The joke

What happens when there's no motivation to complete a task, but the product implies progress? Rarely do I wake up and decide to tackle my banking app's transaction history. There's an underlying assumptions that users want to use digital products, but in the user's mind, they use the product because it's the most convenient method of getting a chore out of the way.

Yahoo Mail

Reading emails is on everyone's radar in this discussion. People might feel a sense of obligation to look at their emails, might need to do it for their jobs, but nobody is excited about a sales letter sent by a product they haven't used in six months.

Yahoo Mail gamifies the task of reading the AI summaries of the most recent 25 unread emails. The product sneaks the occasional ad in, and keeps a counter of how many email summaries are left in the batch, how fast the user presses a button (Keep or Delete), and goes as far as patting them on the shoulder for a job well done.

This is strange, to say the least. A large part of the problem is Yahoo not understanding the percentage of desirable emails in a user's inbox. Ultimately, deleting the incessant sales email or Substack notification doesn't keep the inbox clean: emails will keep coming. If Yahoo wanted to gamify something more meaningful, they had the option to encourage users to unsubscribe to pesky promos.

Kwit

Sometimes, the finish line is in sight. If you want to quit smoking and have a few moments to shoot me an email, I can help you with how I managed it, but be aware I didn't do it using a digital product.

Initially, I liked Kwit, until I started having the usual cravings. The problem with Kwit is that, unless you enable annoying push notifications that flood your home screen with reminders, you don't have to do anything. The app will go on, keeping tally of the days you haven't smoked in, making wild calculations based on arbitrary numbers you added during onboarding, functioning as a self-contained system, input not required.

Then, the app starts with the assumption that users want (or can) quit smoking indefinitely. You have the option to log a "relapse", but that requires input. The entire ecosystem works on auto pilot, but only in the context of perpetual progress towards smoking no cigarettes... ever.

You can forget about your cravings (which is how you should go about quitting smoking), then, be reminded, like in a sitcom, that you have to let Kwit know you haven't smoked.