Application for Digital Wellbeing Dismissal
The screen time warning has been dismissed. The activity that triggered it is ongoing.
The notification appeared at 9:47pm. It said: you have used this app for two hours today. There was a button that said OK. The button was pressed. The app continued.
The notification had appeared every day that week. The button had been pressed every day that week. No review of usage habits had been conducted.
Digital wellbeing dismissal is the outcome of a design problem. The wellbeing feature was built on a model in which the person using the screen wants to use it less and needs help stopping. The dismissal habit is evidence that this model was wrong in a specific way: it assumed the person's problem was information and that knowing would produce change. In many cases the person already knew. The knowing did not change anything, and the notification created a third state between using and not using, in which the person used the app, received information about using the app, dismissed the information, and continued.
Three taps instead of two. Net effect: zero.
The broader context in early 2022 was that screen time was still high by the standards of 2018 but normalized by the standards of the past two years. The apps that had dominated lockdown had become part of the routine. The scrolling that had once been an emergency adaptation was now just how evenings worked. The wellbeing dashboard showed this clearly. It showed two hours. It showed three. It showed, on weekends, four.
The application for dismissal was filed promptly on each occasion. The applications were all approved. The approval process took approximately one second.
What the progress report finds is that the burden of correction was placed on the moment of highest engagement, which is the worst possible moment for an appeal to restraint to land. The person who is scrolling at 9:47pm is not the person who decided at 7pm that less scrolling would be good. They are a different configuration of the same person, and the notification reached the wrong one.
The dismissal stands. Progress report: filed. Status: unchanged.