Designing time: How digital products shape the way we live it

A reflection on how digital architecture shapes attention, perception of time, and the stories we carry from our lives.

I recently came across Gurwinder’s How Social Media Shortens Your Life, which makes a compelling case that technology isn’t just stealing our minutes, it’s reshaping our perception of time itself. It was a reminder of something I’ve been thinking about for years: in the digital age, products are no longer just tools we use — they are environments we live in. And the architecture of those environments doesn’t just influence what we do, it changes how we experience the passing of our lives.

Part 1: Why time design matters

Explores how digital products subtly shape our perception of time, attention, and memory, and why this has deep human and ethical implications.

The hidden power of digital architecture

When we think of “digital product design”, it’s tempting to frame it in terms of usability, engagement, or revenue. But those are surface-level outputs. Underneath, design decisions are time-shaping mechanisms. Every scroll pattern, notification strategy, or recommendation algorithm is effectively a form of chrono-engineering, influencing how long moments feel, how memorable they are, and whether they contribute to a coherent sense of life well-lived.

In this sense, a digital product is more like an urban plan than a vending machine. Cities can be designed to promote wandering or speed, intimacy or isolation, spontaneity or control. Similarly, digital spaces can accelerate or slow perception, sharpen or dull awareness, strengthen or erode memory.

The trouble is, most mainstream digital products are optimized for capturing attention, not enriching it. And when the business model is attention capture, the most profitable designs are those that keep you engaged while making you forget how long you’ve been there. That’s great for retention metrics, but disastrous for the human experience of time.

Attention as a renewable but depletable resource

Attention is often described as scarce, but in reality it’s renewable, we wake up each day with a fresh supply. The problem is that digital environments can accelerate its depletion by scattering it too thinly, forcing constant task-switching, and offering too many shallow stimuli.

Think of attention like light:

• Focused light can illuminate deeply, creating rich, detailed memories.
• Diffused light brightens everything a little but leaves nothing clearly visible.

The more a product fragments our attention, the more it shortens the apparent day. It doesn’t just consume hours, it erases the feeling that those hours happened.

Narrative, memory, and the loss of life’s shape

One of the most overlooked aspects of digital product impact is its role in narrative formation. Our sense of time and identity depends on turning experience into story, with beginnings, middles, and ends.

But many digital products are designed to resist closure.

• Infinite scroll removes natural stopping points.
• Autoplay erases the space between one experience and the next.
• Recommendation feeds jumble unrelated items, making it hard to weave them into a coherent memory.

Without natural story arcs, the brain struggles to index experiences in memory. Days become indistinct. We look back on a week and find fewer “anchors”, no clear sequence of events to mark the passage of time. In the long run, this is more than an annoyance, it’s an existential erosion.

This erosion of time awareness ties closely to what psychologists call duration neglect. Research by Daniel Kahneman and Barbara Fredrickson found that people’s judgments of experiences, whether pleasant or painful — are shaped far more by their most intense moment (the peak) and the final moments (the end) than by the total duration. In other words, we remember experiences as a series of emotional snapshots, not by their actual length.

Part 2: Framework & TikTok vs Duolingo

Introduces the Attention Design Framework and uses contrasting product examples to show how design choices can either erode or enrich users’ sense of time.

How product design can steal, or return time

If we accept that design choices shape time perception, then we must also accept that products can either impoverish or enrich the life lived within them. Here’s where intentional design becomes not just a UX issue, but an ethical one.

And “enriching” is not only about usability, it’s about how the experience feels in the moment. As described in Here’s a Little Design Hack: Romanticize Everything, great design remembers that beyond form and function, there’s a third “F”: feeling. A product that respects your time can also make you fall in love with it, through small, sensory moments, thoughtful details, and interactions that invite you to linger in a good way. When design makes the present moment vivid, it doesn’t just fill time, it turns it into a memory worth keeping.

TikTok vs Duolingo

When you compare two wildly different products like TikTok and Duolingo, the contrast in how they design for time becomes obvious. TikTok is the embodiment of the curvilinear flow, an infinite stream of videos that ‘auto-play’ one after another, removing any natural pause or decision point. Every clip is algorithmically chosen for novelty rather than narrative, which keeps the brain stimulated but robs the session of coherence. There’s no visible endpoint, no summary of what you’ve “gained,” and almost no time markers to remind you how long you’ve been there. The result is a product that thrives on autopilot usage, encouraging you to drift for as long as possible without noticing the hours pass.

Duolingo, on the other hand, builds in right-angle turns that encourage deliberate choice. Each lesson has a clear beginning and end, and you decide which skill to practice next. Progress is structured in thematic “skill trees” that give a sense of narrative advancement. Notifications are tied directly to your learning goals, reminding you to maintain a streak rather than luring you into unrelated content, and at the end of each session, you see a concrete summary of what you’ve learned. Sessions are intentionally short, so time awareness is built into the product experience itself.

One product is designed to stretch your session without you noticing, the other is designed to make each session feel intentional, contained, and memorable.

TikTok’s endless content feed is a prime example of what NN/g’s Tim Neusesser calls classic infinite scrolling, a pattern that minimizes interaction costs and sustains engagement, but often at the expense of orientation and user control. Duolingo, by contrast, leans toward finite loops and clear session boundaries, more akin to pagination. This contrast shows how a single design choice, whether to let content flow endlessly or to offer structured stops can profoundly affect how users experience time, progress, and satisfaction. The research-backed trade-offs here reinforce the value of an Attention Design approach: every navigation pattern is also a time pattern, shaping not just what users see, but how long and how well they engage.

Attention Design Framework

This contrast is the Attention Design Framework in action. Every lever in the table, from flow structure to novelty design, is right there in plain sight. TikTok shows how design can dissolve time without you noticing but Duolingo shows how design can contain it, make it intentional, and give it shape.

The same is true within the same product category, as we see when comparing Instagram and BeReal, two social photo platforms that share the same core function but make radically different decisions about flow, pacing, and user agency.

Once you recognize these patterns, you can spot them in almost any product, from news apps to productivity tools. That’s the point of the framework.

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The framework isn’t theoretical, it’s a lens you can use to analyze any product and see exactly how its design shapes the way users experience, remember, and value their time.

Just as Wil Schroter’s ‘One Thing Rule’ helps individuals focus on what truly matters each day, digital products can be designed to gently filter out competing noise and guide users toward their own ‘one thing’, the single most meaningful next step for them in that moment.

If you see your product as just “keeping people engaged”, you’re only designing for business KPIs. If you see it as shaping their experience of time, you start designing for life quality. And that’s where the real long-term value, for both user and product.

Part 3: AI and the future of time design

Examines how AI could amplify both the risks and opportunities of time-shaping design, and calls for time-conscious metrics and ethics in product development.

AI — The next frontier of time design

As we step into an era of AI-driven experiences, these patterns won’t just persist, they’ll adapt and intensify. The next question is whether AI will simply inherit the attention-extraction playbook or become a new kind of partner in protecting our most finite resource: time.

AI-driven products amplify both the risk and the potential of time-shaping design.

• On one hand, AI can become the ultimate infinite scroll, endlessly generating responses, questions, and suggestions, trapping users in conversational mazes without edges.
• On the other, AI could be trained to be a steward of time, detecting signs of user fatigue, offering meaningful stopping points, or curating experiences that build coherent narratives instead of scattershot engagement.

The critical shift is this: AI products must be designed with time ethics in mind. Otherwise, we risk building machines that are not just attention traps, but memory erasers. And because AI can adapt in real time, the stakes are even higher, the same design patterns that kept people scrolling for hours can now be tuned on the fly to hold them for days. This is why we can’t rely on old engagement metrics alone, we need a new way to measure what “good” looks like.

Designing for richness, not just retention

The metrics that dominate product dashboards, DAU, session length, and retention rate, measure presence in the app, not presence in life. A truly responsible product team should also measure the depth of the experience:

• How many users can recall what they saw or learned yesterday?
• Did the session produce a shareable story, or just another blur?
• Did the interaction make the rest of their day feel richer, or more depleted?

This is where depth metrics intersect with problem framing. As Pavel Samsonov writes in Stop Inventing Product Problems; Start Solving Customer Problems, low-performing teams often obsess over “missing features” instead of focusing on the outcomes customers actually care about. Designing for time well-spent is impossible if the problem you’re solving isn’t rooted in a customer’s real goal. A beautifully crafted feature that addresses an internal stakeholder’s wish list might look good in a roadmap, but it won’t create the kind of moments that users remember, or that make them feel their time was valued. When we frame problems around genuine customer outcomes, we not only design better solutions, we also design better use of their time.

If we don’t start tracking these, we’ll keep optimizing for the wrong thing, engagement without enrichment, and end up designing products that are “successful” by business standards but corrosive to human experience.

From autopilot to awareness

The deepest danger of time-eroding design is not that we lose hours, but that we lose agency. Autopilot living is cheaper for the brain, but it leaves us with little to show for our days. If products keep smoothing away the “right angles”, the moments when we choose to turn, then we are no longer navigating our lives, we are simply being carried along.

The countermeasure is not to reject technology, but to demand products that introduce friction in service of reflection. The best digital experiences won’t just help us do more, they’ll help us notice more.

The call for a new design ethic

We are still in the early centuries of the digital city. We have the chance now to decide: will our digital streets be mazes without exits, or routes that lead somewhere worth going?

As builders, researchers, and leaders in this space, we can design products that:

• Give users stories instead of fragments.
• Offer novelty that’s meaningful, not just stimulating.
• Protect the narrative fabric of life instead of fraying it.

Time will pass either way. The question is whether our designs will help people feel it, own it, and remember it, or let it vanish into the algorithmic wind.

Because in the end, digital products are not just shaping engagement curves. They’re shaping the lived texture of human life. And that’s too important to leave to the logic of infinite scroll.

Author’s Note:
I write this as someone still learning how to navigate the tension between business targets and the better life of the user. In product roles, it’s easy to lean on metrics that reward time spent and session length, because those are the numbers that keep the lights on. But the more I work in this space, the more I realize that long-term business health depends on designing for long-term human health. This reflection isn’t a declaration that I’ve solved the balance, it’s a reminder to myself that the balance must be the work.

Designing time: How digital products shape the way we live it was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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