According to an app on my phone that tracks my phone usage, I use it for 3.5 hours every day. This is a number I’m almost too embarrassed to admit. Nevertheless, acknowledging this number helps me with my goal of decreasing how much I use my phone. With this goal in mind, I figured I would use my “rewire” experience to find a way that would complicate the way I use my phone so that my usage time would drop. Therefore, I attempted to only use my left hand when using my phone to make my user experience less seamless. Regardless to say, I am a righty (as my name implies; pun intended).

It was weird to use all the apps with my left hand. I found it somewhat tiresome and inconvenient. Truth be told, old habits die hard and I often remembered about my goal only after having spent some time on my phone, using both of my hands. Nevertheless, when I did remember about it, my experience on my phone got a lot more complicated. Especially when texting. This made me stop my sessions on my phone faster, but I believe the main reason for that was not the inconvenience. Rather, whenever I remembered about the necessity to use the left hand, I also remembered about my goal to stop using my phone without a purpose, which then made me end the session on the phone. Therefore, I believe this “rewire” experience was a success. Nevertheless, I suspect that over time using my left hand would have become normal and I might have returned to my old habits.

On top of that, I was also curious to see if I will notice if some apps have a bias for right handed people. By this I mean, that I was trying to pay attention whether some apps are objectively easier to use if a person is right handed – similar to how regular scissors are meant for right handed people. I found that:

• Swiping FB stories further is inconvenient as the thumb stretches across the screen and blocks the view of the stories,
• Editing options for Instagram photos are all located on the top right corner of the screen making them impossible to reach only using the left hand.
• Messenger and Whatsapp have placed people’s names and photos on the left side of the screen which means that swiping the screen with my left hand blocks all the names and pictures, making it more difficult to find the person I would be looking for.

These might be small details, but it is clear the apps were designed for right handed people. I found it interesting to observe this as I would normally not pay attention to this.