Designing for Attention

In this episode we sit down with Maya Hollis, a type designer who spent a decade building interfaces before walking away from the screen entirely. She now draws letters by hand in a studio with no wifi, above a picture framer’s on Tanner Street, and she has strong opinions about the red dot.

Maya worked on product teams at three software companies between 2009 and 2019, mostly on messaging and calendar tools. Her first typeface, Ashby Text, was released in 2022. We recorded in her studio on a Tuesday afternoon in the rain. You can hear it on the skylight for the first ten minutes. We decided to leave it in.

Fig. 2. The notification bell, switched off for good. Drawing by Almanac.

Leaving the screen

We start with the obvious question, which is why. Maya is clear that there was no single moment and no breakdown. It was more like a slow pile-up of meetings in which the main measure of whether something worked was how often people came back to it.

AMARA: So you didn’t throw your laptop into a river.

MAYA: I sold it, actually. For quite a good price. It wasn’t dramatic. I just noticed that I’d spent ten years getting very good at one thing, which was making people look at a screen one more time than they meant to, and I wanted to get good at something else.

AMARA: Who bought it?

MAYA: A student from the art college. She came round with the money in an envelope and asked if it had any games on it. I said it used to have about four thousand unread emails on it, which I’d wiped, and she looked at me as if I’d said something very sad. I suppose I had.

In the first few months in the studio she kept reaching for a phone that was in a drawer at home. She counted once. Forty-one reaches in a single afternoon, down to about a dozen by the second week.

The cost of the notification

We talk about how a single notification badge rewired the way software is designed. Once attention could be measured, it could be optimised, and once it could be optimised, every product began competing for the same scarce thing. The result, she argues, is interfaces that are brilliant at interrupting and poor at helping.

MAYA: Nobody sat down and said, let’s make people anxious. Someone said, let’s show people they have unread messages, which is reasonable. Then someone noticed that the number made people open the app. And then the number had to go up. You can follow it all the way down from there.

AMARA: What would you have done differently?

MAYA: Honestly, I’m not sure. I think I’d have asked more often who the number was for. Good software should behave like a good librarian: there when you need it, silent when you don’t, and never tapping you on the shoulder to ask how you’re getting on.

Good software should behave like a good librarian: there when you need it, silent when you don’t, and never tapping you on the shoulder to ask how you’re getting on.

AMARA: Did anyone ask that, while you were there? Who the number was for?

MAYA: Once, properly. And it was me, and I asked it badly, and I didn’t follow it up. Which is a story in itself.

The meeting about the dot

Maya tells a story here that she says she has never told on the record. In 2013, on a messaging product she would rather not name, her team tested two colours for the unread badge: the usual red, and a soft warm grey that one of the junior designers had argued for because it was calmer and, he said, more honest about how urgent most messages are.

MAYA: The red won by nine per cent. Nine per cent more people opened the app within an hour of a message arriving. People got promoted on smaller numbers. And I remember sitting in the meeting room, it was called Kestrel, all the rooms were named after birds, and someone put the chart up and everyone sort of exhaled, the way you do when a decision has been made for you.

AMARA: Did you argue?

MAYA: I asked what the other people had been doing instead. The ones who didn’t open it within the hour. Whether they were worse off. And someone said, quite reasonably, that we had no way of measuring that. Which was true. We only had a way of measuring the thing we already wanted.

AMARA: That sounds like the whole problem in one sentence.

MAYA: It’s most of it. The rest is that I didn’t push. I had a mortgage and a nice team and I thought, it’s a dot. It’s a small red dot. Ten years later I’m drawing the letter g in a room above a framer’s, so I suppose it was a bigger dot than I thought.

Amara asks whether she feels guilty about it. Maya takes a long time to answer, long enough that you can hear the rain again.

I feel responsible, which is less dramatic and lasts longer.

Maya Hollis

The junior designer, she adds, now builds boats.

Quiet defaults

We also get into what she calls quiet defaults: settings that assume the user wants to be left alone unless they ask otherwise. She describes a calendar tool she worked on in 2016 that briefly shipped with every reminder switched off unless you turned it on.

MAYA: It lasted eleven days. Usage dropped, which nobody was surprised by. What surprised me was that the complaints dropped too. People just quietly got on with their lives. That was treated as a problem.

AMARA: Because quiet doesn’t show up on a dashboard.

MAYA: Quiet looks exactly like failure on a dashboard. That’s the whole difficulty.

MAYA: If you build something that helps people and then gets out of the way, the line on the graph goes down. Imagine a plumber whose success was measured by how often you had to ring him.

AMARA: Some plumbers would quite like that.

MAYA: Some plumbers are product managers.

The missed appointment

Amara pushes back here. Her mother, who is seventy-three, relies on a text the day before every clinic visit, and once missed a scan because the text did not arrive.

AMARA: She sat at home that afternoon perfectly happily, doing the crossword, and the appointment came and went. Eight weeks for another one. So when you say quiet by default, part of me hears my mum missing a scan.

MAYA: That’s fair. That’s completely fair. And that reminder is the system working, I think. She asked for it, in effect. She’d want it. What I’m against is the reminder nobody asked for, about something that doesn’t matter, dressed up to look exactly like the one that does.

AMARA: But who decides which is which?

MAYA: That’s the hard part, and I don’t have a clean answer. I think the person should decide, and the default should assume they haven’t decided yet. Which means the hospital asks once, properly, at the start. Not the app guessing, and certainly not the app deciding that everything is urgent because urgent gets opened.

Selling it to a board

Her argument, in the end, is not that interruption is always wrong but that the default should sit on the side of the person who has not asked for anything yet. She admits she has no idea how you would sell that to a board.

MAYA: I tried once. A slide deck, twenty minutes, very carefully argued. The last slide just said, “What if they’re fine?” It did not go well. Someone asked me what the revenue model was for people being fine, and I didn’t have one, and I still don’t.

Letters as a slower medium

The second half of the conversation turns to type itself. Maya shows Amara a sheet of tracing paper with twenty-three versions of the same g on it, most of which look identical to anyone who is not her. The difference between the fourth and the nineteenth is about a third of a millimetre in the curve of the lower bowl, and it is the reason the word glad looks friendly in Ashby Text instead of cramped.

AMARA: How do you know when it’s finished?

MAYA: You don’t, really. You stop when the changes start making it worse. With the g it was number nineteen. I drew four more after that, and they were all worse, and I did them anyway, because I needed to be sure. That’s the part screens are very bad at. Letting you take a week to be sure of something small.

Why paper is not nostalgia

Towards the end, Amara asks why reading on paper is not nostalgia.

MAYA: A printed page can’t ask you for anything. It can’t check whether you’re still there. It just waits. I think that’s very generous, actually. It assumes you’re an adult.

A printed page can’t ask you for anything.

AMARA: And a screen doesn’t?

MAYA: A screen assumes you might leave at any moment and plans accordingly.

A phone in a drawer

Before we finish, Amara asks how Maya actually lives now. The answer is less pure than people might hope.

MAYA: I have a phone. It lives in a drawer in the kitchen at home. I check it at four o’clock every day, for about ten minutes, and then it goes back. The studio has a landline, which I answer if I feel like it. Font orders come in by email, and I read those on Friday mornings at the library, on their computers, which I know is slightly absurd.

AMARA: Would you go back?

MAYA: To the work? No. To a phone in my pocket? I think about it about once a month, usually when it’s raining and I’m at a bus stop with no idea when the bus is coming. Then the bus comes and I forget about it. I’m not trying to make a point to anyone. I just found I liked my afternoons better.

AMARA: And the letters? You said in your email, sorry, your letter, that you get a lot.

MAYA: About six a week. I answer all of them, by hand, on Thursdays. A man in his eighties wrote to tell me my capital R had a weak leg, and he was right, and I fixed it in the next version and sent him a specimen with a note saying so. He wrote back to say the new one was “adequate.” That’s the best review I’ve had.

That is where we leave it. Maya walks us down the stairs, past the framer’s, and points out the sign above his door, which she says is badly spaced between the R and the A. She has offered to redraw it for free. He has, so far, declined.

Episode notes

Mentioned in this episode:

• Ashby Text, Maya’s typeface, available from her studio as a printed specimen booklet (£12, posted) and, reluctantly, as a font file.

• Episode 97, with the bookbinder Ruth Ellery, which Amara refers back to.

• Notes on the Lower Bowl, a short pamphlet on drawing the letter g by the late typographer Arnold Vesey. Out of print and, Maya says, worth hunting for.

The Signal is made by Amara Okafor and produced by Ben Sorrell, with music by the Halden Quartet. It is supported entirely by Almanac’s readers and listeners. If you have a question for Maya, she says she will answer letters, and only letters.