Attention is the budget
Software is costed in engineering weeks. It is paid for in user attention, and nobody keeps that ledger.
A notification costs a context switch. A new tab in the navigation costs a scan on every visit, forever, from everyone. A setting costs a decision. These are small individually and they are charged to every user on every session, which makes them the largest recurring expense most products have.
Session shape
Design around how long someone actually has, not how long you’d like them to stay. A tool used in four-minute gaps between calls needs to resume where it left off, hold no state in the user’s head, and complete something in four minutes. The same tool designed for a leisurely half-hour is unusable in the gap, and the gap is where it’s actually opened.
Interruption is the expensive one. Recovering a train of thought after a context switch takes minutes, not seconds, so a notification that saves someone thirty seconds of checking has still cost them more than it gave — unless it’s genuinely urgent, and almost nothing is.
Batching beats immediacy nearly everywhere. Digest over ping. Async over meeting. Nothing over digest, most of the time.
Onboarding tours are the standard removal. They go in during a week, almost nobody finishes one, and every user pays the interruption on their first and most fragile visit. Taking one out usually moves nothing measurable, which gets read as proof it didn’t matter — when it is really proof that the cost was carried by people who never became users, and so never appeared in the numbers anyone was watching.
Where it breaks
“Respect attention” is easy to say and structurally disadvantaged, because attention-respecting choices show up as flat numbers.
Remove the notification and engagement drops. It drops whether or not the product got better, and the dashboard cannot distinguish the two. You’ll be arguing a qualitative case against a quantitative one, quarterly, and mostly losing. That’s the real reason products get noisier — not villainy, just asymmetric evidence.
The principle also gets misread as minimalism. Fewer features is not the same as less attention spent. A product stripped so far that people need three tools and manual copying between them has increased total cost while looking clean. Sometimes the attention-respecting move is a dense, information-heavy interface that lets an expert see everything at once. Airline crews don’t want progressive disclosure.
And it cuts both ways internally. Protecting focus blocks and going async is right for deep work, and it is genuinely worse for the fast, ambiguous conversations where a five-minute call replaces two days of thread. Teams that adopt async as an ideology rather than a default trade interruption for latency and call it discipline.
Takeaway: design for sustained attention, not maximal engagement.