On being a Gen Z UX designer
Being GenZ and entering the field of UX design has been both a terrifying and fascinating experience.
I was born in 2001, the first iPhone was released when I was 6, in the summer before my younger brother was born. Because of this, my experience of technology is so different to people older than me, people I have worked with.
I didn’t get any social media until I was 17, 7 months before I started university, but most of my peers joined Instagram in its first boom of popularity in 2013. We were 12. This was damaging enough to my generation — I spent my teen years watching my friends obsess over likes, followers, how good they look in pictures. The techniques social media companies use are only getting more and more sophisticated. And the children are getting younger.
The difference in my experience was not to do with being older when I joined in — it was about my knowledge. I was forming my relationship with social media whilst beginning to learn about and discover the field of UX design. I knew what was happening, I knew what the mysterious ‘algorithm’ was doing, I knew the tactics being used to pull me into obsession, and encourage me to mindlessly scroll, so it did not have the same effect on me. My mobile screen time is rarely above 3 hours, I only follow people I’m friends or acquaintances with, I refuse to scroll for more than a minute at a time.
The main thing I have gathered from this experience is that teaching children at a young age about the concepts behind UX design is becoming more and more important in the digital age. Children now are more affected by the work in this industry than anyone can even measure at the current moment, even more so than I was. Children need to be given the power, through knowledge and understanding, to challenge how social media apps are changing their behaviours for the benefit of the rich guys at the top. This demystifies social media companies and allows the prevention of negative effects of social media during formative years.
It is also about respect – teenagers will not do something simply because they are told to. We were constantly told ‘spend less time on your phone’ but no one, once, explained to us why, or how. To someone who thinks they know everything (most teenagers), this is completely ineffective.
mindless/doom scrolling
We are all aware of the negative effects of ‘mindless scrolling.’ You go on social media, and before you know it, an hour has passed. This is damaging enough to ourselves, but the effect is more pronounced on children. Children have much higher screen times, of approximately 5–9 hours per day, and this compared with a developing brain is a recipe for disaster.
Social media platforms do this deliberately. They create information overload – a kind of paralysis that impacts the motivational system of the brain. Developers intentionally create features to be addictive – likes, notifications, the refresh button. They count on the children not being self-aware or knowledgeable enough to know what is happening to them, and on parents and teachers not to know enough about how the children are being entrapped.
Then, if we start to teach children exactly what information overload is, and exactly how each part of these apps are working to get them to keep scrolling, we are much better able to get them to break this habit than simply by giving them a row.
e-commerce tactics
As children grow into older teenagers, with an independent money source, they are often allowed free rein with internet shopping. Particularly for young girls, this can be harmful. Many older GenZ and millennials are all too aware of the addictive nature of online shopping and have developed an addiction to it themselves. (I am sure some older people do as well, as every time I go to my parents' house, there is a pile of parcels waiting for my mother)
But this, combined with the body image issues that are already rising in young adults, is very damaging. E-commerce companies such as ASOS use a variety of marketing and UX strategies to take advantage of this – sales, featured collections, partnering with influencers, aggressive push notifications.
This is a symptom of a wider issue with how consumption-focused our society is, but that is straying too far from the point of the article.
Someone once described to me the time we are living in as the ‘Wild West of the Internet’ — you would not send your child into that unequipped, surely. Many parents may choose to minimise these effects by banning their children from social media, and whatever other digital platforms they deem dangerous, which is a perfectly valid solution. But, as your child enters their adult years, they will encounter it regardless, so it is vital that they know what these mysterious algorithms and other dodgy tactics used by social media platforms are doing, and how they work.
This is by no means an extensive explanation of what should be done to tackle social media companies taking advantage of children, it is merely the introduction of an idea, and what I, as someone who is barely an adult, thinks would have been effective for my generation.
