Digital products and the attention crisis
A few days ago a friend shared something very ordinary with me: while waiting in line at the supermarket, he counted the times his phone tried to capture his attention. Seventeen. In less than five minutes. Every vibration, every flash of the screen, every little red dot was an auction where he was, simultaneously, the auctioneer and the good being auctioned.
This everyday experience took me back to the pages of "Information Rules" by Hal Varian and Carl Shapiro, that foundational text that taught us to think about information as a peculiar economic good. But there's something Varian didn't fully anticipate, or perhaps he did and we didn't pay enough attention: in the information economy, the truly scarce resource is not information itself, but the human capacity to process it.
What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.
— Herbert Simon, "Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World", 1971
The invisible market of microseconds
In the product management program at Instituto Tramontana, I sometimes propose a revealing exercise. I ask participants to imagine that every interaction with their product has a price. Not in euros, but in units of attention. A click costs 2 seconds. A scroll, 10 seconds. A decision about which movie to watch, 5 minutes. An online purchase, 20 minutes of browsing, comparing, and doubting.
What emerges from this exercise is a visceral understanding of what Michael Goldhaber called "the attention economy" back in 1997. But unlike the traditional economy, where money flows in one direction and goods in another, in the attention economy the flow is more tangled. When you "pay" with your attention, you don't get it back. It's gone. And unlike money, you can't save attention to spend tomorrow.
The paradox of free
Varian taught us that information has marginal costs close to zero. Replicating a bit is practically free. This fundamental economic reality shaped the entire internet we know: from free software to freemium models, from Wikipedia to YouTube. But there was a hidden variable in the equation.
What economists call "complementary goods" turns out to be, in the case of digital products, our own cognitive capacity. And this complementary good is not just scarce; it's absolutely scarce. There's no way to produce more hours in the day, no way to significantly expand our capacity for sustained attention.
Among digital product professionals, it's common to share a concern about what are called "cannibal products": products that feed on other products, not in terms of data or functionality, but in terms of the attention they consume. Every new productivity app that promises to "save you time" first needs you to invest time in learning to use it, configuring it, integrating it into your workflow.
The real switching costs
Information economics helped us think about switching costs, those costs of changing from one product to another. We thought mainly in terms of data, learning, configuration investment. But there's a more subtle and perverse switching cost: the accumulated attentional cost.
Every digital product we use regularly has colonized a portion of our cognitive architecture. We know where every button is, we've internalized every flow, we've developed automatisms. As an applicant for the next edition of the program recently told me: "It's not that I don't want to change email tools. It's that I don't have the mental bandwidth to do it."
The tragedy of the digital commons
Garrett Hardin told us about the tragedy of the commons: how shared resources tend to be overexploited because each individual actor has incentives to maximize their use. Human attention has become the new common, and we're witnessing its systematic overexploitation.
Every product wants to be your "platform," your "hub," your "command center." Each one claims to be the place where you should spend more time. Dark patterns, which were once shameful exceptions, end up becoming with certain ease "best practices for engagement."
The goal is no longer to be the application that users need. The goal is to be the application that users can't stop using.
— Nir Eyal, "Hooked"
Don't turn your back on this reality
In my classes, when we reach this point, an uncomfortable silence usually occurs. There are many more moments like this throughout the program. ;)
It's the moment when all of us who have responsibility for different digital products internalize that part of our job is, inevitably, participating in this extractive economy of attention. But it's also the most fertile moment to imagine alternatives.
What would digital products be like if we designed them optimizing for the minimum necessary usage time? If our success metrics included "time saved" instead of "time on platform"?
The value of boring
Among those alternatives, there are always people who make the following confession: their favorite digital products are boring. Sublimely boring. They're tools that do exactly what they promise, no more, no less. They don't have extra features grafted on. They don't tire you with notifications "to keep you informed."
They're products that understand something fundamental: the best compliment a user can give a tool is to forget it exists while using it. In Varian's terms, these products have found a different way to capture value. They don't monetize attention; they monetize the liberation of attention. Which is also a way of saying they make it productive.
Metrics for a not-always-hooked world
If we accept that engagement as we've understood it can become a toxic metric, what metrics should we use? In the program, we explore some alternatives:
- Time to Value: How long does it take a user to get what they came for?
- Successful completion rate: How many users complete their task and leave satisfied?
- Interval between necessary uses: Do you use the product when you need it or because it reminds you?
- Cognitive load per session: How many unnecessary decisions do you ask the user to make?
These are metrics that require a change in how we understand success. It's no longer about maximizing the area under the attention curve, but minimizing it while maximizing the value delivered.
A new responsibility
If software is eating the world, as Marc Andreessen said, then those of us who make software-based products have a proportionally large responsibility. Every decision is potentially a decision about how numerous people will direct their attention.
Information economics gave us the tools to understand how information flows and is valued. Now we need an attention economy that helps us understand, and perhaps regulate, how human attention flows and is valued.
If digital products are, as I mentioned in this other article, a kind of movie, then perhaps it's time to not think exclusively about blockbusters that require all your attention all the time, and more about visual haikus: brief, precise, that leave you space to breathe and think.
We can balance the focus a bit so it's not always about how much attention your product can capture. But also how much attention it deserves.
This article is part of a series on the nature of digital products that I develop in the product management program at Instituto Tramontana. If these topics interest you, perhaps it's time to take the leap.