MOM!? What did you do!?They’ll fade! They’ll shrink!
You say you’ll do it. Then, you don’t.
You say, give me another chance—this weekend, I promise!—and then you don’t do it again. This perpetual disappointment can be frustrating for you, your coworkers, your friends, and the people you love.
But don’t feel bad. I understand. Call it privileged. Call it entitled. A lot of us can actually relate to you.
After all, your excuse is the number-one self-reported reason why nearly 70 percent of Australian women aren’t doing what they want to in life,1 why Michigan teens haven’t gotten a driver’s license,2 why overstressed Americans don’t deal with their stress,3 and it’s even the most self-reported reason why nearly 60 percent of men in the UK don’t shower in the morning.4
You’re too busy.
It even occurs for those with devout faith. The big conclusion of a recent five-year, 20,000-person, 139-country study of Christianity? Christians feel that they are just too busy for God.5
The feeling isn’t unwarranted. In the United States, we are working more hours than has ever been statistically recorded. Some corporate lawyers are working 15 hours a day. Some schoolteachers work 80 hours a week. The United States is one of the only countries in the world where the government doesn’t require companies to give you any time off.6
So yeah, you didn’t take out the trash. Clean the car. Go for a jog. Brigid Schulte’s book Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time was recently in the top 10 on the New York Times’ Best Seller list for a good reason.7 Volunteering, one of the most important things we can do for our communities, hit a 10-year low in 2013.8
We all have a lot going on; we all wish we could do more for the people we care about; and none of us really want to spend our free moments doing those mindless, embarrassing, strange, or painful chores we feel obligated to get done and don’t enjoy.
“There are things you can do individually, though, to save energy,” Barack Obama told a crowded room in Springfield, Missouri, when running for president in 2008. “Making sure your tires are properly inflated. Simple thing.”
Oh, sure, I’ll just do one more chore.
While the country at the time was in the midst of two wars in the Middle East, we were looking for simple, non-time-consuming ways to stop handing our hard-earned gasoline dollars to the Middle East, where oil-bearing countries could be potentially harboring or aiding distant, hardly understood enemies. And the answer to our worries was . . . put more air pressure in our car tires?
Barry, I’m sorry, I’ve got to take the kids to soccer practice right after work . . . I don’t really have time for my car tires.
During that election, the opposing Republican party—whose nominee John McCain was using the slogan “Drill, baby, drill!” in support of North American oil drilling—mocked the town hall meeting in Springfield, Missouri. Conservative radio personality Rush Limbaugh said, “This is unbelievable. My friends, it’s laughable, of course. But it’s stupid! It is stupid.”9 And the party sent out tire pressure gauges to supporters with the words “Obama’s energy plan” printed on them.
At least, on this particular issue, Barack Obama’s campaign statement was accurate. Having the appropriate tire pressure makes cars more efficient. They use less gas, which means we could reduce some of our foreign dependency on oil. In fact, the US Department of Transportation has estimated that five million gallons of fuel are wasted every day—yes, every day—because of Americans with improperly inflated car tires.10
And by being more efficient, we would pollute less, thereby reducing global emissions. The wrong air pressure in our tires would mean more air pollution in our lungs and more pollution in our drinking water.
And if that’s not enough to convince you the correct air pressure is important, it also has safety consequences. The Society of Automotive Engineers estimates that about 260,000 accidents each year involve improperly inflated car tires. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) found that you’re three times more likely to be in an accident if your tires are underinflated.11
Interesting and timely, but Obama’s speech wasn’t going to solve any of this.
It couldn’t. Because it wasn’t (and still isn’t) an information problem. Yes, many people don’t understand the merits of proper tire pressure, but that’s not the heart of problem.
It’s not a social issue, like marijuana legalization or gay marriage, which can be discussed and debated to convince minds. This is more like the dishes in your sink, or a dirty toilet bowl. This is an experience design problem. You don’t have the time, and even if you did, you’re probably not going to do it because it’s an annoying chore.
Say you actually find the time and set forth to properly inflate your car tires. Once you find a gas station with an air pump, the burdensome experience continues not with delight, but with a feeling that you’re being scammed. Many pumps require you to pump quarters into a coin slot to buy air from a machine.
Then, you bend over, squatting on the ground near your car tire, and you deal with showing the world another kind of coin slot: your butt crack coming out of your jeans.
And, as a little icing on the cake, as you attempt to rush through the embarrassing squat on the oil-stained ground, the air machine you just dumped all of your pocket change into might even be deceiving you about how much more air you need to buy. A study by the NHTSA found that 34 percent of low-volume gas stations had air machines with gauges inaccurate by 4 or more pounds per square inch (PSI) when trying to fill car tires that need a common 35 PSI.12
Yeah, I’ll get that done next weekend.
Some who understand the consequences of not properly inflating their car tires just don’t care enough to do anything about it. I don’t blame them: Nobody wants to be squatting at a gas station with a plumber’s crack pumping quarters into a lying machine to buy air. We just don’t have the time.
So, what does a major tire manufacturer do about this problem? Well, don’t worry, Goodyear has made an app. It has allowed people to do amazing things like, um . . .
“Print and email brochures.”13
Make sure you add a share button! Yeah, one for Google Plus, too.
Fortunately, Goodyear’s Innovation Center in Ohio has been working on something that leverages technology to solve the real problem. They’re thinking beyond screens, and imagining a world of no interface that follows the first principle by embracing our typical processes, and also the second principle to leverage technology to serve us.
It’s straightforward, really. They’ve created a tire in their labs that senses air pressure while you’re driving. And if the tire pressure is low, it opens a tube that fills the tire back up to the ideal air pressure while you’re moving. You just drive your car, and your tires fill up with air if they need it. They don’t take you away from what matters, they don’t take up your time, they don’t add an additional chore, they just operate on their own. A simple system helping you avoid something you don’t want to do that greatly benefits all of us.
The technology caters to your needs, so it all happens automatically, behind the scenes. Have no time? Worry not. It’s not a tedious screen-based app, it’s a machine input that works for you. As genius cofounder of Google Larry Page once said, “I’m kinda lazy, and having the computer do things is good.”14
Whether self-inflating becomes an industry standard, or unpredictable market forces halt Goodyear’s efforts before they hit your local O’Reilly’s, the Goodyear project is a signpost on a journey that embodies the kind of thinking we should all be building toward. When we focus on leveraging systems that work for us within our typical processes, we can forget all that time spent on getting people to enter the right password, and instead focus on solving problems that do things like save us gas, money, and the environment for generations to come.
We’re forgetful, fragile, and busy. Instead of adding another chore, computers can do the things we don’t want to do, that we don’t know we should do, and that we aren’t able to do behind the scenes.
MOM!? What did you do!?
They’ll fade! They’ll shrink!
A teenage daughter in another room, not visible on camera, screams with despair.
I LOVED those jeans!15
Those quotes from a recent Whirlpool washing machine commercial embody the first-world, Orange County crisis of the multibillion-dollar, international appliance industry.16 She’s afraid her mom will do something wrong with a machine that’s designed to clean clothes and ruin her new pair of designer jeans forever.
Yeah, her mom is from a fictional commercial, but it’s hard to blame her, nonetheless. According to Good Housekeeping, the average American family does eight loads of laundry a week,17 and the washing choices aren’t obvious for loads of random, varying clothes. Please consider these actual controls on a top-selling washing machine:
Controls for one of the most popular laundry machines today.
Finally, you make the time to do laundry, and now you don’t even know which button might completely ruin your clothes.
So, if I played basketball in this cotton T-shirt, do I select Cotton? Or is it Sports Wear because it smells terrible? Wait, but isn’t the purpose of a washing machine to wash my clothes so they don’t smell? What does Sports Wear do differently? Oh look, there’s Silent Wash. That could be good, too, because I don’t like how loud this washer gets sometimes. Then again, there’s Quick 30, which might be nice because quick is good, right? I’ve got things to do. Actually, wait, I sometimes get allergies—like 55 percent of all Americans18—maybe I should choose Allergy Care?
As some appliance companies have gone slaphappy with interfaces, the problem has gotten even worse as some models adopt touchscreens with pages and pages of options and bizarro apps that control them.
So what do consumers do with all this choice?
Well, colleagues who have done user research in the appliance industry have reported to me that time after time they get the same result: People have no idea what the buttons on their appliances actually do. An informal survey found that 58 percent of men in the UK don’t even know how to use a washing machine.19
You don’t have the time. There are more important things to do than read an instruction manual about the differences between Easy Care and Delicate. Yes, when you’ve paid $1,000 or more for a machine with just one purpose, you’re entitled to better expectations.
For people using a dishwasher, the results are worse. I’ve been told by industry insiders that research indicates we often keep a single cycle button pressed forever. Forever. No matter what dishes have mom’s spaghetti stuck on them (or not) there’s always the same cycle button pressed on the dishwasher.
Are we pathetic because we can’t figure out which cycle to use? Do we suck at life?
Nah, struggling with choice is actually a basic and observed part of human psychology that’s an understood element in good design thinking. The burden and anxiety caused by the need to make choices has been confirmed time and time again. Like the study in which people were offered 30 randomly selected chocolates and ended up being less satisfied and more regretful than when they were offered only six randomly selected chocolates.20 Or the discovery that the more retirement mutual funds employers offered to their employees through the investment firm Vanguard, the less and less those employees participated.
This has been explained by Barry Schwartz, the author of The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, in his 2006 TED talk:
Why? Because with 50 funds to choose from, it’s so damn hard to decide which fund to choose that you’ll just put it off until tomorrow. And then tomorrow, and then tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and of course tomorrow never comes. Understand that not only does this mean that people are going to have to eat dog food when they retire because they don’t have enough money put away, it also means that making the decision is so hard that they pass up significant matching money from the employer.21
For appliances, is there anything simpler than buttons?
Of course. And some of the more experience-focused appliance makers are working on it. They’re moving past the woes of user input and using signals to enable machine input. To save us time. To put the burden onto the machine that is designed to help rather than the instruction manual.
When Whirlpool showcased the teen jeans drama—“MOM!? What did you do!?”—they were advertising a sensor-based washing machine. The machines they introduced in 2013, the Duet Washer and Dryer, used sensors to determine the size of the load in the washing machine, and with that information the washer then used the appropriate amount of water and detergent.22 And the dryer had moisture sensors to make sure your clothes were actually dry before it stopped running.23 Neat.
But before those sensors went to work, you still had to choose a cycle from an enormous wheel of options . . . and a touch screen. Perhaps as a slave to the paradigm of bullet-point shopping—where websites and stores sell products based on bullet points, not experiences—appliance companies often feel the pressure to add a few more buttons and gizmos to get a few more bullet points that attract a few more sales despite any advances in actual experience.
Oh, look, this has 12 buttons and a touch screen! It must be the best.
But more impressively, Whirlpool’s dishwashing division has created a button to end all buttons: A “sensor cycle.” Wanna keep one button pressed forever? Sure. Press the sensor cycle, and sensors measure “temperature, soil level, and load size.”24 The dishwasher determines every setting so that your dishes come out perfectly clean each time, whether they’re lightly stained wine glasses or plates heavily stained by Mom’s spaghetti.
Today, there’s a new kind of chore. A new set of numerous, mindless errands embedded into our already overwhelmingly busy lives.
Over the past decade, these tiny requests have been culminating into a larger and larger ball of more and more of our time, taking us farther and farther away from spending more time with our friends and family, or allowing us the free time to make our communities stronger by volunteering at places like the downtown homeless shelter.
These tasks are the result of graphical user interfaces that assume constant, demanding attention is the expected norm. They are the byproduct of screen-based thinking. First-world errands for the almighty computer and the apparent productivity software we have to manage.
From their roots in delight and harmlessness—“You’ve Got Mail!”—they’ve grown into an endless stream of to-dos and checklists. As our lives continue to become increasingly digital, these tasks have exponentially increased because the standard paradigm in making new software is that we serve the computer, that we live to click. As each old-world thing turns digital, the software has more requests for you.
On a given day, you could have software updates to download and install, passwords to reset, notifications to attend to, files and folders to sort, messages to archive, social media requests to confirm, calendars to update, credit card balances to check, information to verify, storage space to manage and monitor, documents to back up, messages to reply to, photos to upload, flights to check in . . .
These are digital chores. The maintenance of our digital lives.
Oh, a new version is available? Yes, I’d love to download it for the next few hours.
By clicking here, yes, I’ll be boarding that flight tomorrow that I purchased for that exact date for that exact route for $1,000 that has a $150 cancellation fee even though you’re going to resell my ticket to another person if I don’t check-in. I’d be delighted to let the computer know.
These digital chores are nightly, weekly, and monthly errands that can feel just as mundane and forced as taking out the trash. Sometimes, they have worse consequences than traditional chores. Previously, you forgot to do the laundry and had to wear an old shirt. Now, you forget to accept a request, and your friend may not be your friend anymore. You forget to change your password, your account can get hacked, and you lose your private pictures, or maybe even your friends all get porn in their inboxes attributed to you.
No, I swear, that’s not my dick pic!
Rarely do these digital chores involve creating or contributing to the world. Rather, they’re mostly made up of us serving the computer. We seek alluring, aspirational moments like Inbox Zero—a state of having an empty inbox because you’ve deleted, moved, or archived them all—which many desire and few attain. But for what? For happiness? The improvement of society? Nope, for the computer. For the interface. So that a count in a numerical badge floating above your application icon can diminish and eventually disappear. So that the application notifications go away. So that your most important documents are preserved. So that your account stays current. So that you don’t get hacked.
In this digital errand world of operating system settings, folders, badges, and notification centers, one of the absurdities of the job is that the more digital chores you do, the more new digital chores may arise. Reply to an inbox full of messages? You’ll probably get a lot of replies back, and your temporary state of Inbox Zero will quickly become aspirational all over again. In other words, the better you are at email, the more emails you get.
Back up your photos? Now it’s time to rethink that cloud storage. Saving and preserving your memories can mean massive file management.
Update your mobile operating system? Oh, well, all your applications need to be updated now, too. They don’t work with the new system, duh.
The whole process feels like getting done with the laundry and having your clothes come out of the dryer dirty again.
Wait, why do my socks smell even worse now?
Fortunately, not everyone is convinced that this is the right path.
By taking advantage of things like an application programming interface (API) that allows software to talk to software, or by embracing a simple type of machine input—such as Wi-Fi or Bluetooth radio—some designers and engineers are rethinking software in NoUI ways.
In 2006, a startup called TripIt wanted to be the service that helped people manage their travel, in their words, “to enable the perfect trip.” And in pursuing that goal they attempted to remove a digital chore that was a typical process for frequent travelers. See, travelers were getting emails from airlines like United, and then going through the mindless chore of entering that flight information and the rest of their trip itinerary at the correct times into their preferred calendar program, like, say, Google Calendar. So, TripIt—embracing their mantra “automagical”25—created an email address to which you could forward any travel information, like an email about flight, hotel, or rental car, and TripIt would automatically compile your trip itinerary. Your travel information just showed up in your calendar. People described it as “magic.”
Eliminating a digital chore? That’s a good thing. Making your customers feel like your service is magic? That’s a great thing.
In 2010, they took it a step further. With user-granted email permissions, TripIt made an algorithm that finds travel-related emails when you get them—say, emails from Marriott or JetBlue—and automatically puts them in your calendar.26 No need to forward or even open your email. The software worked invisibly in the background, automatically eliminating a nonsensical digital chore for you.
The movement to link software to software and create subscription-based services that make the computer serve you is still in early stages. So, it’s mostly executed as a single feature of a larger resource, as when Dropbox introduced “background uploading”27 in 2012 that automatically backs up photos from your smartphone to Dropbox when you’re connected to Wi-Fi.28
The philosophy is embraced by more manual, hackerish services such as IFTTT (if this, then that; pronounced like “gift without the g”),29 which allows you to create recipes so that if something happens in one digital space, you make something else happen in another digital space. (Like if you get a phone call from an important client, they get a text that you’ll call them back soon.)30
These invisible kinds of subscription-based applications point toward a refreshing future. Instead of more gadgets, more software to manage, and more digital chores to take care of, these background robots will remove your digital chores. The computer will serve your needs.
Look, you’re busy. We all are. We’d all love a few extra hours to see the people we love, to enjoy life, and to contribute to the world. When it’s possible for computers to free us to be more productive, well, let’s take that option. Let’s have the almighty computer serve us.