In short, it is called JOMO – the Joy Of Missing Out. Among a growing number of digital native citizens, it has become a trend to occasionally turn the smartphone off, and not always carry it around in your pocket or in your bag.
At LINAK we fully understand this trend, and to accommodate users following it, we incorporate the latest findings from social sciences into our product development.
Multiple benefits – but at a cost
There is no doubt that the smartphone revolution has helped increase quality of life for people across the world.
Socializing, planning, information gathering, and generally keeping track of your family members as well as your financial transactions, have all made life easier, faster, and more efficient.
However, according to several recent studies*, many people have started to realize just how the very same devices, with all their services and technologies, can do the opposite too. The power and speed that ‘mobile technology’ offers also appear to raise users’ expectations regarding productivity and response time. We have to be efficient all the time – day and night – it seems!
Leave the phone behind and lose… nothing
Hitting the off button on your mobile device is hard, as it is your only connection with the rest of the world. Or so you may think. Users, apparently digital natives, have started to realize that existence is possible without holding a smartphone 24-7. In fact, it has started to become a status qualifier NOT to be online every now and then.
What began with leaving the phone off the table at meals and not bringing it when going on walks in nature, has in recent years evolved into so-called “offline weekends.” Some have even started to go on holiday without their smartphone.
Offlining with LINAK®
Of course, we still need our mobile devices for many purposes in our daily lives. But, as spare time becomes increasingly treasured, we begin to prioritize quiet ‘alone-time’ or time together with family and friends more. For comfort bed users, wanting to keep the mobile phone out of their bedroom, LINAK provides hand control solutions with some of the same features you know from modern smartphones.
One example is the hand control HC40 TWIST. It comes in a Standard and an Advanced edition, and the latter fully supports the offlining trend with features such as a display with time and date, flashlight, and an optional alarm clock function – on top of the traditional adjustment function of course.
All this to ensure that the user experiences a fully user-optimized hand control.
It has never been easier to leave the smartphone out of the bedroom, and without having to say goodbye to some of the very practical features from a phone. If you want to know more about how LINAK takes both online and offline into account when designing products, and when to choose one or the other for your solutions, please contact your local LINAK office.
*) Julie H. Aranda & Safia Baig. 2018. Toward “JOMO”: The Joy of Missing Out and the Freedom of Disconnecting, (MobileHCI '18) Barcelona, Spain.
