“Rather than fighting my tendency to type these two characters in my omnibar, I neutralized it.”

An interesting short story from Ernie Smith at Tedium, who ventured out to do the opposite of what we usually cover on this blog – disrespect his motor memory:

Recently, I made a realization: I have been unwillingly addicted to Facebook for a long time, and it’s not even because I like Facebook. Rather, it’s because I find it an extremely easy URL to type into a modern web browser’s omnibar. This sounds crazy, but the first two letters, f and a, are on the home row, and I don’t really rely on bookmarks, but my browser’s history function to type in URLs.

This creates a sort of recency bias. If I type in the same URL a lot, it’s the one that pops up the most. And so, if I’m at a browser with no clear idea of what my intent for the next page I load up, I inevitably type in “fa,” which would suck me in. […]

So, what I ended up doing was creating a URL that does nothing but forward to Google News. […] The result is that whenever I type in my new Facebook URL, I go to a news aggregator, which is inevitably what I was using Facebook for anyway. A week later, and my Facebook usage has gone down considerably.

There is something really interesting about creating your own URL for a purpose like this. Smith doesn’t disclose his, but you can imagine it’s something like facebook.aresluna.org that just redirects to a news aggregator. If creating a new URL is too difficult, there are always other options:

Wanna go to fatberg.com every time you load your computer? Or maybe faxtoy.net?

This is a good example of some of the challenges with “recent” interfaces I am such a big fan of. If you’re designing recents and you think they can turn against the user or otherwise get in their way, it’s good to offer not just a “clear recents” feature that gets rid of them all, like here in Apple’s Music…

…but also individual clears, like here in Bluesky:

I don’t know if this is true for all the browsers, but in Chrome and Safari, you can also clear individual suggestions this way:

Smith writes a bit more about the addictive nature of computers, but I’ll let you read on your own.