Digital Superstitions: Why We Still Double Click
Most of barely realise we hang on to superstitions around the technologies we use. This has an impact.
Still hit those Ctrl+S keys when you’re madly typing away on an important document? Even when you know its auto-saving? Maybe you still double-click a link, even with a finger on a mobile device? These aren’t really habits, they’re digital superstitions that have outlived their technical necessity.
Like ancient villagers who avoid that spot on the path where lightening once struck many years past. We all carry these superstitions today in various ways. It is a human quirk, kinda funny at times. But it can also cost businesses in productivity and reveals a gap in how fast technologies can develop, yet we’re so slow.
These digital superstitions weave together a fascinating story around human psychology, cultural transmission and the unexpected emotional relationship we have with digital machines. There’s that damned lizard brain again!
Most often, these rituals are formed based on our earlier emotional experiences with a given technology. In the days of saving everything to a disc, constantly, crashes and lost work were inevitable. That was painful. This created an emotional memory one where people will still hit the save icon or Ctrl+S often without thinking about what they’re doing.
We even develop a sort of internal safety code with actions like thinking we have to safely eject a USB stick, which one used to have to do. We perform rituals with our personal devices often without thinking. These actions give us small moments of comfort, despite not being logical.
Some of these habits are handed down generationally, such as parents and teachers instructing kids and students. While we are far more comfortable with using devices today in most cultures, the cultural cues we receive from peers and elders still affect us in various ways, big and small.
Our brains too, prefer cognitive efficiency. We prefer established patterns over constant adaptations. This then plays into cultural norms and behaviours. Nor do we always use a tool for the purpose for which it was designed. Rarely are technology adoption habits linear.
We all build mental models for how we work and play, with each other and with technologies. These mental models are resilient and persistent, making it harder to adapt when technologies can leap ahead by generations. It’s part of the reason digital transformations fail in businesses. This can be termed as “structural resistance”.
Sometimes I still find myself closing down apps I’m not using on my main computer, despite the fact I don’t need to. Years ago, one had to turn their computer off at the end of the day, restarting in the morning. It was a huge annoyance going through airport security when they demanded you start your laptop. A time sink going through and then gaggles of business travellers waiting for it to finish starting just to turn it off again.
From a personal point of view, these superstitions may seem quirky and not really impactful. From a software developer and designer point of view and for larger organisations, this can be extremely frustrating and expensive.
When you add up these little superstitions, it can be much harder for new features to be adopted, which can lead to slower adoption of new tools being rolled out. Unfortunately few UX designers and developers understand this. They see the obvious benefit from a logical perspective. Humans however, aren’t always logical. Such as having these superstitions.
For marketers of technology products, they’ll expend a lot of budget and time promoting new features, yet struggle. Largely because they’ve not considered that not only do people need to learn new features and processes, they have to unlearn. Including getting over superstitions. It means having to provide emotional bridges between old and new behaviours.
The cumulative impact of all these little superstitions, at just a few extra seconds per task, can add up fairly quickly to equal significant productivity losses across an enterprise. Some people will ignore new features, or develop workarounds based on their superstitions, creating effective shadow systems.
In larger organisations, be it business or governments, one can often find “cultural islands”, such as departments and teams that have evolved their own practices and systems. They may cling to outdated workflows while others around them adopt new approaches.
One result of all this is that on the surface, management may think adoption of a new technology is going well, when in reality entrenched superstitions and practices are just working around the new technology, distorting adoption analytics.
UX designers, software developers who understand the role of superstitions and how they can impact a new products success, will find they have greater success in new feature and product roll outs. While a degree of compliance can be placed on organisations by management, this is much harder with consumer technology products.
So you might think, oh, I don’t have any of those superstitions. Some don’t. Most do. And most don’t even realise their habits and superstitions. We often act on them unconsciously. I’d wager you have some. Step back and consider, you might be a wee bit surprised yourself.