I just finished reading the book Irresistible by Adam Alter.  This book looks at our addiction to technology (smartphones, email, gaming, fitness tracking, etc).  It starts by reviewing the research on behavioural addiction (what it is and where it came from), how to create addictive experiences, and solutions for living in a world where abstinence from technology isn't an option.  It's different than the other UX books I've read in that it made me think about the ethics of creating addictive user interfaces and what responsibilities we have as designers of these products.  Here are the notes I took as I was reading:

Addiction is a deep attachment to an experience that is harmful and difficult to do without.  Rather than involving substances, behavioral addictions arise when a person can't resist a behavior which addresses a deep psychological need in the short term, but produces significant harm in the long term.

Research on rats demonstrated that anyone can exhibit addiction under the right circumstances and it isn't just based on having  an addictive personality - eg a probe activating pleasure centre causes rats to ignore food and rest, but when taken out of that environment they no longer show addictive behaviors.  This was revolutionary compared to the idea that addicts have brains that are predisposed to substance abuse.

Ingredients of an addictive experience: goals, feedback, progress, escalation, cliffhangers, and social interaction.

Humans are driven by a sense of progress.  When goals are smaller and easier to manage, people will be more likely to act.  Goals inspire action because they become fixation points.  The problem occurs when people start fixating on arbitrary goals, like getting to inbox zero, where we become obsessed with perfection and spend more time pursuing the goal than enjoying the success.  If the pursuit is governed by numbers (eg salary, Instagram followers, marathon time, streaks), goals will come in the form of round numbers and social comparisons, and repeated success will spawn one new ambitious goal after another.

Feedback encourages action, whether it be pushing a button on an elevator or even a virtual button that does nothing (eg Reddit's 2015 April Fools prank).  When feedback is intermittent rather than guaranteed, more dopamine is released in the brain for each "reward" and the draw is bigger (like gambling).  Facebook took advantage of this phenomenon via their like button, which gives intermittent feedback about whether your friends like your post.  In gambling with slot machines, losses can be disguised as wins when you win back some of the money you spent on a spin (eg win 1 of 15 rows on a single spin would get you $1 win, but cost $1.50 to play).  The alluring whirl of lights and sounds can convince you that you won. Similarly to how slot machines measure success using time on device, game designers  capture how engaging and enjoyable their games are.  Designers use microfeedback to keep gamers hooked.  It is important that feedback immediately follows a player's action so the player feels they caused it.  Games like Candy Crush use a layer of surface feedback, like sights and sounds, to make it feel real and connect the player to the virtual world. Virtual Reality has the potential to deepen this experience and escalate behavioural addictions.

Addictive games help users progress and offer something to both novices and experts.  Start with a hook, like the dollar auction game or Super Mario avatar setup.  Beginner's luck can also be a powerful hook because it shows you the pleasure of success and then yanks it away.  In gaming, this can be achieved by giving rewards quickly early in the game and spreading them out as the player progresses.

Although people think they want to make life easier, there is actually research showing people prefer breaks between something pleasant and moderate hardship (examples of people in the lab giving themselves electric shocks to avoid the boredom of sitting alone with their thoughts for 20 minutes, and movie stars getting bored with everything coming too easily).  Escalation of difficulty is a critical hook that keeps games engaging long after you've mastered the basic moves - like Tetris getting faster as you progress with time.  Another study showed that children learn best and are most motivated when the material they're learning is just beyond their current skill level - called the "zone of proximal development".  When people enter the zone, they experience "flow" - the joy of being able to just barely overcome challenges.  In the context of gaming, this sensation is called a "ludic loop" where each time you solve part of the puzzle a new incomplete piece presents itself - e.g. Super Hexagon starts up again right away so the player can't wallow in defeat, music starts at random spot so it doesn't feel like as much of a loss - all to preserve the player's flow.  Near wins where you're sure you were close to winning are very addictive, sometimes more so than actual wins - eg lottery tickets.  People have inherent stopping rules that cue them to stop doing some activity (shopping, exercising, etc).  We tend to overlook them because in the short term it's more useful to know how to get someone to start doing something than to continue or stop doing it.  Unfortunately technology can disrupt stopping rules and make us less intuitive about what we're doing (eg calorie counting vs healthy eating).  Games like Farmville override stopping rules because they are persistently running, with no levels or sessions that tell you when your game begins and ends.

Incomplete experiences occupy our minds more than completed ones - such as tasks and songs.  We can use cliffhangers to drive behaviour - eg Netflix autoplay function encourages binge watching, organ donation rates affected based on whether people opt in or opt out.

People are endlessly driven to compare themselves to others.  Facebook and Instagram are addictive partly because of the feedback that comes in through likes and comments; something that isn't available through apps without a social network.  People also seek social confirmation - signs that they see the world the way others do, that they are part of a group.  E.g. Hot or Not app gives people feedback about whether their version of hot is mirrored by others.  Multiplayer games leverage interactions between gamers who share a common purpose to keep people hooked.  Making online friends isn't a problem as long as you also make friends in the real world.  One study found that gamers aged 10-15 who played 3+ hours/day were less satisfied with their lives, less likely to feel empathy toward other people, and less likely to know how to deal with their emotions appropriately.  This is especially alarming when recent studies show kids spend an average of 5-7 hours/day in front of screens.

Children are especially vulnerable to addiction because they lack the self control that prevents many adults from developing addictive habits.  Hardship innoculation is the idea that struggling with a mental puzzle innoculates you against future mental hardships (like vaccines against illness), so depriving kids by handing them a device that makes everything easier is dangerous.  Since some screen time is unavoidable, recommendations for healthy screen time include: parents should encourage children to connect what they see in the screen world to their experience in the real world ("transfer of learning"), active engagement is better than passive viewing, screen time should focus on the content of the app rather than the technology itself.  A key idea is that it's easier to prevent people from developing addictions than to correct existing bad habits. Part of parenting today include lessons on how to interact with technology and for how long each day.


When people try to suppress thoughts or behaviors, they tend to focus on them more.  Rather than trying to use willpower alone, it is a better habit to reduce the environmental cues.  A key to overcoming addictive behaviors is to replace them with something else (eg a stress ball instead of biting nails).  Habits consist of three parts - a cue, a routine, and a reward.  Keep the cue and reward the same, but change the routine.  Habits can take a long time to form - 66 days on average, but quite variable across different people.  Behavioural architecture - redesign your environment so temptations are as close to absent as possible (eg not keeping phone next to you all the time or while sleeping, automatically deleting emails while on vacation, etc) and blunt temptations that can't be avoided.  

Not all addictive experiences are bad.  The same hooks that drive addiction can also be used to drive healthier eating, regular exercise, retirement savings, charitable giving, and committed studying.  Gamification is about taking a non-game experience and turning it into a game.  Three common elements include using points, badges, and leaderboards.  The risk of gamifying everything is that people can lose the intrinsic motivation to do the right thing - only exercising when it's fun, fees for picking up kids late from daycare become an economic decision, etc.