Designing for an Anxious Generation

Article by Ben Stankich — Mar 31, 2025

One of last year’s most popular books detailed how the internet-in-our-pockets shaped an entire generation — for the worse. The Anxious Generation focuses its critique on tech giants because of the scale at which they steal attention, but the same mechanisms they pioneered have been adopted as the norm in modern software.

As designers, developers, and project managers, we are shaping the world’s interface to an increasingly digitally-driven life. What does it look like to consciously design software that respects the time and attention of its users? How do we design for an already anxious generation — and future ones to come?

We’ll look at our industry’s relationship to these issues and call out UX patterns to re-evaluate, replace, or avoid altogether.

A New Interface to Childhood

Jonathan Haidt’s book calls attention to a shift in culture created by the advent of smartphones, social media, and attention-hungry algorithms. Not only has technology grown leaps and bounds in the last few decades, it’s seeped its way into all of life all the time.

Haidt studied Gen Z, who grew up in the midst of widespread smartphone adoption, having what he calls a “phone-based childhood.” Internet-connected devices became the default locale of social development for kids. Texting, online gaming, Facebook — later on Youtube, Instagram, Reddit, and TikTok. Constant connectivity, instant cures for boredom, FOMO, new rules for friendship (and pathways for bullying) — the list goes on.

In the span of a decade, Western culture removed the phone from the wall, the computer from the office, the TV from the living room, and put them all in the pockets of kids. What happens when a 12-year-old trades in afternoons running around with neighborhood friends for scrolling the internet alone?

Drawing on countless studies, Haidt reveals a sharp rise in negative behaviors in correlation with the adoption of smartphones and social media. Loneliness, anxiety, depression, self-harm and suicidal thoughts grew alarmingly between 2010 and 2015, as well as decreased focus, loss of sleep, and unhealthy patterns of self-comparison.

Rethinking UX Patterns

Technology is accountable both for its addictive mechanisms, and in part for the content it shows and rewards with greater reach. The medium always influences its content. The like button, endless autoplaying feeds, content-promotion algorithms — these all shape what content gets created, who sees it, and how easily users get sucked in.

Interfaces change behavior — for good or ill. As software creators, we play a role in driving and advocating for responsible design in our organizations. We need to take inventory of our own practices and be mindful of those that generate unhealthy behaviors.

Avoid: Infinite Scroll

Asa Raskin was an interface designer and developer for Mozilla, who wanted to save people time by removing the need to click “Load More” at the end of a page. It wasn’t until after his development of infinite scroll became widely adopted that we realized its negative impacts on accessibility, wayfinding, and (worst of all) mental health. By his calculation, his invention now wastes the equivalent of 100,000 lifetimes each day (TED podcast interview).

What Asa meant for good became a vehicle for hijacking attention. Infinite scroll has become the de facto method of loading content, and we no longer question whether to use it.

Much of its harm comes from ad-driven social media platforms, where more time on site means more ad impressions and more revenue. Putting aside this (historically) problematic business model, when viewed as a user interface, continual scrolling may indicate:

a lack of filters or curation to help users find the right thing
poor wayfinding elements to get to the right page
unengaging or irrelevant items being presented

Whether there is financial incentive or not, infinite scroll can often be a crutch to offload to users the task of finding something or getting somewhere. It’s a UI problem.

Adopt: Pagination and Better Filters

Google recently switched back from infinitely scrollable results to a paginated approach. Their stated goal was to serve search results more quickly and avoid loading results that users don’t explicitly request. They found that automatically loading additional results didn’t have a meaningful impact on user satisfaction.

Pagination helps users by providing landmarks. With infinite scroll, the only reference points are the feed’s beginning and end. Have you ever seen something in a social media feed, scrolled past it, then tried to go back to it? It’s nearly impossible (depending on how algorithmically-driven the feed is, it may actually be impossible). In an infinite sea of content, discrete pages indicate what’s been seen and what’s still to come.

Introducing pagination buttons also provides the user a moment to consider the next best move. With infinite scroll, there’s no prompt to stop the task — the computer decides for you.

All sorts of interesting design opportunities surface when we eschew infinite scroll. How do you visually distinguish pages? Do you load them in place or separately in traditional pages? What filters can be incorporated to make a view more useful? There are a lot of opportunities to explore when we approach content organization with fresh eyes.

Avoid: Auto-Play and Always Suggesting a Next Thing

Like infinite scroll, auto-play has become a widely used pattern with its own set of downsides. YouTube creates a personalized playlist that starts as soon as you finish a video. Social media feeds autoplay content and switch from subscribed-to to algorithmically-selected content.

This automatic behavior removes user agency and assumes that the platform knows their next best move. The goal is almost always user retention.

Learning platforms (traditionally viewed more positively) also employ strategies that do more harm than good. For example, Duolingo language learners who reach their daily learning goal are shown a cute owl animation — promptly followed by a screen that emphasizes all their incomplete lessons. Any celebration of accomplishment is cut short by a sense of unending work.

To continue the learning example — even the design and label of the ubiquitous call to action communicates a lot to the user. “Continue”, “Next”, “Keep Going!” — in one sense, these CTAs are simple and necessary navigation elements. Ten lessons in, however, this copy-pasted component is subtly reinforcing a mentality that the user has not accomplished enough and that there’s always more to be done.

Adopt: Exit Points

I first heard Growth Design name this strategy, recommending that creators “allow users to disengage from your product with a sense of completion. If not, people will associate your product to a never-ending list of tasks—which may hurt your long-term user retention.”

At transition points, user needs and limitations are often second chair to the business’s idea of progression. But adopting exit points doesn’t mean you need to discourage using the product. It’s about knowing your user, respecting their time, and trusting your product’s long-term value proposition.

CTA sections and interstitials provide opportunities to highlight what’s been accomplished and de-emphasize options for users to keep going. Be aware of when you need to motivate users to press on, and when to encourage them to take the offramp if needed. There’s a long-held fear of users clicking away, but we must remember that positive interactions, such as through exit points, will keep them coming back.

Consider: Time Limits

In 2018 Apple introduced the “Screen Time” feature to iPhones, following an open letter from two of its shareholders concerned about phone addiction. Years later, Instagram added a daily time limit feature. Now they’ve added full-screen “Take a Break” reminders for users spending large swaths of time in the app.

This new category of UX isn’t limited to parents who want to restrict their kids’ device time — they are tools intended for all. They’re the result of a growing societal recognition that the digital platforms and apps we use are addictive.

In a world where content loads almost instantaneously and sites “feed” you content before you can even scroll to it, users need a new type of exit point. Time limiting features provide friction to let users make a more conscious decision whether to continue or not.

For products that inspire or require lots of time on the user’s part, what guardrails can be put in place to protect their time? A starting point could include prompting users to take a break during a significantly long session in your product. This could become a granular, user-controlled setting to pre-empt overlong stretches in the first place.

Even in its simplest form, a time limit flow requires some thoughtful design. Most importantly, it entails choosing what happens when a user reaches their time limit. In Apple’s Screen Time, a message takes over the entire screen with options to exit the app or extend time by one of several preset amounts. If you exit, you’ll see that app’s icon dimmed; if you return, you get the same message overlaid.

Other considerations include: Can the time limit be bypassed? Can kids under parental control request more time? Is it useful to offer analytics, and if so, based on time usage, number of sessions, or some other metric?

Reconsider: Streaks

In the early to mid-2010s, Duolingo and Snapchat popularized streaks, a gamification element that is highly motivating for building habits. Streaks are a record of some task to be completed (usually daily) that incentivizes users to keep their streak alive by completing that task without fail. The longer the streak, the greater the incentive.

Ideally, streaks are used to motivate users for self-initiated habits, like exercise, practicing music, or learning a language. But they can also addict users to your platform.

In Snapchat’s case, the app recorded streaks for the number of days in a row that a user messaged each of their friends. For many, streaks started as fun reminders of relational closeness, but over time, maintaining the streak started to feel like work. Streaks would lose their meaning and users became anxious if they realized they hadn’t done their daily Snap.

While Streaks looked great to Snapchat from a usage standpoint, it was harmful to users and eventually deteriorated many users’ view of the platform. A 2018-2019 study found that Snapchat streaks caused “problematic smartphone use” and contributed to FOMO and a lack of “social media self-control”.

Duolingo found streaks problematic as well. Gina Gotthilf, their former Head of Growth, said: “Streaks make people come back more, but losing a streak is also a big reason why people quit. I lost my 80-day streak last year when I was trying to learn German, and I was so frustrated that I stopped using Duolingo” (33Voices Podcast).

Adopt: More Realistic Goal Motivation

In the above examples, streaks were successful, but only for a time. In Snapchat’s case, its negative impact shows the feature should not have been on by default. If you utilize streaks for motivation, consider letting them be user-initiated (i.e., helping users achieve their goals) and be sure to frame streaks that have ended in a positive light.

For encouraging habit formation, a realistic approach could still include using daily streaks to motivate the habit early on. After 30 days — when that habit is more formed — motivation could switch to something more tolerant of missing days, such as a goal completion percentage. When a user inevitably misses a day, they won’t fixate on their short-term mistake because the UI highlights long-term consistency.

Redesign: Fewer, Better Notifications

Push notifications have made the journey from showcasing the marvel of real-time updates to becoming common intrusions. Of all areas of product experience that get thoughtful design attention, notifications always get the short stick. Most people need fewer notifications while they aren’t using your product, and better ways of catching up when they are.

The logic behind most implementations is overly simple: when X event happens, immediately send a notification. In a world where everyone grapples with a high volume of notifications, context-aware design makes a huge difference. That might mean taking into account what is known about the user’s current state (e.g. working or not working), the instigating event’s relative importance, or related notifications.

Bundling notifications can greatly reduce cognitive overload. Figma delays the emailing of comment notifications to build up awareness, preventing individual notifications in favor of a single email encasing a whole batch. For time-sensitive notifications, easy mute options on specific streams (as is popular in messaging apps) can save users’ sanity.

Allowing users to limit when notifications are received is another great way to let the user apply their attention properly. This could be as simple as a time-based delay or — like Instagram — take a fully integrated approach. The app’s Sleep Mode lets you “automatically pause your Instagram notifications, auto-reply to messages, and let people know you’re in sleep mode during the time periods you choose. You’ll see a reminder to close Instagram during sleep mode.”

Adopt: Easier Activity Catch Up

Another under-designed experience is when users return to a product UI, especially when they want to discover what they missed while away.

Chronological notification logs are standard, but what if they were joined by a summary that contextualized those updates? (I hear AI summaries aren’t half bad these days.) For high volumes of notifications, you could add filters or other elements that make viewing and taking action on them more manageable.

Slack has innovated in this space. Rather than having users click through each message channel individually to see the latest notifications, the “Catch Up” feature on mobile presents notifications as cards that can be quickly triaged through swiping. It’s an interesting interface, and certainly appealing for someone checking back in after missing a few days of work.

Back to the Why

We began with a reflection on the poor state of mental health in our digital age. The research shows us that children aren’t built for the pace at which technology is inserting itself into their lives — and, if we’re honest, we probably aren’t very well-equipped either. Redesigning a few user experiences at your company may not feel like it’s moving the needle much.

But we’re not just grasping at principles. You have the opportunity in your corner of the internet to prioritize people’s health by safeguarding their time and attention. As user advocates, we can voice opposition to Silicon Valley’s “race to the bottom of the brain stem” as tech ethicist Tristan Harris poignantly describes it.

We can provide clarity to stakeholders on what healthy user engagement looks like. We can normalize responsible design in the components and libraries we build. We can find appropriate ways to push back against dark patterns that disguise themselves as business decisions.

Application design alone is not enough, but it’s the part we play as software creators.