ScrollCure

Opening an app today feels like stepping into a fantasy videogame world. The designers seemed to have picked the colors looking at animated stickers on a 1st grader’s tiffin box or designed the app sitting inside a toy store.

Bright pinks, bright yellows, bright reds & over-saturated hues everywhere. It looks like they are trying to emulate slot machines or videogames with their bright, saturated, tempting colors. Our everyday mundane apps are not designed for play. Yet they are becoming brighter, shinier & more-childlike overtime.

What used to be colors present only in games like Farmville & Candy Crush are now present everywhere. This is besides user-submitted media & pictures too which are getting more & more saturated, brightened and edited over time. Skies which look bluer than real skies, whites which look whiter than milk and skin tones which are 3 or 4 shades brighter and fairer than true shades.

Also everything is gamified today. So many apps will throw out a worthless, digital award or accomplishment: “Congratulations! You just reached a 1000 views on your post!”, “Woah! You got your 100th follower! See the badge in your profile”, “Congrats! You’re a level 5 reviewer!” the bold bright text reads as colorful confetti falls all over your screen as a celebration.

Or gamified goalposts set up as milestone for you to accomplish: “You”re 32 points away from unlocking the Viral Reach badge”, “You’re one day away from completing your 10 day login streak”, “You’re 20 minutes away from completing 1000 hours of watch-time on your videos”

All this hoo haa motivation & the only thing these platforms care about is how much time you spend on their device & how often they can get you to click on their advertisements so as to fill their pockets.

They want to set up emotional feedback loop & positivity hooks just like videogames do where upon completing a mission or a task you get awarded with game resources, victory music & bright visuals.

Ofcourse most of us realize these prompts are silly & stupid but the dopamine & serotonin being released inside our mind does not. When you’ve had an uneventful day and the only positive thing to happen is your Instagram post getting a few dozen likes and a bright red bubble on your message icon, it stops being a silly joke & just some animations because now you’ve developed an emotional hook to it. Next thing you know, you’ve re-opened your app multiple times in quick succession to see if you’ve gained new likes or received a new message, looking to get the next hit of that positive feel-good design elements.