đź’¬ I feel i have made a terrible mistake
For those of you who don’t know, I’m a digital product designer by trade. My bread and butter is designing mobile apps, optimizing for usability, and thinking about how to make things easier and clearer. I’ve noticed that designers, myself included, particularly struggle when trying to parse unintuitive interfaces. The typical user often blames themselves when struggling to understand an interface; we designers, however, are so aware of what is “standard” or “best practice,” that we know to blame the software when something doesn’t make sense. It can even make us angry and offended, like it's an affront to our values.
Anyway, setting up my new phone was a trip.
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I started using my new dumbphone on Friday evening.
First order of business: adding contacts and texting my friends that I’ve finally taken the plunge.
[To Friend 1]
7:26pm: Woo flip phone
[To Friend 2]
7:34pm: Lol this is my flip phone
[To Friend 3]
7:53pm: Hi
7:54pm: Im on this annoying dumbphone
8:03pm: I feel i have made a terrible mistake
My silly little dumbphone has all sorts of strange quirks that don’t exist in the modern conventions of smartphone interface design. Of course, there’s the numeric keypad I have to use for text entry, on which typing every letter requires me to look at all nine keys to find the digit that maps to the letter I want, then calculating how many times to clickclickclick — crap, wrong letter, where’s the back button? — clickclick pause, clickclickclick. Typing any text message takes what feels like a minute, during which friends can answer questions they’ve asked me by googling it instead, or send me a mini-essay of messages with five different points I want to respond to but can’t keep up. As the recipient, my primitive device renders their emoji as undecipherable boxes; as the sender, I can only type out old-school ASCII emoticons by navigating 15 keystrokes through an overflow menu with a grid of random punctuation organized in no particular order. Constrained by time, limited patience, and the physical difficulty of typing, my texts stay minimalist, functional, brusque. Out of context, the asymmetry in our communication makes me seem like quite the inconsiderate friend.
But at least I sort of knew what I would be getting into with the keypad. The real surprises lie in the details, where conventions I wouldn’t think twice about are upended in this Nokia’s twisted alternate universe. For example, all dates are formatted as DD/MM/YYYY, with no option to change — though to be fair, the American format of MM/DD/YYYY never made any sense in the first place. In Messages, the texts I send show up on the left side of the conversation, instead of on the right like every other messaging app in a left-to-right language — every time I read a text, I have to spin some gears in my head to check if I had sent it or received it. In Contacts, people are displayed with their last names first — for this, Nokia has generously offered the illusion of control with a “Sort by First Name” setting, which seems to change absolutely nothing at all.
Have you ever been gaslit by software? Unfortunately, now I have.
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It took me an hour and a half to add 30 contacts to my address book.
The conscious effort of adding people one-by-one on this limited interface, as opposed to the ease of importing a decade’s worth of accumulated phone numbers on my iPhone, is so frustrating that I try to cut as many corners as possible. Last names? Nope. Randos I haven’t talked to in a year? No chance. Friends I usually talk to on Messenger or Twitter DMs? Unnecessary. Each number I add, each key I press, needs to be worth the pain. (Literally — my right thumb, which already hurts from too much scrolling, shouldn’t take on much more repetitive strain.)
The resulting rolodex is an intimate, carefully-curated collection of unique first names. First to be saved were the people who I text every day — my mom, my ride-or-dies, friendships over a decade old. Then, from my recent iMessage conversations, came my coworkers, local weekend friends, therapist — people to whom I don’t want to rudely ask New phone who dis? And finally, the aspirational contacts — the friend-crushes and the crush-crushes, people I rarely talk to but want to have their number saved just in case they text. (Or even just to gaze upon their address book entries as trophies in a display case, my connection to them a privately-prized possession.)
Of these 30 people on my new phone, I only texted five on the first day. I simply had no desire or need to reach out to the others. I have no irl meetups to plan, since I’m home for the holidays. What is there to even share now that I’m not browsing Tiktok or Youtube or Twitter? What actual conversations can I even have now that texting feels like fighting a hydra in slow motion — painstakingly reply to one message, only to have two new ones appear?
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But all this frustrating friction, I have to remind myself, is kind of the point.
I’m not a luddite, since I still have my laptop for all my internetting needs. I’m not a hermit, since I can still maintain my social relationships (including the 30 people in my contacts) by messaging them on the computer. Now though, walking ten steps to fire up my laptop at the slightest hint of boredom just feels like more work than it’s worth. New paths of least resistance to pleasure are taking shape: journaling, or cleaning, or playing with the cat.
The first night I set up my new phone, in the face of this speedbump to digitally-dispensed dopamine, I turned to writing out my frustrations, the very ones you’re reading here. My mind went to all sorts of places, like finding cute phone charms and accessories, and grand ideas for writing projects, and new feature ideas related to my product design job even though I had just started my holiday. I got so excited I couldn’t fall asleep in bed for two hours, my brain just buzzing away in the dark. In a complete 180 from my despondent declaration that "I feel i have made a terrible mistake," I was now convinced that getting a dumbphone is the smartest decision I’ve ever made. Perhaps it was just the fresh fizz of novelty, but what could weeks, months, years of this energy add up to?
Defaults are powerful, as I say all the time in design meetings at work. I wonder what we’ve lost by making cheap thrills so easy.
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