Product-Design

The Anti-Engagement Product

Sojourn, the bedtime-story app I’m building, has a success metric that most product people find hard to accept. The metric is that the listener falls asleep. The numbers a product person lives by — session length, retention, daily actives — all point the wrong way here. The whole machine is tuned to end the session as quickly and gently as it can, and then to not only be entirely fine with you not opening it again tonight, but to celebrate that. The audio fades to silence on a timer. There is no streak, no notification, no come-back-tomorrow nudge, no social anything. The product is, in the most literal sense, trying to get rid of you.