Author: Abdulazeez Adeshina

As lavish influencer lifestyles, wealth flaunting, and hauls dominate social media feeds, we shouldn’t be surprised that excessive consumption has become the default way of living. We see closets filled to the brim with cheap, throw-away items and having the latest gadget arsenal as signifiers of an aspirational life.

Consumerism, however, is more than a cultural trend; it’s the backbone of our economic system. Companies eagerly drive excessive consumption as an increase in sales is directly connected to an increase in profit.

While we learned to accept this level of material consumption as normal, we need to be reminded of the massive environmental impact that comes along with it. As Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia, writes in a New York Times article:

“Obsession with the latest tech gadgets drives open pit mining for precious minerals. Demand for rubber continues to decimate rainforests. Turning these and other raw materials into final products releases one-fifth of all carbon emissions.”

— Yvon Chouinard

In the paper, Scientists’ Warning on Affluence, a group of researchers concluded that reducing material consumption today is essential to avoid the worst of the looming climate change in the coming years. This need for lowering consumption is also reflected in the UN’s Sustainability goals, specifically Goal 17, “Ensuring sustainable consumption and production patterns”.

For a long time, design has been a tool for consumer engineering by for example, designing products with artificially limited useful life (planned obsolescence) to ensure continuous consumption. And if we want to understand specifically UX design’s role in influencing how much and what people buy, we have to take a deeper look at pushy online shopping experiences.

Today, most online shopping experiences are designed with persuasion, gamification, nudging and even deception to get unsuspecting users to add more things to their basket.

There are “Hurry, only one item left in stock” type messages and countdown clocks that exploit well-known cognitive biases to nudge users to make impulse purchase decisions. As Michael Keenan explains,

“The scarcity bias says that humans place a higher value on items they believe to be rare and a lower value on things that seem abundant. Scarcity marketing harnesses this bias to make brands more desirable and increase product sales. Online stores use limited releases, flash sales, and countdown timers to induce FOMO — the fear of missing out — among shoppers.”

— Michael Keenan

To make buying things quick and effortless, we remove friction from the checkout process, for example, with the one-click-buy button. As practitioners of user-centered design, we might implement the button and say: thanks to this frictionless and easy checkout process, we improved the customer experience. Or did we just do a huge disservice to our users?

Gliding through the checkout process in seconds leaves no time for the user to ask, “Do I actually want this?” or “Do I have the money for this?”. Indeed, putting users on autopilot to make thoughtless decisions is the goal.

As a business.com article says: “Click to buy helps customers complete shopping within seconds and reduces the amount of time they have to reconsider their purchase.”

Amanda Mull writes from a user perspective about how it has become “too easy to buy stuff you don’t want”:

“The order took maybe 15 seconds. I selected my size and put the shoes in my cart, and my phone automatically filled in my login credentials and added my new credit card number. You can always return them, I thought to myself as I tapped the “Buy” button. [...] I had completed some version of the online checkout process a million times before, but I never could remember it being quite so spontaneous and thoughtless. If it’s going to be that easy all the time, I thought to myself, I’m cooked.”

— Amanda Mull

This quote also highlights that this thoughtless consumption is not only harmful to the environment but also to the very same user we say we center our design process around. The rising popularity of buy-now-pay-later services, credit card debt, and personal finance gurus to help “Overcoming Overspending” are indicators that people are spending more than they can afford, a huge source of stress for many.

The one-click-buy button is not about improving user experience but building an environment where users are “more likely to buy more and buy often.” If we care to put this bluntly, frictionless and persuasive e-commerce design is not user-centered but business-centered design.

While it is not unusual for design to be a tool to achieve business goals, we, designers, should be clear about who we are serving and at what cost with the power of design. To reckon with our impact, first, we have to understand the source of power we yield — the power asymmetry between the designer and the user.

Imagine a scale: on one end sits the designer and the user on the other. Now, let’s take an inventory of the sources of power each party has in their hands in an online shopping situation and see how the scale balances.

Designers

Designers are equipped with knowledge about psychology, biases, nudging, and persuasion techniques. If we don’t have the time to learn all that, we can reach for an out-of-the-box solution that uses those exact psychological and behavioral insights. For example, Nudgify, a Woocommerce integration, promises to help “you get more sales and reduce shopping cart abandonment by creating Urgency and removing Friction.”

Erika Hall puts it this way: “When you are designing, you are making choices on behalf of other people.” We even have a word for this: choice architecture. Choice architecture refers to the deliberate crafting of decision-making environments. By subtly shaping how options are presented, choice architecture influences individual decision-making, often without their explicit awareness.

On top of this, we also collect funnel metrics, behavioral data, and A/B test things to make sure our designs work as intended. In other words, we control the environment where the user is going to make decisions, and we are knowledgeable about how to tweak it in a way to encourage the decisions we want the user to make. Or, as Vitaly Friedman says in one of his articles:

“We’ve learned how to craft truly beautiful interfaces and well-orchestrated interactions. And we’ve also learned how to encourage action to meet the project’s requirements and drive business metrics. In fact, we can make pretty much anything work, really.”

— Vitaly Friedman

User

On the other end of the scale, we have the user who is usually unaware of our persuasion efforts, oblivious about their own biases, let alone understanding when and how those are triggered.

Luckily, regulation around Deceptive Design on e-commerce is increasing. For example, companies are not allowed to use fake countdown timers. However, these regulations are not universal, and enforcement is lax, so often users are still not protected by law against pushy shopping experiences.

After this overview, let’s see how the scale balances:

When we understand this power asymmetry between designer and user, we need to ask ourselves:

• What do I use my power for?
• What kind of “real life” user behavior am I designing for?
• What is the impact of the users’ behavior resulting from my design?

If we look at e-commerce design today, more often than not, the unfortunate answer is mindless and excessive consumption.

This needs to change. We need to use the power of design to encourage sustainable user behavior and thus move us toward a sustainable future.

The discussion about sustainable e-commerce usually revolves around recyclable packaging, green delivery, and making the site energy-efficient with sustainable UX. All these actions and angles are important and should be part of our design process, but can we build a truly sustainable e-commerce if we are still encouraging unsustainable user behavior by design?

To achieve truly sustainable e-commerce, designers must shift from encouraging impulse purchases to supporting thoughtful decisions. Instead of using persuasion, gamification, and deception to boost sales, we should use our design skills to provide users with the time, space, and information they need to make mindful purchase decisions. I call this approach Kind Commerce.

While the intent of designing Kind Commerce is noble, we have a bitter reality to deal with: we live and work in an economic system based on perpetual growth. We are often measured on achieving KPIs like “increased conversion” or “reduced cart abandonment rate”. We are expected to use UX to achieve aggressive sales goals, and often, we are not in a position to change that.

It is a frustrating situation to be in because we can argue that the system needs to change, so it is possible for UXers to move away from persuasive e-commerce design. However, system change won’t happen unless we push for it. A catch-22 situation. So, what are the things we could do today?

• Pitch Kind Commerce as a way to build strong customer relationships that will have higher lifetime value than the quick buck we would make with persuasive tricks.
• Highlight reduced costs. As Vitaly writes, using deceptive design can be costly for the company:

“Add to basket” is beautifully highlighted in green, indicating a way forward, with insurance added in automatically. That’s a clear dark pattern, of course. The design, however, is likely to drive business KPIs, i.e., increase a spend per customer. But it will also generate a wrong purchase. The implications of it for businesses might be severe and irreversible — with plenty of complaints, customer support inquiries, and high costs of processing returns.”

— Vitaly Friedman

Helping users find the right products and make decisions they won’t regret can help the company save all the resources they would need to spend on dealing with complaints and returns. On top of this, the company can save millions of dollars by avoiding lawsuits for unfair commercial practices.

• Highlight the increasing customer demand for sustainable companies.
• If you feel that your company is not open to change practices and you are frustrated about the dissonance between your day job and values, consider looking for a position where you can support a company or a cause that aligns with your values.

Add Friction

I know, I know, it sounds like an insane proposition in a profession obsessed with eliminating friction, but hear me out. Instead of “helping” users glide through the checkout process with one-click buy buttons, adding a step to review their order and give them a pause could help reduce unnecessary purchases. A positive reframing for this technique could be helpful to express our true intentions.

Instead of saying “adding friction,” we could say “adding a protective step”. Another example of “adding a protective step” could be getting rid of the “Quick Add” buttons and making users go to the product page to take a look at what they are going to buy. For example, Organic Basics doesn’t have a “Quick Add” button; users can only add things to their cart from the product page.

Inform

Once we make sure users will visit product pages, we can help them make more informed decisions. We can be transparent about the social and environmental impact of an item or provide guidelines on how to care for the product to last a long time.

For example, Asket has a section called “Lifecycle” where they highlight how to care for, repair and recycle their products. There is also a “Full Transparency” section to inform about the cost and impact of the garment.

Design Calm Pages

Aggressive landing pages where everything is moving, blinking, modals popping up, 10 different discounts are presented are overwhelming, confusing and distracting, a fertile environment for impulse decisions.

Respect your user’s attention by designing pages that don’t raise their blood pressure to 180 the second they open them. No modals automatically popping up, no flashing carousels, and no discount dumping. Aim for static banners and display offers in a clear and transparent way. For example, H&M shows only one banner highlighting a discount on their landing page, and that’s it. If a fast fashion brand like H&M can design calm pages, there is no excuse why others couldn’t.

Be Honest In Your Messaging

Fake urgency and social proof can not only get you fined for millions of dollars but also can turn users away. So simply do not add urgency messages and countdown clocks where there is no real deadline behind an offer. Don’t use fake social proof messages. Don’t say something has a limited supply when it doesn’t.

I would even take this a step further and recommend using persuasion sparingly, even if they are honest. Instead of overloading the product page with every possible persuasion method (urgency, social proof, incentive, assuming they are all honest), choose one yet impactful persuasion point.

To make it clear, I’m not advocating for designing bad or cumbersome user experiences to obstruct customers from buying things. Of course, I want a delightful and easy way to buy things we need.

I’m also well aware that design is never neutral. We need to present options and arrange user flows, and whichever way we choose to do that will influence user decisions and actions.

What I’m advocating for is at least putting the user back in the center of our design process. We read earlier that users think it is “too easy to buy things you don’t need” and feel that the current state of e-commerce design is contributing to their excessive spending. Understanding this and calling ourselves user-centered, we ought to change our approach significantly.

On top of this, I’m advocating for expanding our perspective to consider the wider environmental and social impact of our designs and align our work with the move toward a sustainable future.

E-commerce design is a practical example of how design is a part of encouraging excessive, unnecessary consumption today. In this article, we looked at what we can do on this practical level to help our users shop more mindfully. However, transforming online shopping experiences is only a part of a bigger mission: moving away from a culture where excessive consumption is the aspiration for customers and the ultimate goal of companies.

As Cliff Kuang says in his article,

“The designers of the coming era need to think of themselves as inventing a new way of living that doesn’t privilege consumption as the only expression of cultural value. At the very least, we need to start framing consumption differently.”

— Cliff Kuang

Or, as Manuel Lima puts in his book, The New Designer,

“We need the design to refocus its attention where it is needed — not in creating things that harm the environment for hundreds of years or in selling things we don’t need in a continuous push down the sales funnel but, instead, in helping people and the planet solve real problems. [...] Designs’s ultimate project is to reimagine how we produce, deliver, consume products, physical or digital, to rethink the existing business models.”

— Manuel Lima

So buckle up, designers, we have work to do!

Today, design is part of the problem of encouraging and facilitating excessive consumption through persuasive e-commerce design and through designing for companies with linear and exploitative business models. For a liveable future, we need to change this. On a tactical level, we need to start advocating and designing mindful shopping experiences, and on a strategic level, we need to use our knowledge and skills to elevate sustainable businesses.

I’m not saying that it is going to be an easy or quick transition, but the best time to start is now. In a dire state of need for sustainable transformation, designers with power and agency can’t stay silent or continue proliferating the problem.

“As designers, we need to see ourselves as gatekeepers of what we are bringing into the world and what we choose not to bring into the world. Design is a craft with responsibility. The responsibility to help create a better world for all.”

— Mike Monteiro

Imagine that you could smell this page. The introduction would emit a subtle scent of sage and lavender to set the mood. Each paragraph would fill your room with the coconut oil aroma, helping you concentrate and immerse in reading. The fragrance of the comments section, resembling a busy farmer’s market, would nudge you to share your thoughts and debate with strangers.

How would the presence of smells change your experience reading this text or influence your takeaways?

Scents are everywhere. They fill our spaces, bind our senses to objects and people, alert us to dangers, and arouse us. Smells have so much influence over our mood and behavior that hundreds of companies are busy designing fragrances for retail, enticing visitors to purchase more, hotels, making customers feel at home, and amusement parks, evoking a warm sense of nostalgia.

At the same time, the digital world, where we spend our lives working, studying, shopping, and resting, remains entirely odorless. Our smart devices are not designed to emit or recognize scents, and every corner of the Internet, including this page, smells exactly the same.

We watch movies, play games, study, and order dinner, but our sense of smell is left unengaged. The lack of odors rarely bothers us, but occasionally, we choose analog things like books merely because their digital counterparts fail to connect with us at the same level.

Could the presence of smells improve our digital experiences? What would it take to build the “smelly” Internet, and why hasn't it been done before? Last but not least, what power do scents hold over our senses, memory, and health, and how could we harness it for the digital world?

Let’s dive deep into a fascinating and underexplored realm of odors.

Why Do We Remember Smells?

In his novel In Search of Lost Time, French writer Marcel Proust describes a sense of déjà vu he experienced after tasting a piece of cake dipped in tea:

“Immediately the old gray house upon the street rose up like a stage set… the house, the town, the square where I was sent before lunch, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took… the whole of Combray and of its surroundings… sprang into being, town and gardens alike, all from my cup of tea.”

— Marcel Proust

The Proust Effect, the phenomenon of an ‘involuntary memory’ evoked by scents, is a common occurrence. It explains how the presence of a familiar smell activates areas in our brain responsible for odor recognition, causing us to experience a strong, warm, positive sense of nostalgia.

Smells have a potent and almost magical impact on our ability to remember and recognize objects and events. “The nose makes the eyes remember”, as a renowned Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa puts it: a single droplet of a familiar fragrance is often enough to bring up a wild cocktail of emotions and recollections, even those that have long been forgotten.

A memory of a place, a person, or an experience is often a memory of their smell that lingers long after the odor is gone. J. Douglas Porteous, Professor of Geography at the University of Victoria, coined the term Smellscape to describe how a collective of smells in each particular area form our perception, define our attitude, and craft our recollection of it.

To put it simply, we choose to avoid beautiful places and forget delicious meals when their odors are not to our liking. Pleasant aromas, on the other hand, alter our memory, make us overlook flaws and defects, or even fall in love.

With such an immense power that scents hold over our perception of reality, it comes as no surprise they have long become a tool in the hands of brand and service designers.

Scented Advertising

What do a luxury car brand, a cosmetics store, and a carnival ride have in common? The answer is that they all have their own distinct scents.

Carefully crafted fragrances are widely used to create brand identities, make powerful impressions, and differentiate brands “emotionally and memorably”.

Some choose to complement visual identities with subtle, tailored aromas. 12.29, a creative “olfactive branding company,” developed the “scent identity” for Cadillac, a “symbol of self-expression representing the irrepressible pursuit of life.”

The branded Cadillac scent is diffused in dealerships and auto shows around the world, evoking a sense of luxury and class. Customers are expected to remember Cadillac better for its “signature nutty coffee, dark leather, and resinous amber notes”, forging a strong emotional connection with the brand.

Next time they think of Cadillac, their brain will recall its signature fragrance and the way it made them feel. Cadillac is ready to bet they will not even consider other brands afterwards.

Others may be less subtle and employ more aggressive, fragrant marketing tactics. LUSH, a British cosmetics retailer, is known for its distinct smells. Although even the company co-founder admits that odors can be overwhelming for some, LUSH’s scents play an important role in crafting the brand’s identity.

Indeed, the aroma of their stores is so recognizable that it lures customers in from afar with ease, and few walk away without forever remembering the brand’s distinct smell.

However, retail is not the only area that employs discernible smells.

Disney takes a holistic approach to service design, carefully considering every aspect that influences customer satisfaction. Smells have long been a part of the signature “Disney experience”: the main street smells like pastry and popcorn, Spaceship Earth is filled with the burning wood aroma, and Soarin’ is accompanied by notes of orange and pine.

Dozens of scent-emitting devices, Smellitzers, are responsible for adding scents to each experience. Deployed around each park and perfectly synced with every other sensory stimulus, they “shoot scents toward passersby” and “trigger memories of childhood nostalgia.”

As shown in the patent, Smellitzer is a rather simple odor delivery system designed to “enhance the sense of flight created in the minds of the passengers.” Scents are carefully curated and manufactured to evoke precise emotions without disrupting the ride experience.

Disney’s attractions, lanes, and theaters are packed with smell-emitting gadgets that distribute sweet and savoury notes. The visitors barely notice the presence of added scents, but later inevitably experience a sudden but persistent urge to return to the park.

Could it be something in the air, perhaps?

Well-curated, timely delivered, recognizable scents can be a powerful ally in the hands of a designer.

They can soothe a passenger during a long flight with the subtle notes of chamomile and mint or seduce a hungry shopper with the familiar aroma of freshly baked cinnamon buns. Scents can create and evoke great memories, amplify positive emotions, or turn casual buyers into eager and loyal consumers.

Unfortunately, smells can also ruin otherwise decent experiences.

Why Fragrant Cinema Failed

In 1912, Aldous Huxley, author of the dystopian novel Brave New World, published an essay “Silence is Golden”, reflecting on his first experience watching a sound film. Huxley despised cinema, calling it the “most frightful creation-saving device for the production of standardized amusement”, and the addition of sound made the writer concerned for the future of entertainment. Films engaged multiple senses but demanded no intellectual involvement, becoming more accessible, more immersive, and, as Huxley feared, more influential.

“Brave New World,” published in 1932, features the cinema of the future — a multisensory entertainment complex designed to distract society from seeking a deeper sense of purpose in life. Attendees enjoy a ​​“scent organ” playing “a delightfully refreshing Herbal Capriccio — rippling arpeggios of thyme and lavender, of rosemary, basil, myrtle, tarragon,” and get to experience every physical stimulation imaginable.

Huxley’s critical take on the state of the entertainment industry was spot-on. Obsessed with the idea of multisensory entertainment, studios did not take long to begin investing in immersive experiences. The 1950s were the age of experiments designed to attract more viewers: colored cinema, 3D films, and, of course, scented movies.

In 1960, two films hit the American theaters: Scent of Mystery, accompanied by the odor-delivery technology called “Smell–O–Vision”, and Behind the Great Wall, employing the process named AromaRama. Smell–O–Vision was designed to transport scents through tubes to each seat, much like Disney’s Smellitzers, whereas AromaRama distributed smells through the theater’s ventilation.

Both scented movies were panned by critics and viewers alike. In his review for the New York Times, Bosley Crowther wrote that “...synthetic smells [...] occasionally befit what one is viewing, but more often they confuse the atmosphere”. Audiences complained about smells being either too subtle or too overpowering and the machines disrupting the viewing experience.

The groundbreaking technologies were soon forgotten, and all plans to release more scented films were scrapped.

Why did odors, so efficient at manufacturing nostalgic memories of an amusement park, fail to entertain the audience at the movies? On the one hand, it may attributed to the technological limitations of the time. For instance, AromaRama diffused the smells into the ventilation, which significantly delayed the delivery and required scents to be removed between scenes. Suffice it to say the viewers did not enjoy the experience.

However, there could be other possible explanations.

First of all, digital entertainment is traditionally odorless. Viewers do not anticipate movies to be accompanied by smells, and their brains are conditioned to ignore them. Researchers call it “inattentional anosmia”: people connect their enjoyment with what they see on the screen, not what they smell or taste.

Moreover, background odors tend to fade and become less pronounced with time. A short exposure to a pleasant odor may be complimentary. For instance, viewers could smell orange as the character in “Behind the Great Wall” cut and squeezed the fruit: an “impressive” moment, as admitted by critics. However, left to linger, even the most pleasant scents can leave the viewer uninvolved or irritated.

Finally, cinema does not require active sensory involvement. Viewers sit still in silence, rarely even moving their heads, while their sight and hearing are busy consuming and interpreting the information. Immersion requires suspension of disbelief: well-crafted films force the viewer to forget the reality around them, but the addition of scents may disrupt this state, especially if scents are not relevant or well-crafted.

For the scented movie to engage the audience, smells must be integrated into the film’s events and play an important role in the viewing experience. Their delivery must be impeccable: discreet, smooth, and perfectly timed. In time, perhaps, we may see the revival of scented cinema. Until then, rare auteur experiments and 4D–cinema booths at carnivals will remain the only places where fragrant films will live on.

Fortunately, the lessons from the early experiments helped others pave the way for the future of fragrant entertainment.

Immersive Gaming

Unlike movies, video games require active participation. Players are involved in crafting the narrative of the game and, as such, may expect (and appreciate) a higher degree of realism. Virtual Reality is a good example of technology designed for full sensory stimulation.

Modern headsets are impressive, but several companies are already working hard on the next-gen tech for immersive gaming. Meta and Manus are developing gloves that make virtual elements tangible. Teslasuit built a full-body suit that captures motion and biometry, provides haptic feedback, and emulates sensations for objects in virtual reality. We may be just a few steps away from virtual multi-sensory entertainment being as widespread as mobile phones.

Scents are coming to VR, too, albeit at a slower pace, with a few companies already selling devices for fragrant entertainment. For instance, GameScent has developed a cube that can distribute up to 8 smells, from “gunfire” and “explosion” to “forest” and “storm”, using AI to sync the odors with the events in the game.

The vast majority of experiments, however, occur in the labs, where researchers attempt to understand how smells impact gamers and test various concepts. Some assign smells to locations in a VR game and distribute them to players; others have the participants use a hand-held device to “smell” objects in the game.

The majority of studies demonstrate promising results. The addition of fragrances creates a deeper sense of immersion and enhances realism in virtual reality and in a traditional gaming setting.

A notable example of the latter is “Tainted”, an immersive game based on South-East Asian folklore, developed by researchers in 2017. The objective of the game is to discover and burn banana trees, where the main antagonist of the story — a mythical vengeful spirit named Pontianak — is traditionally believed to hide.

The way “Tainted” incorporates smells into the gameplay is quite unique. A scent-emitting module, placed in front of the player, diffuses fragrances to complement the narrative. For instance, the smell of banana signals the ghost’s presence, whereas pineapple aroma means that a flammable object required to complete the quest is nearby. Odors inform the player of dangers, give directions, and become an integral part of the gaming experience, like visuals and sound.

Some of the most creative examples of scented learning come from places that combine education and entertainment, most notably, museums.

Jorvik Viking Centre is famous for its use of “smells of Viking-age York” to capture the unique atmosphere of the past. Its scented halls, holograms, and entertainment programs turn a former archeological site into a carnival ride that teleports visitors into the 10th century to immerse them into the daily life of the Vikings.

Authentic smells are the center’s distinct feature, an integral part of its branding and marketing, and an important addition to its collection. Smells are responsible for making Jorvik exhibitions so memorable, and hopefully, for visitors walking away with a few Viking trivia facts firmly stuck in their heads.

At the same time, learning is becoming increasingly more digital, from mobile apps for foreign languages to student portals and online universities. Smart devices strive to replace classrooms with their analog textbooks, papers, gel pens, and teachers. Virtual Reality is a step towards the future of immersive digital education, and odors may play a more significant role in making it even more efficient.

Education will undoubtedly continue leveraging the achievements of the digital revolution to complement its existing tools. Tablets and Kindles are on their way to replace textbooks and pens. Phones are no longer deemed a harmful distraction that causes brain cancer.

Odors, in turn, are becoming “learning supplements”. Teachers and parents have access to personalized diffusers that distribute the smell of peppermint to enhance students’ attention. Large scent-emitting devices for educational facilities are available on the market, too.

At the same time, inspired to figure out the way to upload knowledge straight into our brains, we’ve discovered a way to learn things in our sleep using smells. Several studies have shown that exposure to scents during sleep significantly improves cognitive abilities and memory. More than that, smells can activate our memory while we sleep and solidify what we have learnt while awake.

Odors may not replace textbooks and lectures, but their addition will make remembering and recalling things significantly easier. In fact, researchers from MIT built and tested a wearable scent-emitting device that can be used for targeted memory reactivation.

In time, we will undoubtedly see more smart devices that make use of scents for memory enhancement, training, and entertainment. Integrated into the ecosystems of gadgets, olfactory wearables and smart home appliances will improve our well-being, increase productivity, and even detect early symptoms of illnesses.

There is, however, a caveat.

We know very little about smells.

Until 2004, when Richard Axel and Linda Buck received a Nobel Prize for identifying the genes that control odor receptors, we didn’t even know how our bodies processed smells or that different areas in our brains were activated by different odors.

We know that our experience with smells is deep and intimate, from the memories they create to the emotions they evoke. We are aware that unpleasant scents linger longer and have a stronger impact on our mental state and memory. Finally, we understand that intensity, context, and delivery matter as much as the scent itself and that a decent aroma diffused out of place ruins the experience.

Thus, if we wish to build devices that make the best use of scents, we need to follow a few simple principles.

Design Principle #1: Tailor The Scents To Each User

In his article about Smellscapes, J. Douglas Porteous writes:

“The smell of a certain institutional soap may carry a person back to the purgatory of boarding school. A particular floral fragrance reminds one of a lost love. A gust of odour from an ethnic spice emporium may waft one back, in memory, to Calcutta.”

— J. Douglas Porteous

Smells revive hidden memories and evoke strong emotions, but their connection to our minds is deeply personal. A rich, spicy aroma of freshly roasted coffee beans will not have the same impact on different people, and in order to use scents in learning, we need to tailor the experience to each user.

In order to maximize the potential of odors in immersion and learning, we need to understand which smells have the most impact on the user. By filtering out the smells that the user finds unpleasant or associates with sad events in their past, we can reduce any potential negative effect on their wellness or memory.

Design Principle #2: Stick To The Simpler Smells

Humans are notoriously bad at describing odors.

Very few languages in the world feature specific terms for smells. For instance, the speakers of Jahai, a language in Malaysia, enjoy the privilege of having specific names for scents like “bloody smell that attracts tigers” and “wild mango, wild ginger roots, bat caves, and petrol”.

English, on the other hand, often uses adjectives associated with flavor (“smoky vanilla”) or comparison (“smells like orange”) to describe scents. For centuries, we have been trying to work out a system that could help cluster odors.

Aristotle classified all odors into six groups: sweet, acid, severe, fatty, sour, and fetid (unpleasant). Carl Linnaeus expanded it to 7 types: aromatic, fragrant, alliaceous (garlic), ambrosial (musky), hircinous (goaty), repulsive, and nauseous. Hans Henning arranged all scent groups in a prism. None of the existing classifications, however, help accurately describe complex smells, which inevitably makes it harder to recreate them.

Academics have developed several comprehensive lists, for instance, the Odor Character Profiling that contains 146 unique descriptors. Pleasant smells from the list are easier to reproduce than unique and sophisticated odors.

Although an aroma of the “warm touch of an early summer sun” may work better for a particular user than the smell of an apple pie, the high price of getting the scent wrong makes it a reasonable trade-off.

Design Principle #3: Ensure Stable And Convenient Delivery

Nothing can ruin a good olfactory experience more than an imperfect delivery system.

Disney’s Smellitzers and Jorvik’s scented exhibition set the standard for discreet, contextual, and consistent inclusion of smells to complement the experience. Their diffusers are well-concealed, and odors do not come off as overwhelming or out of place.

On the other hand, the failure of scented movies from the 1950s can at least partially be attributed to poorly designed aroma delivery systems. Critics remembered that even the purifying treatment that was used to clear the theater air between scenes left a “sticky, sweet” and “upsetting” smell.

Good delivery systems are often simple and focus on augmenting the experience without disrupting it. For instance, eScent, a scent-enhanced FFP3 mask, is engineered to reduce stress and improve the well-being of frontline workers. The mask features a slot for applicators infused with essential oil; users can choose fragrances and swap the applicator whenever they want. Beside that, eScent is no different from its “analog” predecessor: it does not require special equipment or preparation, and the addition of smells does not alter the experience of wearing a mask.

We may know little about smells, but we are steadily getting closer to harnessing their power.

In 2022, Alex Wiltschko, a former Google staff research scientist, founded Osmo, a company dedicated to “giving computers a sense of smell.” In the long run, Osmo aspires to use its knowledge to manufacture scents on demand from sustainable synthetic materials.

Today, the company operates as a research lab, using a trained AI to predict the smell of a substance by analyzing its molecular structure. Osmo’s first tests demonstrated some promising results, with machine accurately describing the scents in 53% of cases.

Should Osmo succeed at building a machine capable of recognizing and predicting smells, it will change the digital world forever. How will we interact with our smart devices? How will we use their newly discovered sense of smell to exchange information, share precious memories with each other, or relive moments from the past? Is now the right time for us to come up with ideas, products, and services for the future?

Odors are a booming industry that offers designers and engineers a unique opportunity to explore new and brave concepts. With the help of smells, we can transform entire industries, from education to healthcare, crafting immersive multi-sensory experiences for learning and leisure.

Smells are a powerful tool that requires precision and perfection to reach the desired effect. Our past shortcomings may have tainted the reputation of scented experiences, but recent progress demonstrates that we have learnt our lessons well. Modern technologies make it even easier to continue the explorations and develop new ways to use smells in entertainment, learning, and wellness — in the real world and beyond.

Our digital spaces may be devoid of scents, but they will not remain odorless for long.

This article is a sponsored by Sentry.io

Google Lighthouse has been one of the most effective ways to gamify and promote web page performance among developers. Using Lighthouse, we can assess web pages based on overall performance, accessibility, SEO, and what Google considers “best practices”, all with the click of a button.

We might use these tests to evaluate out-of-the-box performance for front-end frameworks or to celebrate performance improvements gained by some diligent refactoring. And you know you love sharing screenshots of your perfect Lighthouse scores on social media. It’s a well-deserved badge of honor worthy of a confetti celebration.

Just the fact that Lighthouse gets developers like us talking about performance is a win. But, whilst I don’t want to be a party pooper, the truth is that web performance is far more nuanced than this. In this article, we’ll examine how Google Lighthouse calculates its performance scores, and, using this information, we will attempt to “hack” those scores in our favor, all in the name of fun and science — because in the end, Lighthouse is simply a good, but rough guide for debugging performance. We’ll have some fun with it and see to what extent we can “trick” Lighthouse into handing out better scores than we may deserve.

But first, let’s talk about data.

Local performance testing is a great way to understand if your website performance is trending in the right direction, but it won’t paint a full picture of reality. The World Wide Web is the Wild West, and collectively, we’ve almost certainly lost track of the variety of device types, internet connection speeds, screen sizes, browsers, and browser versions that people are using to access websites — all of which can have an impact on page performance and user experience.

Field data — and lots of it — collected by an application performance monitoring tool like Sentry from real people using your website on their devices will give you a far more accurate report of your website performance than your lab data collected from a small sample size using a high-spec super-powered dev machine under a set of controlled conditions. Philip Walton reported in 2021 that “almost half of all pages that scored 100 on Lighthouse didn’t meet the recommended Core Web Vitals thresholds” based on data from the HTTP Archive.

Web performance is more than a single core web vital metric or Lighthouse performance score. What we’re talking about goes way beyond the type of raw data we’re working with.

Speed is often the first thing that comes up when talking about web performance — just how long does a page take to load? This isn’t the worst thing to measure, but we must bear in mind that speed is probably influenced heavily by business KPIs and sales targets. Google released a report in 2018 suggesting that the probability of bounces increases by 32% if the page load time reaches higher than three seconds, and soars to 123% if the page load time reaches 10 seconds. So, we must conclude that converting more sales requires reducing bounce rates. And to reduce bounce rates, we must make our pages load faster.

But what does “load faster” even mean? At some point, we’re physically incapable of making a web page load any faster. Humans — and the servers that connect them — are spread around the globe, and modern internet infrastructure can only deliver so many bytes at a time.

The bottom line is that page load is not a single moment in time. In an article titled “What is speed?” Google explains that a page load event is:

[…] “an experience that no single metric can fully capture. There are multiple moments during the load experience that can affect whether a user perceives it as ‘fast’, and if you just focus solely on one, you might miss bad experiences that happen during the rest of the time.”

The key word here is experience. Real web performance is less about numbers and speed than it is about how we experience page load and page usability as users. And this segues nicely into a discussion of how Google Lighthouse calculates performance scores. (It’s much less about pure speed than you might think.)

The Google Lighthouse performance score is calculated using a weighted combination of scores based on core web vital metrics (i.e., First Contentful Paint (FCP), Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)) and other speed-related metrics (i.e., Speed Index (SI) and Total Blocking Time (TBT)) that are observable throughout the page load timeline.

This is how the metrics are weighted in the overall score:

The weighting assigned to each score gives us insight into how Google prioritizes the different building blocks of a good user experience:

1. A Web Page Should Respond to User Input

The highest weighted metric is Total Blocking Time (TBT), a metric that looks at the total time after the First Contentful Paint (FCP) to help indicate where the main thread may be blocked long enough to prevent speedy responses to user input. The main thread is considered “blocked” any time there’s a JavaScript task running on the main thread for more than 50ms. Minimizing TBT ensures that a web page responds to physical user input (e.g., key presses, mouse clicks, and so on).

2. A Web Page Should Load Useful Content With No Unexpected Visual Shifts

The next most weighted Lighthouse metrics are Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). LCP marks the point in the page load timeline when the page’s main content has likely loaded and is therefore useful.

At the point where the main content has likely loaded, you also want to maintain visual stability to ensure that users can use the page and are not affected by unexpected visual shifts (CLS). A good LCP score is anything less than 2.5 seconds (which is a lot higher than we might have thought, given we are often trying to make our websites as fast as possible).

3. A Web Page Should Load Something

The First Contentful Paint (FCP) metric marks the first point in the page load timeline where the user can see something on the screen, and the Speed Index (SI) measures how quickly content is visually displayed during page load over time until the page is “complete”.

Your page is scored based on the speed indices of real websites using performance data from the HTTP Archive. A good FCP score is less than 1.8 seconds and a good SI score is less than 3.4 seconds. Both of these thresholds are higher than you might expect when thinking about speed.

Google Lighthouse’s performance scoring is, without a doubt, less about speed and more about usability. Your SI and FCP could be super quick, but if your LCP takes too long to paint, and if CLS is caused by large images or external content taking some time to load and shifting things visually, then your overall performance score will be lower than if your page was a little slower to render the FCP but didn’t cause any CLS. Ultimately, if the page is unresponsive due to JavaScript blocking the main thread for more than 50ms, your performance score will suffer more than if the page was a little slow to paint the FCP.

To understand more about how the weightings of each metric contribute to the final performance score, you can play about with the sliders on the Lighthouse Scoring Calculator, and here’s a rudimentary table demonstrating the effect of skewed individual metric weightings on the overall performance score, proving that page usability and responsiveness is favored over raw speed.

The overall Google Lighthouse performance score is calculated by converting each raw metric value into a score from 0 to 100 according to where it falls on its Lighthouse scoring distribution, which is a log-normal distribution derived from the performance metrics of real website performance data from the HTTP Archive. There are two main takeaways from this mathematically overloaded information:

1. Your Lighthouse performance score is plotted against real website performance data, not in isolation.
2. Given that the scoring uses log-normal distribution, the relationship between the individual metric values and the overall score is non-linear, meaning you can make substantial improvements to low-performance scores quite easily, but it becomes more difficult to improve an already high score.

Read more about how metric scores are determined, including a visualization of the log-normal distribution curve on developer.chrome.com.

I appreciate Google’s focus on usability over pure speed in the web performance conversation. It urges developers to think less about aiming for raw numbers and more about the real experiences we build. That being said, I’ve wondered whether today in 2024, it’s possible to fool Google Lighthouse into believing that a bad page in terms of usability and usefulness is actually a great one.

I put on my lab coat and science goggles to investigate. All tests were conducted:

• Using the Chromium Lighthouse plugin,
• In an incognito window in the Arc browser,
• Using the “navigation” and “mobile” settings (apart from where described differently),
• By me, in a lab (i.e., no field data).

That all being said, I fully acknowledge that my controlled test environment contradicts my advice at the top of this post, but the experiment is an interesting ride nonetheless. What I hope you’ll take away from this is that Lighthouse scores are only one piece — and a tiny one at that — of a very large and complex web performance puzzle. And, without field data, I’m not sure any of this matters anyway.

TL;DR: Show the smallest amount of LCP-qualifying content on load to boost the FCP and LCP scores until the Lighthouse test has likely finished.

FCP marks the first point in the page load timeline where the user can see anything at all on the screen, while LCP marks the point in the page load timeline when the main page content (i.e., the largest text or image element) has likely loaded. A fast LCP helps reassure the user that the page is useful. “Likely” and “useful” are the important words to bear in mind here.

What Counts as an LCP Element

The types of elements on a web page considered by Lighthouse for LCP are:

• <img> elements,
• <image> elements inside an <svg> element,
• <video> elements,
• An element with a background image loaded using the url() function, (and not a CSS gradient), and
• Block-level elements containing text nodes or other inline-level text elements.

The following elements are excluded from LCP consideration due to the likelihood they do not contain useful content:

• Elements with zero opacity (invisible to the user),
• Elements that cover the full viewport (likely to be background elements), and
• Placeholder images or other images with low entropy (i.e., low informational content, such as a solid-colored image).

However, the notion of an image or text element being useful is completely subjective in this case and generally out of the realm of what machine code can reliably determine. For example, I built a page containing nothing but a <h1> element where, after 10 seconds, JavaScript inserts more descriptive text into the DOM and hides the <h1> element.

Lighthouse considers the heading element to be the LCP element in this experiment. At this point, the page load timeline has finished, but the page’s main content has not loaded, even though Lighthouse thinks it is likely to have loaded within those 10 seconds. Lighthouse still awards us with a perfect score of 100 even if the heading is replaced by a single punctuation mark, such as a full stop, which is even less useful.

This test suggests that if you need to load page content via client-side JavaScript, we‘ll want to avoid displaying a skeleton loader screen since that requires loading more elements on the page. And since we know the process will take some time — and that we can offload the network request from the main thread to a web worker so it won’t affect the TBT — we can use some arbitrary “splash screen” that contains a minimal viable LCP element (for better FCP scoring). This way, we’re giving Lighthouse the impression that the page is useful to users quicker than it actually is.

All we need to do is include a valid LCP element that contains something that counts as the FCP. While I would never recommend loading your main page content via client-side JavaScript in 2024 (serve static HTML from a CDN instead or build as much of the page as you can on a server), I would definitely not recommend this “hack” for a good user experience, regardless of what the Lighthouse performance score tells you. This approach also won’t earn you any favors with search engines indexing your site, as the robots are unable to discover the main content while it is absent from the DOM.

I also tried this experiment with a variety of random images representing the LCP to make the page even less useful. But given that I used small file sizes — made smaller and converted into “next-gen” image formats using a third-party image API to help with page load speed — it seemed that Lighthouse interpreted the elements as “placeholder images” or images with “low entropy”. As a result, those images were disqualified as LCP elements, which is a good thing and makes the LCP slightly less hackable.

View the demo page and use Chromium DevTools in an incognito window to see the results yourself.

This hack, however, probably won’t hold up in many other use cases. Discord, for example, uses the “splash screen” approach when you hard-refresh the app in the browser, and it receives a sad 29 performance score.

Compared to my DOM-injected demo, the LCP element was calculated as some content behind the splash screen rather than elements contained within the splash screen content itself, given there were one or more large images in the focussed text channel I tested on. One could argue that Lighthouse scores are less important for apps that are behind authentication anyway: they don’t need to be indexed by search engines.

There are likely many other situations where apps serve user-generated content and you might be unable to control the LCP element entirely, particularly regarding images.

For example, if you can control the sizes of all the images on your web pages, you might be able to take advantage of an interesting hack or “optimization” (in very large quotes) to arbitrarily game the system, as was the case of RentPath. In 2021, developers at RentPath managed to improve their Lighthouse performance score by 17 points when increasing the size of image thumbnails on a web page. They convinced Lighthouse to calculate the LCP element as one of the larger thumbnails instead of a Google Map tile on the page, which takes considerably longer to load via JavaScript.

The bottom line is that you can gain higher Lighthouse performance scores if you are aware of your LCP element and in control of it, whether that’s through a hack like RentPath’s or mine or a real-deal improvement. That being said, whilst I’ve described the splash screen approach as a hack in this post, that doesn’t mean this type of experience couldn’t offer a purposeful and joyful experience. Performance and user experience are about understanding what’s happening during page load, and it’s also about intent.

TL;DR: Defer loading content that causes layout shifts until the Lighthouse test has likely finished to make the test think it has enough data. CSS transforms do not negatively impact CLS, except if used in conjunction with new elements added to the DOM.

CLS is measured on a decimal scale; a good score is less than 0.1, and a poor score is greater than 0.25. Lighthouse calculates CLS from the largest burst of unexpected layout shifts that occur during a user’s time on the page based on a combination of the viewport size and the movement of unstable elements in the viewport between two rendered frames. Smaller one-off instances of layout shift may be inconsequential, but a bunch of layout shifts happening one after the other will negatively impact your score.

If you know your page contains annoying layout shifts on load, you can defer them until after the page load event has been completed, thus fooling Lighthouse into thinking there is no CLS. This demo page I created, for example, earns a CLS score of 0.143 even though JavaScript immediately starts adding new text elements to the page, shifting the original content up. By pausing the JavaScript that adds new nodes to the DOM by an arbitrary five seconds with a setTimeout(), Lighthouse doesn’t capture the CLS that takes place.

This other demo page earns a performance score of 100, even though it is arguably less useful and useable than the last page given that the added elements pop in seemingly at random without any user interaction.

Whilst it is possible to defer layout shift events for a page load test, this hack definitely won’t work for field data and user experience over time (which is a more important focal point, as we discussed earlier). If we perform a “time span” test in Lighthouse on the page with deferred layout shifts, Lighthouse will correctly report a non-green CLS score of around 0.186.

If you do want to intentionally create a chaotic experience similar to the demo, you can use CSS animations and transforms to more purposefully pop the content into view on the page. In Google’s guide to CLS, they state that “content that moves gradually and naturally from one position to another can often help the user better understand what’s going on and guide them between state changes” — again, highlighting the importance of user experience in context.

On this next demo page, I’m using CSS transform to scale() the text elements from 0 to 1 and move them around the page. The transforms fail to trigger CLS because the text nodes are already in the DOM when the page loads. That said, I did observe in my testing that if the text nodes are added to the DOM programmatically after the page loads via JavaScript and then animated, Lighthouse will indeed detect CLS and score things accordingly.

The Speed Index score is based on the visual progress of the page as it loads. The quicker your content loads nearer the beginning of the page load timeline, the better.

It is possible to do some hack to trick the Speed Index into thinking a page load timeline is slower than it is. Conversely, there’s no real way to “fake” loading content faster than it does. The only way to make your Speed Index score better is to optimize your web page for loading as much of the page as possible, as soon as possible. Whilst not entirely realistic in the web landscape of 2024 (mainly because it would put designers out of a job), you could go all-in to lower your Speed Index as much as possible by:

• Delivering static HTML web pages only (no server-side rendering) straight from a CDN,
• Avoiding images on the page,
• Minimizing or eliminating CSS, and
• Preventing JavaScript or any external dependencies from loading.

TBT measures the total time after the FCP where the main thread was blocked by JavaScript tasks for long enough to prevent responses to user input. A good TBT score is anything lower than 200ms.

JavaScript-heavy web applications (such as single-page applications) that perform complex state calculations and DOM manipulation on the client on page load (rather than on the server before sending rendered HTML) are prone to suffering poor TBT scores. In this case, you could probably hack your TBT score by deferring all JavaScript until after the Lighthouse test has finished. That said, you’d need to provide some kind of placeholder content or loading screen to satisfy the FCP and LCP and to inform users that something will happen at some point. Plus, you’d have to go to extra lengths to hack around the front-end framework you’re using. (You don’t want to load a placeholder page that, at some point in the page load timeline, loads a separate React app after an arbitrary amount of time!)

What’s interesting is that while we’re still doing all sorts of fancy things with JavaScript in the client, advances in the modern web ecosystem are helping us all reduce the probability of a less-than-stellar TBT score. Many front-end frameworks, in partnership with modern hosting providers, are capable of rendering pages and processing complex logic on demand without any client-side JavaScript. While eliminating JavaScript on the client is not the goal, we certainly have a lot of options to use a lot less of it, thus minimizing the risk of doing too much computation on the main thread on page load.

Google Lighthouse can’t detect everything that’s wrong with a particular website. Whilst Lighthouse performance scores prioritize page usability in terms of responding to user input, it still can’t detect every terrible usability or accessibility issue in 2024.

In 2019, Manuel Matuzović published an experiment where he intentionally created a terrible page that Lighthouse thought was pretty great. I hypothesized that five years later, Lighthouse might do better; but it doesn’t.

On this final demo page I put together, input events are disabled by CSS and JavaScript, making the page technically unresponsive to user input. After five seconds, JavaScript flips a switch and allows you to click the button. The page still scores 100 for both performance and accessibility.

You really can’t rely on Lighthouse as a substitute for usability testing and common sense.

As with everything in life, there’s always a way to game the system. Here are some more tried and tested guaranteed hacks to make sure your Lighthouse performance score artificially knocks everyone else’s out of the park:

• Only run Lighthouse tests using the fastest and highest-spec hardware.
• Make sure your internet connection is the fastest it can be; relocate if you need to.
• Never use field data, only lab data, collected using the aforementioned fastest and highest-spec hardware and super-speed internet connection.
• Rerun the tests in the lab using different conditions and all the special code hacks I described in this post until you get the result(s) you want to impress your friends, colleagues, and random people on the internet.

Note: The best way to learn about web performance and how to optimize your websites is to do the complete opposite of everything we’ve covered in this article all of the time. And finally, to seriously level up your performance skills, use an application monitoring tool like Sentry. Think of Lighthouse as the canary and Sentry as the real-deal production-data-capturing, lean, mean, web vitals machine.

And finally-finally, here’s the link to the full demo site for educational purposes.