Bringing you the latest and greatest in UX industry related to wellbeing, mental health and psychological safety — this week plus my lens about them.
Chronocentrism and the anxiety of time in UI
Almost all global software is designed around a Western, “monochronic” concept of time (a framework coined by anthropologist Edward T. Hall): time is linear, a scarce resource, and constantly running out. This gives us progress bars, session timeouts, countdown timers, and “read in 5 mins” tags.
But much of the world, including parts of Asia and Latin America, operates on “polychronic” time, where time is fluid, relationship-based, and cyclical. By hardcoding Western time anxiety into our interfaces, we aren’t just designing for efficiency; we are actively manufacturing chronic stress and exporting urgency culture to places where it doesn’t naturally exist.
Another variable introduced by Hall, is attitude to time, which can be either monochronic (typical for low-context cultures, e.g. USA, Germany) or polychronic (typical for high-context cultures, mainly Japanese, Middle Eastern and Latin American). Monochronic attitude to time means focusing on one thing at a time and respecting schedules and deadlines. Polychronic people involve in doing many things at once and are highly distractible (people are more important than punctuality). In website design this translates into a general preference for monochronic cultures to have linear or tabular navigation, and for polychronic cultures to use parallel navigation – layers and many windows.
My take: I never realised how heavily UI relies on creating a low-level sense of panic until I stepped back. From an APAC perspective, this relentless push for “efficiency” and “time-saving” often just feels cold and deeply stressful. We design as if the user is always late for a meeting.
(But to be honest, I think I am personally more trained to be monochronic.)
More to read here.
The “therapy-washing” of gamification
There is a rising, insidious trend of digital products co-opting clinical psychology and therapy speak to drive engagement.
Notifications no longer just tell you to do a task; they ask if you are “honoring your boundaries” or practicing “self-care.”
Meanwhile, the actual mechanics underneath are the same old addictive streaks and retention loops.
As highlighted in recent mental health app design guides by agencies like Gapsy Studio, standard behavioural triggers like “reset to zero” streaks can actually trigger a shame spiral in vulnerable users. It is weaponising the language of mental health to keep users addicted, making them feel like putting down their phone is a failure of personal wellness.
My take: It is incredibly manipulative. I’ve seen product teams debate how to make a push notification sound more “empathetic” while the sole metric they are tracking is Daily Active Users. Slapping the word “mindful” on a behavioral loop doesn’t make it healthy; it just makes it deceptive.
Empathy as extraction
We love to champion “empathy” in UX, but we rarely talk about the dark side of qualitative research: we are essentially sending designers out to mine human trauma for corporate profit. To build accurate customer journey maps for healthcare or finance apps, researchers probe into users’ deepest vulnerabilities—debt, illness, marginalisation.
Yet, as organizations like Rosenfeld Media point out in their advocacy for trauma-informed research, most UX professionals have zero clinical training on how to safely navigate psychological distress. The user is left raw and exposed, and the researcher is left with secondary trauma, all to optimize a checkout flow.
Trauma-informed research does not mean researching trauma. It means conducting any research with the awareness that participants may carry trauma you cannot see, and designing your process so that it does not cause harm regardless of whether trauma is present. A participant testing a banking app may have financial trauma from bankruptcy or fraud.
My take: This is the shocker we need to face. We demand that vulnerable populations open up their wounds for a $50 Amazon gift card, and then we pat ourselves on the back for being “user-centric.” Real psychological safety means knowing when it is deeply unethical to ask a user for their pain. We need to stop treating human suffering as raw data for our personas.
See you next week!
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Consider subscribing, you will get at least a weekly update on things related to alternative views on UX. This blog is an attempt of me to refute, challenge or refresh what I’ve learned and observed about UX design as a career and industry, throughout my 15+ years career as a product designer. Read more about me, or visit my UX portfolio site.