A year mostly indoors is changing what people want from a screen, and it is not what I expected.
I think a lot of us assumed people would want more. More entertainment, more features, more to fill the hours. There has been some of that. But underneath it I keep noticing the opposite instinct, a kind of exhaustion, and a quiet hunger for things that are simple and finish.
When the screen becomes the office and the classroom and the doctor and the family and the shop, all at once, it stops being a pleasure and becomes a place you cannot leave. And a person who cannot leave does not want a richer environment. They want less friction, fewer decisions, and a way out.
The businesses that seem to be holding up are almost never the ones with the most impressive product. They are the ones that let a frightened person do the thing they came to do in three taps, and then leave them alone.
It has clarified something I already half-believed. Engagement is not the same as value. If someone is spending longer with the thing I made, that is not automatically good news. It is an easy mistake to treat time on a screen as worth, and I have made it myself.
Respect someone's time and they tend to come back. Take it, and they might come back for a while too, until something kinder comes along.