Americans spend about three hours each day staring at their mobile phones. That’s a lot, but is it too much? As an article this weekend notes, several new companies betting that consumers crave less phone time are offering products like apps that filter messages and jewelry that buzzes only when the most important messages arrive.
In an interview, Sundar Pichai, Google’s senior vice president of products, spoke at length about how Google products and apps were meant to help provide balance, giving you information with letting you live your life. Mr. Pichai oversees most of the company’s core products and is considered the righthand man of Larry Page, Google’s chief executive.
Following are excerpts from the interview, which has been condensed and edited.
Do you see mobile phones heading down a path of social unacceptability? Do we have a problem of overuse?
I don’t quite frame it that way in my head. I think phones are, you know, I think they have evolved to play an incredibly important role in people’s lives. People get a lot out of them and as part of that I’m sure they are using them a lot and there are times it probably needs to be – it’s more interruptive than it should be. And it definitely needs to evolve.
I view all of this at a very nascent stage in its life cycle. Really, smartphones have been around, you know, six or seven years, for most people, maybe, four to five years in their life, right?
You can step back
and say people watch six hours of television per day or whatever it is. So people watch television a lot. In some cases the phone is shifting some of that. It sounds a bit philosophical, but I think people do these
things because they want to.
You frequently say products should be “user centric.” What do you mean?
In the end the goal should be, you know – all of us should be doing stuff to solve problems for users and actually making their lives better, happier and so on.
I do think the experience needs to be a lot more thoughtful of interrupting users at the right point, when they really need to. I think, for example, do we need to design systems where if your spouse is calling you versus a random person is calling you, like, how does the system automatically do that better? Of course.
I think everyone recognizes that phones free people in ways that weren’t possible before, and have changed our lives. But then people start doing things like checking their email at dinner. Are there things Google is doing to return people to where they are and reduce the temptation to look at their phone?
You’re asking questions that have nothing to do with technology. Should kids check phones at dinner? I don’t know. To me that’s a parenting choice.
I didn’t mean kids, I meant the parents.
Yeah but there are people who watch television at dinner, too.
Well, people are making products like apps that turn your phone off for a while. So it seems like developers and consumers are seeing a need to use technology to reduce people’s temptation to constantly be using your phone.
But people always ask for this with email, too. And social networks have had to deal with how do you go off the record for a while. So to me I don’t know that it’s specific to phones. I also don’t know how much of these are like something that is just happening at the margin versus what’s happening at the core.
I believe that we need to make all of this work better for users – where, you don’t want this to be attention seeking, you don’t want it to be about the technology or the products themselves –
that’s what I mean by everything needs to be user centric, it should make users happier.
To me, we need to design products which are genuinely centered around users. And then there is a line by which
how users choose to live their lives. It’s their choice, and I want to be careful not to be prescriptive about what is O.K. to do and what is not O.K. to do. And if there are third-party apps which are doing
a good job of it, I welcome them as innovations on top of the platforms.
As you have risen in the ranks at Google, have you noticed that people use their phones less in meetings with you? I have this theory that you can tell the importance of who is running a meeting by how many people are using their phone in the middle of it.
Well before mobile phones in corporate America people used to use laptops in meetings. And I’ve seen meetings at the highest levels being run where many people are on their laptops. There are different usage
patterns – I never do email during the day. I don’t multitask well at all. I don’t know how to be in a meeting and participate and be on email at the same time. I do see some people do it more
effectively. I’ve never quite figured that out.
In general, I try to run my meetings in a way in which most people who are there need to be there and are engaged in the meeting.
But right there on the stage at I/O two years ago, when the first Android Wear watch came out, one of the messages was this watch can allow you to be more present at a dinner. You could glance at your email and not have to pull your phone out.
I generally want information to be there when you need it or seek for it and it not to be interruptive. To me building the perfect system is what we are trying to do.
Similarly there are times you are driving. Do
you need to pull your phone to look up some information? That happens to be dangerous.
So if you look at how we are thinking through something like Android Auto, we are trying to thoughtfully figure out how you get what you want at the right time. Can you just speak and get your answer so that you don’t have to open up a phone? These are all experiences we think through.
We are all in the early days. Today the burden is too much on the users to solve these things and I think the burden should be on us.
How is the burden on the user? They have to quiet all their notifications and such?
Today let’s say somebody interrupts you and you shouldn’t have been interrupted. The burden was on the user.
Do you think users need to trust the system more? People obsessively check their email, sometimes just because they want to, but other times because they are genuinely worried their boss or some other important person might have emailed them. Is there a way that over time they just start to trust that unless it’s an important email it will not come to me. Features like this are out there, but I don’t think most people rely on them yet, the way everyone relies on, say, an alarm clock.
Today for example Now does this. Over time I do think users rely on – you know, Google will let me know when to go to a particular meeting. We will interrupt you at the right time. I think good applications today are very thoughtful about their notifications.
Which ones?
There are many apps like that. I think social networks do a good job of telling you who the right contacts are. Priority inbox in Gmail was a good example of that – choosing a set of emails to surface to you and not other emails.
But not all users want it – when we do priority inbox and simplify it for users there are users who prefer to be in control. To me it’s a bit of a Holy Grail: How do you improve the quality of what we do where we approach human level intelligence or human level preferences, understanding context and understanding the subjective nature of these things. So to me that’s a journey we are all on.
Of course there are many bad applications too, where the incentives are different, they are just trying to get people to come back to it. All that’s happening in the system and we have to figure out a way to make it better.
Do you think not bothering people is becoming a feature? For instance, if I have a Google Calendar and it leaves me completely alone but then tells me something exactly when I need it, in a way, the not talking to me was the feature.
Every good product needs to have restraint. To me, you have to do what the user wants, so it shouldn’t be about the application it should be about the user. You are absolutely right that if all the user needs
from the calendar application is to be prompted one time that day because that’s all they needed, that is in fact a good application.
I wouldn’t say that’s the overall way things are happening
and I wouldn’t draw broad conclusions out of it. There are certain use cases when that’s really valid.
There are cases when people may even need more – I don’t know, a fitness app may actually need to prompt users more to stay fit and on top of their schedules, and to me that’s an equally important function. I think these things span a wide variety of uses. If I’m about to forget my kid’s birthday, I want the phone to scream at me until I do something about it.
Have you ever picked up your phone and forgotten what you were there to do in the first place?
Sure, of course! There are times I pick up my phone out of habit and I look when I didn’t need to look at it at all.
Have you done anything to ease back? I have a policy that I’m not allowed to walk around the house with my phone. It has to stay in one room.
I’ve done my versions of it. For example, before Google I/O we used to go out for dinner the day before the keynote and I would make everyone on the team put all their phones in a basket so that we can all have a good dinner together. It turns out it’s the public relations people, thanks to what you all do [meaning journalists call them too much], who get so nervous not being on their phones.
You and [Google chief executive] Larry Page both have said that you want technology to fade into the background more. What do you mean by that?
The point is not to present the technology to the user. The point is to build a user experience. There is a reason when we built Chrome we minimized everything to do with Chrome so that all you spent time on was the website you cared about at the given time. We wanted the users to focus on the content they were using. The reason the product was named “Chrome” was we wanted to minimize the chrome of the browser. That’s how we thought about it.
To me, great products do that. If you’re building search there is so much complexity of technology which happens to get users the right information. You really want all that to fade to the background so that as a user you don’t need to know about all that stuff.
But do you think sometimes the experience is no experience?
Yes, that’s the example of all the stuff I said about Chrome. The whole debate was you don’t need all the buttons on top, you wanted to remove features. There are many, many occasions in which it does involve you taking a restraint role.
Good product design involves all those things. That’s why I gave the example of how I would love for my phone to scream if I am about to miss an important thing in my life, and never bother me if I’m doing something very important and the information coming in is less important than what I’m doing. That’s how I think about it. To me it’s about serving users the right way, and as part of that sometimes you need to disappear and get out of the way.