Freedom is a network-blocking application for Mac and Windows. The application is surprisingly simple: You start it up, and it asks you how long you would like to block your network access. It also lets you specify if you need local network access, so that you could still get to websites on your internal network, for instance.

And then that’s about it. It blocks your network for the specified period of time. It does nothing else in the meantime, without providing so much as a countdown timer to let you know how long you’ve got left. To get your network access back, you need to wait it out or restart your computer.

I could see how in some cases, Freedom could be very effective, particularly if the work you do can be completed offline. But I think that’s increasingly rare, especially in office work environments. However, the website does have an interesting list of testimonials from users who swear by it.

Freedom costs $10 for the full version, but there’s also a free trial which you can use up to five times.

WriteRoom is a full-screen writing application designed to reduce distraction. Much like the previously-posted OmmWriter Dāna, WriteRoom takes over your entire screen and leaves you with the text editor. WriteRoom doesn’t have any of the backgrounds and sound effects that OmmWriter does, though.

One of major differences between the two is that, on the surface, OmmWriter is more obviously configurable. It lets you customize the text options as you’re typing, and you can change the background and sound effects. OmmWriter hides these options once you start typing. WriteRoom also lets you configure the typeface and color (but not background image), but you have to go into preferences to do it, so it’s just a tiny bit more difficult. (I would also argue that WriteRoom’s preferences are a bit too complex and provide too much choice, but the defaults are pretty good.)

Of the two, I would say that WriteRoom is a more effective distraction-free environment. OmmWriter certainly seems more pleasant with its colors and music and keyclicks, but the simple configurability of it also increases its distraction level. I wonder how many users of OmmWriter distract themselves by reconfiguring their typeface and flipping between the backgrounds. WriteRoom hides its complexity behind a minimal to the point of being ascetic front end UI.

So for me, I would use WriteRoom. But, if OmmWriter works for you, that’s great too!

I have three updates this week. First, I have an update to the models that I’ve been working on. Second, I have three concept proposals for what the final form of my thesis will take. And third, I have some notes from the concept presentation I gave on Tuesday.

Five Forces of Distraction

I’ve been referencing five forces of distraction over the past few weeks, but I don’t think I’ve given a good explanation of what those mean. So, here goes.

Based on research and prototyping, I’ve identified five specific forces that influence decisions to concentrate on a goal or switch to a distraction. Ordered by decreasing rationality, those forces are:

• Priority. How important is it that I accomplish this goal? For example, deadlines, social pressures, and threats of punishment are good ways to increase a goal’s priority
• Ability. Do I know how to accomplish this goal? Training and better interaction design are ways to increase the ability to accomplish a goal.
• Interest. Am I interested in accomplishing this goal? Improved visual design might be one way to increase interest in a goal.
• Excitement. Does this goal excite me, or is it prompted by something that excites me? Does this goal give me an adrenaline response? A telephone ring or a new IM window popping up would be exciting.
• Pleasure. Will I experience pleasure by working on this goal? Does it give me a dopamine response? Rewards would be a good way to increase pleasure.

Models

I made just a few more refinements to my model this week, which I think establishes a simple framework for determining the impact that an anti-distraction (or pro-concentration) tool can make, based on the five forces above. It looks like this:

To use this framework, you need start with a specific goal (on the left) and a specific distraction (on the right.) Then you could go through the chart and determine if the force is stronger for the goal, for the distraction, or if it’s not stronger for either. For instance, if you were asked to write a report that you don’t know or care about, you might be distracted by checking out Facebook.

In this case, your report might have more priority, but Facebook wins on all other counts.

But say your boss came in and told you that you would be fired if you didn’t finish the report by the end of the day. The boss would have significantly increased the goal’s priority, and you would probably not check Facebook. On the diagram, the green arrow indicates that the force has been increased.

Alternatively, you could install a network blocking application such as Freedom. Since you wouldn’t be able to visit Facebook, your ability would have been decreased, as indicated by the red arrow, and you would work on the report instead. Your interest, however, would probably still lie with Facebook.

One other alternative would be to write the report in an application like OmmWriter. Since OmmWriter is full screen, it reduces the excitement of other distractions, since you can’t see them. It also increases the interest in writing the report, because the screen environment looks nicer. It would also increase pleasure because it surprises you with fun sounds as you work.

Having the framework in place allows you to do a few things. First it allows you to compare different goals versus different distractions. Second, it allows you to show the impact of tools on that comparison. Third, it helps to identify the forces that you can design for to improve concentration or reduce distraction.

It might be helpful to take this one step further to show that, in certain cases, different forces might override each other. Priority, for instance, is often a very important force in reducing distraction. However, people still procrastinate when they have deadlines, which has the effect of actually increasing the priority as time moves forward. Ability is also an important force, but it does not override the others; if it did, no one would ever learn anything, because users start with zero ability.

Concepts

Using some of the forces above, I proposed three concepts for my thesis project.

Concept 1: Intervention

This concept is based on the observation that one of the most significant factors in reducing distraction seems to be the presence of other people. This concept is basically a small social network for work, or for your workgroup. It would allow everyone in the workgroup to see what everyone else is doing, so that when someone is feeling distracted, a coworker could step in to help. This would be a system to encourage collaboration, which should in turn make work more attractive and distraction less attractive. It would also formalize breaks, so that a user could have dedicated private time to distract themselves with whatever they would like.

In terms of the five forces, this concept increases ability, because it encourages coworkers to help you. It reduces interest, because no one likes having someone “catch” them doing something distracting at work. Finally, it increases pleasure by giving users a formal break to look forward to.

Concept 2: Speedometer

This concept would be a speedometer to keep track of how you are doing throughout the course of the day by using a speed metaphor to measure your distraction. As you distract yourself, you would speed up, and as you do work, your speed would slow down. (Though the opposite metaphor might make more sense.) It would also hook into some of the common distractions, so that it would tell you how much your speed would slow down before you checked Facebook.

This concept would increase interest in accomplishing the goal, because like to see data visualizations. It would also increase excitement, because it would give users a goal to work towards. It would also increase the pleasure of the goal and decrease the pleasure of the distraction, because it would give positive and negative responses, respectively.

Concept 3: Reinterruption

This concept is more of a feature than a particular service, but it’s based on the observation that one of the most distracting things at work is interruptions. This concept would flip the idea of distractions as interruptions by turning your work into an interruption when you ignore it. It would be come increasingly irritating the more you ignore until you finally return to work.

Analyzing this concept in terms of the five forces, it would increase excitement of the goal, because it would turn it into an interruption to get a user’s attention. It would also decrease the pleasure of distraction, because it would trigger a negative response every time it’s acted on.

Presentation

I presented my framework and concepts to the class yesterday and got some interesting feedback.

• Multitasking is one of the most significant causes of distraction. These concepts could more carefully look at ways to reduce that cause.
• Russ suggested that, for the second concept, the metaphor might work better if working increase speed and distraction reduced speed.
• Thesis panel member (and advisor) Paul Pangaro pointed out that, for the first concept, social pressure is one the most successful ways of triggering behavior change.
• Paul also suggested that a way to iterate through the five forces to more carefully analyze and think about ways to manipulate those five forces could be helpful. (A way of quantifiable comparison might also be helpful.)
• Visiting critic Sylvia Harris liked the third concept best because it seemed the lowest tech way of reducing distraction. She encouraged me to look at simpler ways of reducing distraction, rather than building more complex systems that might actually increase distraction overall.

The full presentation can be downloaded here.

Next Steps

Within the next few weeks, I need to arrive on a single concept for my presentation and to pursue next semester. I think my concept will include pieces of some of the concepts above. Here is my analysis of each concept’s strengths and weaknesses.

• Concept 1: Intervention
  Strengths: Encourages social engagement; ties small workgroups more closely together; formalizes breaks
  Weaknesses: Panopticon-esque; could be maliciously used; could become a distraction
• Concept 2: Speedometer
  Strengths: Good metaphor for distraction; prevents distraction from happening
  Weaknesses: Metaphor is kind of opaque; hard to determine good work from distraction
• Concept 3: Reinterruption
  Strengths: Novel
  Weaknesses: Could get irritating

Ultimately, I think the strongest ideas are the social component of the first concept and the speed metaphor and pre-emptive components of the second concept. I’d be happy if I could find a way to integrate both of those into the final concept.

OmmWriter Dāna is the newest of OmmWriter, a Mac OS X application that creates a “distraction free writing environment.” It was created by the interactive design agency Herraiz Soto & Co. in Barcelona, Spain.

As you might expect from the description, the core functionality is a basic text editor. It doesn’t include any of the fancy formatting or technical tools that you might find in some of the more advanced text editors and word processors. Instead, it is designed to emphasize what you’re writing. It takes over your full screen and replaces it with a meditative background. It also plays soothing music in the background and makes some fun sounding key clicks when you type.

The app does provide a few customization options. You can pick out of a short list of typefaces, backgrounds, and sound options. You can also resize the text area and move it around the screen.

Overall, the experience is quite nice. I’m not sure that I would agree this is a “distraction free writing environment,” though. The app is built to distract you in a more carefully considered way compared to the things that are more distracting, such as your email, IM, and Safari. I think this is a fairly clever approach and it does seem to have gained a bit of traction with users.

OmmWriter Dāna I is free for download and includes a few basic backgrounds and sound sets. OmmWriter Dāna II includes additional backgrounds and sound sets and is offered at a recommended starting price of $4.11.

StayFocusd is an extension for Google Chrome that limits the amount of time you spend on specific sites.

It also has some fancy advanced options so that you can customize its behaviors. For instance, you could turn it off on weekends or add a whitelist for specific sites.

Overall, I think it’s a pretty neat extension. I don’t know if time spent over the course of the day is the best measure of visits, but it’s worth checking out if you use Chrome and trying to restrict distractions.

In addition to some of the prototyping I did this week, I worked on the models and started thinking about concepts.

Models, Round 3

I went through three pretty major revisions of the models this week, but I think I’m just about there.

Single Orbit

Based on my idea last week of an “orbital” model of distraction, I started making some sketches that would demonstrate it. I took the five primary emotions from my last model: excitement (previously boredom), interest, pleasure, priority, and ability, and showed them as forces influencing your concentration. The idea is that they were pulling or pushing you into concentration.

You could also “invert” the diagram so that those same emotions are pushing/pulling you away from concentration into distraction.

But you also invert it a bit more (if that even makes sense) so that rather than pushed away from concentration, you’re being pulled toward a distraction.

The idea with this would be that you could adjust the arrows as necessary to show what the active influences are. For instance, if you had a training program or a wizard to guide you through a process, it would increase your ability but would not affect the other aspects.

This wasn’t a bad start, but it’s a bit too one sided. For this project, distraction only exists relative to a goal, and this model didn’t do a good job of showing those other influences.

Double Orbits

For the next model, I tried displaying both the goal and distraction in the model. Otherwise, it displays the same forces as in the single orbit model.

This model was an improvement, but I still didn’t think it accurately represents the concept. I like how it represents that both a goal and a distraction have factors of those five forces, but it doesn’t clearly show that those forces are always in opposition. So I made one more model to show that.

Simplified Model

The last model I worked on this week shows both of those forces as they influence both the goal and the distraction. Here’s how you would show the state of Flow, for instance, where all of the arrows are pulling towards the goal:

And here’s another showing compulsion, where the distraction is much more pleasurable than the goal:

Or boredom, where the distraction is much more exciting than what you are doing:

You could also show how different kinds of interventions affect the model. For instance, deadlines remove social pressure:

Network blockers remove the ability to use a distraction:

And screen blockers remove both the ability and the excitement by hiding the interruptions:

So this seems much better. There’s still a bit more work to do. Based on Paul’s advice, I want to order the forces by rationality (so that priority would probably be on top and pleasure on the bottom). I also want to show magnitude, since a force is probably never in a single direction; both the goal and the distraction are pulling. I also want to adjust the colors a bit.

Concepts

Next Monday, we’ll be presenting 2 – 3 concepts to the class. I’ve been doing some sketching around these areas:

• Concepts that involve some sense of authority to get people to stay on track. For instance, an app that shows what your coworkers are doing so you can all keep track on each other.
• An app that uses your “browsing speed” to keep you on/at a certain target.
• Using to interruption to interrupt you back to work.

I’ll be doing more sketching and ideation over the holiday break. Happy Thanksgiving!

Based on some of my protoyping ideas in my last weekly post, I tried one out on one of my classmates. A special thanks to Colleen Miller for allowing me to subject her to this.

The concept for this prototype was simple. While Colleen was working, I would sit next to her and watch over her. Whenever she got distracted, I would tap on her shoulder to try and get her back on track. For this prototype, I defined “distracted” as looking at a web site that was not related to her goal of writing a blog entry. I watched over her should for about a half hour, which was the entire duration of the task.

The results were mixed. Here are some of the highlights:

• I think that being in the situation (watching over her shoulder) had a significant affect on her work concentration. I sort of suspected this would happen, since in my interviews I had a few people mention that being in a position where your screen is visible makes you less likely to spend time surfing the web in case someone is watching you. This is a good note for the next prototype: I should do something more covert.
• Colleen was working under a self-imposed deadline for the writing, so it’s possible that she was very focused by her own volition.
• She went back and forth between a few apps during the writing. All of those switches (except for the Mail check, below) were in support of the writing goal.
• The first time Colleen was distracted, she went to check her email. It was only a brief interruption, but I tapped her on the shoulder. She said, “What am I supposed to do when I get distracted? You can’t ignore the red dot [on the Mail icon].” This is a surprisingly obvious question for which I do not yet have an answer.
• The second time Colleen was distracted, she had finished writing the blog entry except for the conclusion. She said that she was going to check recent updates on Twitter before she wrote the conclusion, since that was the hardest part of writing and she wanted to make sure she was refreshed. This behavior supports my interview findings that people generally only act on a distraction when they reach a milestone. Interestingly, this pre-empted my shoulder tapping, since she knew she would get a shoulder tap by checking Twitter.

So, where do I go from here?

• Next time, perform a more covert prototype.
• Or, consider a design direction that imposes a sense of “watchedness” on users, since they behave differently when someone is looking over their shoulder.
• Consider what happens when users know they’re distracted.
• Give users an alternative to getting distracted.

This past week was a bit abbreviated because I was out in LA over the weekend for a wedding. Here’s my slightly abbreviated progress report.

Concepts

Last week in class we started to discuss concepts of what our projects could be. Here was the output for my project from working with Kristin, Beatriz, Clint, and Manuel.

The most interesting aspect of this for me was the social one, which I had not previously considered in too much depth. Maybe an office-wide distraction-free hour could be a helpful concept?

Prototypes

I haven’t had the time to test yet, but here a few ideas I could quickly prototype based on the concepts I wrote about earlier:

1. Give someone a bell to ring whenever they feel distracted.
2. Observe someone working and give them a report card at the end of how they’re working.
3. Observe someone working and tell them when to take a break.
4. Observe someone working and interrupt them when they get too distracted.
5. Observe someone working, and stop them and make a note when they try to engage with a distraction. Then when they take a break, remind them of their attempted distraction so they can resume it.
6. Organize a communal work session so that everyone is on the same distraction schedule.
7. Install Freedom or SelfControl on a participant’s computer and see if it reduces their distraction.
8. Slow down someone’s internet connection as they get more distracted.
9. Place a participant in a quiet room and observe how they work.
10. Screen share (VNC, for instance) with someone as they’re working to keep an eye on it.
11. Observe someone and ask them to justify every app switch or new website that they visit.

Models

I did another few rounds of iteration on my models this week. Based on my thinking last week, I added the concepts of “consciousness” as a higher level in my concept map, and here was the result:

This one had gotten to be a bit of a mess, so I decided to step back a bit and simplify. First, I looked at the original diagram from a few weeks ago based on Posner’s model of attention.

Then I started to break out some of the pieces of my larger concept map so that the map wasn’t quite so daunting. For instance, I broke the lower part out into its own diagram so that it would more clearly show what kinds of things people like to do when they get distracted or take a break.

Next, I broke out the piece of the diagram that shows what I have identified as the root feelings of distraction.

I also broke out the diagram for interruption. In the process of documenting it, I’ve determined that interruption does not fall under the area that I’m interested in exploring for the thesis. (Although I will say that interruptions are one form of distraction that is highly preventable. Rather than building notification systems to deal with the increased quantity of interruptions, designers should more carefully consider whether their notification is worthy of a user interruption. It probably is not, but I digress.)

Another core piece of the concept map that I was working with was the idea of a work loop, where people work on one thing until distraction pulls them away or they reach a context switch, where the easiest option is to choose a distraction. Here’s the simplest form of it.

I also started playing around with the idea of thresholds of different emotions. In the emotion diagram above, for instance, I use boredom, difficulty, pleasure, urgency (priority), and ability as the key emotions having to do with distraction and flow. This model puts those emotions in a matrix where different outcomes can be plotted using the different words.

For instance, you could express flow this way:

Or addiction this way:

Or frustration this way:

It’s a bit half baked, but it was a good exercise to see how the different emotions relate.

After all that, I went back and redid my concept map as a flow chart that ties these emotions more closely together with the work loop and the levels of consciousness that I identified above:

I worked with Paul to review this last model and a few of the earlier ones, and he suggested that it’s still a bit unclear as to what exactly it is: concept map, flow chart, or what. The box in the lower right of the model, labeled “Distractability,” is neither a step in a flow chart or an emotion in a concept map. So this still wasn’t quite right.

Paul suggested that I take the core concept of this chart — emotions pulling you towards or pushing you away from work — and distill that out. He helped me work out a sketch for that distilled model:

In this one, the emotions are quite literally orbiting around the goal engagement, and distraction are the things that pull you out of orbit. I’m not sure if that’s quite the right expression, but I think it’s a great start. For next week, I hope to work on this diagram some more.

Readings

I had a lot of travel time this weekend, so I used the extra time to catch up on some reading, including these books:

• Switch by Chip and Dan Heath. Based on the recommendation from Stephanie Aaron. I thought this book provided some helpful examples on how to motivate people. I suspect I will reference this one more later when I need to think more closely about motivation.
• On Second Thought by Wray Herbert. This book discusses heuristics that your brain uses to simplify decisions. It does not seem as closely related to my thesis as I thought it was, but interesting nonetheless. It references quite a few pscyhology papers, which will be helpful for more in-depth research.
• Design as Art by Bruno Munari. An interesting collection of thoughts and essays about design. Whimsical and occasionally inspiring, but not particularly helpful per se. My favorite was the story about going to the gift shop to design an object that doesn’t look like all of the other gift items. And the pictures of faces and chairs are pretty great.

I’ve continued to make progress over the past week, though maybe not quite as much as last week. There are three specific areas of progress to talk about: business models, the Plot Thesis workshop, attention models, and Fidget, which is the web tracking browser extension I’m working on.

Business Models

Last week in class we had the pleasure of a visit from Manuel Toscano of The Helsinki Group. Manuel walked us through the Business Model Canvas as it applied to the class’s theses. While it’s still a bit too early to settle on a single solution or business model, it was interesting to consider the different solutions and how it would impact the business model.

I worked out a few different business model canvases after class. I’m basing these on the mission statement: To reduce web-based distraction in the workplace so that knowledge workers can more easily focus on their higher level goals.

Model 1: Browser Add On and Outside App

This model was based on the idea of an add-on solution that knowledge workers would directly use to reduce distraction while they are working. The value proposition is still a little tenous (in my opinion) but the basic idea is that it would provide a valuable service for organization in return for possible reducing or slowing down compulsive/addictive behaviors.

Model 2: Employer Mandated

This business would be positioned more as an employer-mandated tracking/blocking service so that bosses can make sure that employees are staying productive at work. This would a more difficult product to sell to individuals, so the business model would probably need to be targeted more toward enterprise businesses.

Model 3: Therapeutic Software

This model would represent a bit of a shift in that it would position the product as a “cure” for distraction and compulsive behavior. It could run as a subscription service, but it would have to come to an end once the patient/user would be cured. I think it would tougher to get users to buy into this solution, since as they say, the hardest part is admitting that you have a problem.

Model 4: Distraction Free Browser

This business model is a lot like the first one, but it’s an “all-in” solution. The user would just use the browser and it would take care of everything else for the user to try and reduce distraction. I think this is a tougher position to take, because the existing ecosystems of browsers might make it difficult for a new one to make traction.

The Plot Thesis Workshop

Last Friday, Gill Wildman and Nick Durrant came to the department to present a workshop where we discussed possible futures and where our projects fit into them. I’ve been suffering from a bit of workshop-itis recently, but I was pleasantly surprised by this one. It was helpful to think the arc of our lives, where I wanted to be an architect and/or a dentist when I was a kid, to the thesis project, and how the thesis project helps us to build the future where we see our projects fitting into it or helping to achieve it.

We gave brief presentations at the end where we described that process. In mine, I talked about how I see this thesis project fitting into a larger goal of reducing the “distraction ecosystem” that surrounds us, which includes all of the things that beep, blink, and vibrate to try to communicate with us. This thesis project might make a very tiny dent in that ecosystem, but I hope that in the process of working on this project I can start to think about a set of distraction-free design principles that could be applied to that larger ecosystem.

I also got some help from Nick Durrant in writing up my mission statement:

After the workshop, I joined Liz Danzico, Paul Pangaro, Rachel Abrams, Nick Durrant, Gill Wildman, and Clint Beharry for drinks and snacks at a nearby restaurant, which was kind of amazing on its own.

Attention Models

I’ve also progressed on my attention model. Here’s the newest draft:

This one is a bit more refined than the last one. I’ve added some groups to show related concepts and to reduce the extra line noise. I’ve also added some more of the anti-distraction apps that I’ve seen. But, there’s still more to do. I’m still going to add the higher level “consciousness” to it to represent the goals that the worker may have, and to account for outside anxiety and influence that doesn’t currently fit into this model.

Paul also suggested I look into Petri Diagrams as a way to model the thresholds I think exist in distraction. For instance, my current line of thinking is that when someone is too frustrated or bored, they’ll get distracted with something else, unless there is some other higher motivator — pleasure or urgency, for instance — that prevents that person from switching tasks.

Fidget

Development on Fidget is also going well. I would say at this point it’s about halfway done, though most of the hard work is now complete. Here are a few screen shots from the live app.

This one shows the number of times you’ve visited the current site today and over the past week.

This one is a bit more fun. It shows your web page views over every 5 minute segment over the day. So, for instance, if you visited Google 2 times and Yahoo! 3 times between 9:00 AM and 9:05 AM, the chart would show a peak of 5. So it’s kind of a histogram of usage over the day and the past week.

I hope to have this project finished up relatively soon as a means to collect data.

That’s about it for this week. Next weekend, I’m going to Burbank, CA for a wedding so I might be a bit late or slow getting progress for the rest of this week.