Stop stressing your users! For mental health, accessibility and planet earth

There is so much frustration around in the web. Have you been stressed before by a website, an app, or a software? I bet, yes, because I know pretty much no one that hasn't been stressed before by any kind of digital product. And I know I have been several times.

We will talk about how we stress our dear users, how to create calm design and how calm design benefits mental health, accessibility and our nature. Yeah, that's right. It will also be about how we can reduce our digital footprint with stress free digital products. It's a win win win for everyone, pretty much. So, let's get into it.

Imagine you open a website and first up front you get a cookie banner to click away or to accept or decline your cookies. Okay, done that. Then next up comes a newsletter pop-up. I don't want a newsletter right now. I just want to see the content of this page. Then there comes a push notification pop-up that lets you decide between if you want to have push notifications of this website or not. Like, no, I don't want that. Then there comes a request for your location where you are and you're like “Why? I just want to see that content on this page!” You finally clicked that away as well. And then content is sliding in from all sides. And then maybe you're on a booking page and it tells you that only two rooms are left for today and they sell out in minutes. Ah! Your brain is buzzing and you haven't even read the first paragraph of this website.

That behavior not uncommon these days. I've seen so many websites lately, and there is obviously also software and apps that do that as well, that you feel like minutes away from seeing the first content of this page by clicking all those pop-ups and banners away.

It's too hard. Come on, we can't do that.

It's a marketing strategy. I know. But if we have that on every single website that is out there, we spend so much more time in the internet and we spend so much time being frustrated and stressed. Let's not go further on this way.

We're often overstimulated, which is why we can't focus during the day and we can't sleep at night.

We have to stop this for our own sake. I know when we are sitting in our offices and talk to our business, design and marketing colleagues. It sounds like “yeah, we want to increase sales”. But if we really ask ourselves on a personal side, we probably wouldn't implement all of those things because we hate them as a user ourselves.

So, all those cookie banners, all those push notification pop-ups, all those animations, newsletter banners, marketing bling bling everywhere, making it harder to book something for marketing reasons, call to actions not being clear and violating user expectations, processes being super complicated or audio and video auto-play. That's probably one of the worst things that you can do. All those location requests, those email inputs without email autocomplete where you have to put in your whole email address, although it could just autocomplete it, especially in an app or on mobile phones. Horrible. Those little frictions everywhere. Super long load loading times definitely add to that as well. Booking scarcity that is often fake, such as on Booking.com or on flight websites. You can see in the code that it's fake numbers that they are displaying. Additionally, all those addictive platforms to come back for more. We know that especially about social media, but also about other platforms that try to make you addicted to their app, software or website. All this confirm and cancellation shaming such as “No, thanks, I don't want to get healthy.”, “No, thanks, I don't want to have this super amazing offer”. Why do we do that? It's insane.

Just recently I've been on a furniture website with constant “only two days left of this promo”. And one week later I was on the website again and it said again “There is only three days left of this promo”. It was exactly the same promotion. Let's not do that anymore.

Just think about your users and think about yourself having a hard day being stressed from our current world crises, maybe having a newborn baby that is crying and you haven't slept in days. Being sick and needing medication. Your eyes are swollen and your nose is just running. Maybe you had a car crash and need a tow truck. Maybe you are neurodiverse and have anything related to ADHD, to dyslexia, to Tourette, to autism, whatever there is. Maybe you're at work and your work software is constantly changing something so your automatism doesn't work the same way, like the click path.

It's just frustrating and stressful.

I don't say that all of those marketing techniques are all wrong. But it's about timing. It's about the amount of information. It's about healthy usage and also the correctness of it, including trust that the shown facts are actually true, like not displaying fake numbers just to have this scarcity and driving people to buy or book something.

That's not the society I want to live in and probably you also don't want to live in.

I've seen this really nice sentence in the book 4000 weeks by Oliver Berkman. He said, the more effective and faster we got, the more impatient we got as well. And that definitely is the case in today's society. But we cater for even more of it because we put all those banners and things in there that make us even more impatient than ever before.

One thing that I want to say very clearly, a calm design or distressed design doesn't mean to create boring and lame websites, apps or software.

It can be especially more enhancing and more loving, beautiful and aesthetically pleasing because it reduces the stress of it all.

Let’s get into four different categories that you can de-stress your design or you can create calm design with. The first one is to enable healthy usage. The second one will be to ensure a calming environment. The third one will be communicating in a healthy way. And last but not least, we will talk about promoting well-being.

Category 1: Enable healthy usage.

Category 1: The most important one in that is, first of all, not trying to make your users addicted to your website, app software, whatever. I know you want to drive user engagement and all of those things, but you can do it in an ethical way. It doesn't have to be addictive. One major thing about that is preference settings, especially for notifications and enabling people to mute your notifications for a certain time or intervals like during the night, during the day, during holidays, for just one day or for one week or for in general. A lot of apps do that already and for me, it's a life saver. I do that especially on my phone and being on holidays. I don't want to have any messages from Slack, my emails or anything like that, so I just mute them and you can do that on your website, with your email newsletters, with all kinds of other things as well. If you have an app, then definitely showed those ones at first, like what notifications your user really wants to get and make it clear that they can opt in or opt out later as well in their settings. But displaying that upfront and giving the user the control over their notifications and their mental health. That's so much more worth than your business attention desires. Because, mental health is one of the biggest issues we have in today's society, and we shouldn't press it even more just because our business needs to grow more.

Category 1: Another point in enabling healthy usage is to providing exit points. And that could be when scrolling on social media, you get this exit point of a “you're all caught up for today”. Or load more buttons. So you scroll down a library, for example, and then it doesn't automatically load more of the content but you actively have to click on a button to load more. That's a different mindset than just keeping scrolling. It could be on a shopping website, for example, that you have a load more button instead of constant automatic scrolling behavior. And allow users to disengage from your product with a sense of completion. Some websites, tools or apps do that. I know Duolingo gives you a checked checklist and says “Good job, see you tomorrow”. To have this sense of “Yep, I'm done for today”. Not leaving your user in space and feeling uncompleted and thinking “Oh, I have to do more today. Because I just feel like I have to do more today”.

Category 1: Duolingo, by the way, also sends push notifications up until a certain point when there is a final one with “We'll stop sending you notifications. They don't seem to be working right now.” That’s great personalization that cares for mental health.

Category 1: One feature that I like a lot is in Slack is that you can send messages later. You can write your message this evening and then send it to a colleague, to an employee, to whoever. But you want to send it the next morning. And usually you'd be like “Yeah, okay, I just send it right now”. But then the other person might feel pressured to answer this message right now. So, you might write the message, save it and set a reminder for tomorrow morning to send out this message or email. But having this option to send messages later, that's amazing because it doesn't put pressure on other people to answer it right away.

Category 1: Another thing to enabling healthy usage is to pause tasks in an app or software. To save the process you're in for later and to get right back into it when you come back later. That's brilliant. And it enables us for a healthy usage. To stop at a certain point and not feeling stressed to keep going with whatever we are doing.

Category 2: Ensure a calming environment.

Category 2: First of all, never do any kind of audio auto-play. That's the worst thing that can happen. You're sitting in public transportation or in a public space and then suddenly your video audio is playing. That's horrible. It's the worst scenario. So always ensure to have the audio muted, but also video that has to be clicked to actually play. That saves a lot of energy as well, like carbon awareness in this case because it doesn't have to be loaded in the first place.

Category 2: Then, pop-ups that show up after spending some time on the page. If you haven't been on this page before and you get a newsletter pop-up, everyone will click it away because everyone thinks “What should I do with that? I don't even know yet what the content is about”. But placing the pop-up more on the periphery of the screen instead of in-your-face. Trello, Asana and other project management tools do that really well. It's just displayed in the corner, plus well designed. It grabs your attention, but not in a heavy way, so it's more mentally calming.

Category 2: The same goes for animations. Use them carefully, and don't use fast blinky animations that change neon colors in a fast paced way because that can trigger. That can trigger, especially when you're on an autism spectrum, have Tourette or ADHD. It can overstimulate your brain. So better use micro animations, for example for little celebrations, on buttons, opening overlays or on explanatory illustrations. Those tiny things that show that you care and put love into your design for your users. But don't animate everything that you can just because.

Category 2: Ensuring a calming environment also speaks for clear and easy click paths, not making it more difficult than it has to be just because of business reasons and because you want to put in this offer.

Category 2: Plus, allowing space in your designs, nothing crammed together. That's more nineties design. Let it breathe. Let your design, your content, your text breathe. So that it's actually easy to digest. And in that also having well readable text in size, color and in clear structure. So that it's really calming for anyone who's in a stressed situation as well as having a disability.

Category 2: Another point is having descriptive and easy to follow error messages when something happens. That's a huge part in being frustrated and stressed, and I bet every one of us has faced this one before. Not knowing what's wrong and not knowing that there is even something wrong, because sometimes it doesn't even show it in a way that is easy for us to understand. Major problem.

Category 2: Also, put in calm design screens in between. We don't always need to overwhelm people. It could be your app splash screen that's with a soothing animation and just your logo and a beautiful color. Just very easy, very fading, calming. I did put in one of those calm design screens in a checkout lately for Valana, a client of mine. It's a new platform for women that have just gotten a baby and want to get back in their physical shape. It's quite an extensive checkout because we ask for all kinds of things, like when was the date of your baby’s birth, how's your physical condition currently, how's your mental state currently. At some point it gets into the address and payment information and all that. And in between those two parts, I put in a calming screen which has just an illustration and a “We're putting together your course”. Having this little space to breathe in between filling out all of those things is really calming. We don't have to put everything together and compress it because it can be very stressful.

Category 2: With that also comes in focus modes, which are highly effective, especially for work software or for magazines. I've seen that, for example for Offline Only, a magazine by Chris Bolan. With a focus mode you just see the magazine or the software on your device and see nothing else. Really calming. The same goes for checkouts. There's studies that state that if you have your full header and footer navigation in your checkout, people are more likely to be distracted and overwhelmed with “Oh, did I forget anything?”. They even bounce off from your checkout. Focus modes can also be really helpful for learning experiences to keep your focus at what you're doing right now. So important and valuable.

Category 2: When thinking of a calming environment, I also think of short boardings that might even be split up. Start with easy tasks and then delay the hard task. Tell your users later about the hard tasks because this user won't remember what you told him or her about those hard tasks that come in later in the journey. Just split it up. Really care for a calming intro and onboarding into your application.

Category 2: And most of it all, be very aware of stressful user journeys, like having just been in a car crash, having an emergency tasks, needing assistance, anything that has to do with new parents having a newborn baby. Then you're most likely a bit more stressed than normally. Anything that has to do with financial topics because it's a stressful topic. Or anything with high priced products and services, then we're more likely to have this little nervousness. And we're not those calm, chilling, relaxed people.

Category 3: Communicating in a healthy way.

Category 3: One huge thing that I always want to raise more awareness about is confirm and cancellation screens. And I see so often this shaming of “We're so sad to see you leave. Give us a reason why you want to cancel”. Headspace, for example, is caring for the cancellation screen and is saying “Thank you for having been part of our community”. It helps for your users minds to think “Well I was happy to be part of it, but currently I'm just too involved with other things. I move on to another product”. Or in the case of newsletters “I just feel overwhelmed and I need to have less newsletters. Although I might be interested in your topics, I'm just too overwhelmed currently with them. So I unsubscribe”. Stop shaming your users in this critical moment. Say it in a nice and beautiful way. With a loving and caring note. Even with little illustrations.

Category 3: Apart from cancellation, caring for users also comes in for confirmation. For example, when donating for a service or during checkout. Really saying thank you from the bottom of our heart.

Category 3: Also communicate whether your service is available or you're booked out. For example, if you're a hotel, seminar rooms, events, services, products, just tell those people up front that this is available or not.

Category 3: It's also really nice to have this helpful and true scarcity. If you have just two pieces of this jacket left in your online shop. Then say it. But only if it’s really true. You can say “We have only two pieces left but we will reorder. Just type in your email address and we will let you know once we are full in stock back again.” That's well done. And not this fake scarcity that just wants to drive conversion.

Category 4: Promote well-being.

Category 4: Built in features that promote well-being, such as reminding people to get fresh air, to go outside, to step away from their devices. Headspace sends push notifications to put down the phone and to go outside. How awesome is that? I mean, of course Headspace is for mental health, but they can bring their app to a more addictive state, of course, and they send push notifications that tell you to go outside. We can all do that.

Category 4: Those little nudges that we can put here and there to bring our users into more well-being and to reminding them of going into nature and to care for themselves. To putting down the phone, to closing down social media, to anything like that.

Category 4: Also, things like showing screen time. We know that from our laptops or from our smartphones, but you can put that in your software as well. Showing the screen time of how long you've been involved with a certain software and telling them at some point that it's enough. Maybe even setting screen time for a specific task, for a specific platform, that's very, very helpful.

Category 4: Plus, there is also those special days during the year. There's even an International Day of Unplugging. Using those kinds of little things to remind your users and your customers, your buyers, whoever you're talking to, to do that too. Reminding them of their well-being.

Category 4: I've said a couple of things about the benefits for our mental health accessibility and for the planet in between already.

Category 4: But just to wrap it up a little bit. The benefits for our mental health is this calming, soothing experience that doesn't trigger episodes, overwhelm, frustration, stress, shame, anxiety, an untrusting society. We don't want that. I don't want that. In a society that is stressed immensely already, mental health being in many countries, the number one for sick leave and occupational disability. We need to care for mental health, calm design and de-stressing. Your design is one way of doing it.

Category 4: The gains for accessibility. I talked a bit about it already. For example about using less animations, having clearer processes, easy click paths, no pop-ups that disturb or even block the website. That happens very often, by the way. Pop-ups and banners that block navigating through the website with your keyboard or a screen reader. Then this person cannot use it at all. Really caring for permanent, temporary as well as situational disabilities. Permanent disability of having just one arm, situational disability of having a baby in one arm of yours and having just one arm at spare. Really thinking about accessibility in a holistic way and making it easy to use your product or service.

Category 4: And then the payoff for the planet is, for sure, less heavy content and all those data monsters, all those auto-plays, because then the video and audio is already loaded without the need of it. All those intense animations and everything that, when we do it less, concludes in a lightweight website with a smaller digital footprint. Lightweight websites, lightweight software, lightweight apps, whatever you have. And just keeping the footprint very low. Plus, not sending any push notifications or reminding people to go outside and closing down this app, putting down your smartphone. That's the best of it all, because then we're not sending anything. There is no requests and nothing that goes from one server to the other and nothing going through those telecommunication networks. Perfect. That's the greenest we can all do in the end. Not sending anything, being in focus mode, muting push notifications. All of those things help in the end to use less energy and produce less carbon.

Category 4: Isn't that great?

Category 4: Really respect people's time and mental health.

Category 4: Respect our planet and the resources we have.

Category 4: I can just highly recommend to go through all of these and see what you can implement in your service, your product. Let's just make this a more calming, easy and well-done experience for everyone.

Category 4: That is it for today. Thank you for listening again. Remember, subscribe to the podcast. Share this episode with friends and colleagues. Give this podcast a rating on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, on any platform you're hearing and listening to this podcast. Follow me on Instagram at Green the Web or on LinkedIn. Check out the resources on my website. There's plenty of free like tool lists, article lists and best practices for lightweight websites. Just spread the joy. Please let me know what you got out of this episode on Instagram, LinkedIn, via email, and any of the communities that I'm in. Just send me a message and also let me know if you want to hear more about any specific topic that I should cover in this podcast.

Category 4: See you in the next one.