Day 138: The Novelty Effect

product

There’s a class of feature requests that I get pretty frequently for Intention, and they’re things like the following:

  • Require solving a math problem to unlock a site
  • Require solving a CAPTCHA to unlock a site
  • Require waiting for X seconds to unlock a site
  • Randomize the unlock buttons
  • Requiring typing in the number of minutes every time

Basically, adding more friction to unlocking a distracting site.

I understand why people want this. The logic is that the harder it is to unlock a site, they’ll be less likely to do so.

Features like the ones above would certainly work… but only for a while. This is due to the novelty effect, where performance improves when new technology is introduced simply because it’s new.

But once the features lose their novelty and users become accustomed to them, those barriers would become just another part of the unlocking ritual. Click, click, click. No reflection involved.

In fact, the reason why people ask for these additional measures is because Intention’s core mechanism of pausing the browsing session is also subject to the novelty effect. Many people find the lock quite effective at first, but after a while, they fall into the pattern of mindlessly clicking unlock again and again when their time is up.

More friction isn’t the solution; it’s to restrict access entirely.

The challenge is that restricting access can feel really annoying. It’s why blocking sites outright doesn’t work for a lot of people: All it takes is one time when you don’t want that limitation, and the blocking software gets removed for good.

The solution I’ve come up with is to introduce 5-minute cooldowns. When unlocking a site, people can choose to activate a cooldown when their time is up and have all distracting sites blocked for 5 minutes.

Here are the reasons why I designed it the way I did:

  • Making the user choose to use the cooldown in the moment rather than as a pre-configured setting

    • It’s much easier to listen to yourself from a few minutes ago than yourself from weeks or months ago when you configured the app

  • Starting the cooldown after time is up as opposed to right now

    • “I’ll stop after one more minute” is much easier than “I’ll stop now”

  • Cooldowns last 5 minutes

    • Designed to be long enough to help someone break out of a binging mindset, but not so long that someone will try to uninstall the extension if they change their mind

In short, I won’t implement features that makes it harder to unlock a site because I don’t believe they’ll lead to long-term behavior change. And ultimately, Intention’s goal isn’t to discourage any and all use of distracting sites; it’s to help you use them in a way that’s aligned with — wait for it — your intention.