it’s held to an appropriate limit.

“It took generations to get nutrition labels on food; it took generations to get speed limits on roads and seat belts and air bags into cars. But food and transportation technology are safer because all of these are now in place. In the case of communications technology, we have just begun.”

-Sherry Turkle

I imagine in the future, we’ll all become much savvier in how we approach the information diet. As the saying goes, you are what you eat. Maybe it’s also true that you are what you read.

1. Searching
2. Stating
3. Fixing
4. Verifying

Searching

No matter the kind of problem you’re dealing with, you always begin by searching. You might look for something that’s obviously wrong. You might search the internet for something written by folks who’ve already solved the problem. You trace and triangulate. As you search, you follow the promising strands while ignoring the distracting ones. Of the four steps, searching is the most difficult and unpleasant for people because the search is often uncertain, unclear, and ambiguous. In a sense, it’s also the most important. It’s nearly impossible to solve a non-trivial problem without thoroughly exploring it first.

As the saying goes, no one trips and falls and accidentally replaces their air compressor. Okay, that’s not really a saying… I just made it up. But it should be a saying, because it’s true and it tells you something about the nature of problem solving. 

Stating

“A problem well stated is a problem half-solved.” -Charles Kettering

It’s of vital importance that once you believe you’ve completed your search and you’ve “found” the problem, you attempt to explain what the problem is. The problem must make enough sense to you for you to be able to explain it. You don’t need a total grasp on the problem, but you must be able to state it in a way that’s somewhat cogent. If you can’t, that’s a sign you’ve got more work to do before you understand it well enough to truly solve it. 

Fixing

Once you’ve found the problem and understand it well enough to state it, there’s some action you must take to fix it. It might require creativity on your part to think of the actions you could take. It might be a matter of stopping something you’ve been doing that’s created the problem. You will likely need to remove something, alter something, or add something that fundamentally alters the situation. There might be more than one legitimate way to fix the problem. At the end of the day, if you haven’t made any changes at all, there’s a good chance you haven’t solved the problem. 

The fix must fit your statement of the problem. It must fit into the theory that you’ve formed. If you can’t explain how your fix addresses the problem (as you’ve stated the problem), then there’s a much lower chance it’ll work as a solution. 

Verifying 

By the time you’ve found and applied the true fix, you’ve solved the problem, but you might not know it yet. If you go back to square one and take a look at the situation after you’ve applied the fix, you should be able to see that the problem is gone. The absence of the problem should correspond to the presence of your solution. You might need to get creative when thinking of ways to verify the fix. You might be able to temporarily remove the solution and see if the problem re-emerges. Or, you might have to be patient. Given enough time and creativity, there’s usually a way to prove you’ve fixed the problem.