Overview
Cognition is a very-practical™ tool for creating "exit points" in software applications for the purposes of reducing user burnout, tech addiction, harassment and more.
Most companies don't actually benefit from addictive products; it causes negative associations with the product, bad press, and unhappy employees. But they do benefit from them more than not having any customers.
It's a lot easier to create an addictive product than to create one that's meant to be used in a healthy manner.
Cognition
Cognition is an HTTP API that you send your customer usage logs to. It's got a web frontend that lets you set usage budgets, and then your product can query Cognition to see if an individual user is over their usage budget.
That lets an app adapt in the case that the user is over budget by:
- Turning off addictive features like notifications or feeds
- Sending a note to the user that they're using things a little too much
- Batching information or slowing it down so it's not such a skinner box
Case Study: Google Analytics
Anyone who's ever launched something with GA has felt the "overchecking" of analytics tools. It's really cool to see people use your product live. But GA wasn't designed to try and addict you, they just want to give you cool data.
So what could GA do?
They could throw their user data into Cognition and set a global usage budget for about 30 minutes. If a user is constantly rechecking GA, they're not actually getting any value out of the tool, so after about 30 minutes of use in a day, we could turn off the live analytics and just show yesterdays count.
Or we could just take it off the front page. Or we could log the user out so they're forced to put a little extra work.
Viability
You may think "companies would never do this." And you'd be wrong.
The game industry has been doing this for years. Nearly every game you've played in the last 10 years was designed with specific "exit points" in mind. Every quest had a time limit, you just didn't realize it. After that time limit, the games mechanics would suggest you put the game down for awhile. This is often done so subtly you didn't realize it.
You may think "the tech industry is just financially incentivized to addict users." And you'd be wrong again.
Addictive products aren't necessarily better than just "good" products. People quit addictive products. The press gets mad about addictive products. Employees don't want to build addictive products. Customers see your company in a negative light.
But addictive products are much easier to build than just "good products." Cognition's purpose is to bring that easiness to making healthy products; you can still make something engaging, but setting limits let users enjoy things in moderation.
Other Uses
Cognition could also be used to:
- Automatically suspend accounts that are harassing people
- Alert parents or psychiatrists of product over use
- Allow users to set their own usage limits or to turn off features entirely
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.