UX Design
Are people reading onto the next line of your blog post?
Are they clicking through the next page?
Are they actually paying attention throughout your content?
One solution to the problem of engagement is to feed your audience’s most natural addiction.
“Humans are pattern-seeking story-telling animals, and we are quite adept at telling stories about patterns, whether they exist or not.”
– source
With our tendency to organize the world into logical categories that make sense to us, we instinctively seek out similarities and search for patterns in an attempt to find order.
As a people we’re addicted to order and averse to chaos. The difference between « noise » and « music », « stuff happening » and « story », is a strategically composed experience built to provoke our pattern-addicted brains. With this in mind, you can encourage engagement by better channeling your audience’s attention through a piece of content. You can even strategically surprise your audience when you know what they’re expecting.
- Make your content easier to follow for the people who consume it
- Deliver a more enjoyable experience for your audience
- Demonstrate creativity and impress your audience
- Create cohesion without being predictable
Why stories are so popular?
Do you watch Instagram Stories? They’ve become my guilty pleasure.
One of the reasons why stories are effective at engaging audiences is because they rely on familiar formulas. People innately understand the direction a story will go because they’ve experienced similar patterns before.
When you predict the ending of a movie or see a plot twist coming, it might be because you’ve caught on to a pattern you’ve already seen elsewhere.
If you feel like you’re more addicted to Instagram now than you were a year ago, blame Stories.
Development
Addiction is a brain disorder characterized by compulsive engagement in rewarding stimuli, despite adverse consequences.
– source
How tech companies value your skills is often the result of a simple equation with a short time spent on a good quality render that drives to a great transformation. Geeks are known to dive deep into their passion that make them magicians in some ways. The pursuit of perfection is therefore naturally used to create a competition.
The web development environment goes so fast that we don’t want to miss new technologies, faster or more efficient frameworks to work with and other security breaches. There is always this need to remain up to date of course. Learn more and improve skills. Unfortunately the side effect appears when it makes us addicted to news through Twitter, RSS feeds, Medium, Github pages and more.
Some developers encounter this all-consuming feeling that they are missing out something that peers are doing better. It’s certainly not a good thing and let you check these channels again and again to not feel out of the loop. Especially for freelancers who work in a narrow social and professional network.
Reading these posts help you to not feel left out.
Caught in the FOMO cycle? You’re probably not feeling great about your life or your professional field of expertise so you turn to information like social media and blogs to feel better. Only one problem: it could makes you feel even worse…
Still wondering why? Because comparisons to people or projects that seem better than yours tend to make you focus on what you don’t have in opposition to what you do.
It’s easy to mistake the flow of creativity of a whole community and what you can achieve on your own at once. Confidence and happiness in code is more about what you do than what you read. When you spend all that time staring at these so cool posts this is your projects you’re missing out on.
Social Media Management
Addiction is defined as a state of being enslaved to a habit or practice or to something that is psychologically or physically habit-forming, as narcotics, to such an extent that its cessation causes severe trauma. Addiction is then a very strong word.
Technology addiction is nowadays a thing. But it isn’t seen globaly as a bad thing. It is actually seen as a movement or a trend, mostly. As every addiction, there are dangerous consequences as sleep deprivation or putting non-ethical content online in order to have fame. However, this might be the subject of another article…
We are going to highlight three concepts: the infinite scroll, short content and the art of not waiting ANYMORE.
For sure, you know someone that decided time to time – because they can’t actually do it intentionally – to delete the Facebook app from their phone or to not use Youtube during the night, or to not go on social media at work, or even worse… to unplug their modem! 😲
Whenever the willingness isn’t enough, there is an addiction!
Why are social media so addictive then? For the same reason we LOVE internet, the answer is: we-do-not-get-bored. Even if it happens, that won’t last! And that’s the beauty of it ❤️.
Thanks to Deep Learning, every content passing through our pupils has a big chance to create a stimuli. But, imagine it doesn’t, our first reflex would be to look for it and that’s why the infinite scroll and short contents has been created!
Short contents are easier to consume and to enjoy. The shorter it is, the more you can watch!
Marketers duty needs to be more and more impacting, more visual, easier to read and more understandable. Being subtle does not work anymore.
Game of Thrones + sausage = stimuli!
The proeminence of visual content in e-Marketing is the result of the advance of high speed internet connexion. It leads to a habit of a certain level of comfort and at the end it is an exacerbated impatience – don’t hide, we’re all in the same basket – so, whenever you’re checking out your notifications on Instagram for example, you will probably check the your feed (viva Machine Learning \O/) and analyse each pictures with your own interest specifications. Searching everytime is no longer an obligation.
Such as: Funny 💩, colourful 🍭, brightness ☀️, food 🥓, beach 🌊, abs 🍫, clouds ⛅, shiny buildings 🌇, butts 🍑, kitties 🐱, puppies 🐶…etc. :]
The Machine knows you better than you know yourself!
The biggest proof that we are in need of instantaneous entertainment is how dating apps have involved in just few years.
First of all, these were websites with FULL DETAILS about you and about what you’re looking for. Nowadays, those are mainly apps and required 500 characters maximum about yourself and just a few requirements about who you’d like to talk to. The app will do the rest 😉
Swipe, swipe, swipe, click, swipe, swipe,swipe, swipe, swipe…
OR
Scroll, scroll, click, scroll, scroll, scroll, click…
That is how every social networks work now.
Timeliness is the keyword. Have you ever noticed how you actually use Netflix or Youtube? Click, click, scroooooooooooooll, click, skip the intro/ad, watch… click, watch… click, scroll, click, scroll… etc.
This feeling of satisfaction through few movements of a thumb/index is the heavy emotional impact created by the addiction.
If you scrutinize apps and websites, you will see that we are INFESTED of signals and call-to-actions, but no worries, most of the time, these are harmless ;).
Video / Motion
Video content is a big part of internet nowadays, and an even bigger part of casual browsing.
if you ever watched cat’s videos endlessly or felt into the dark depth of YouTube without knowing how exactly, you are an addict.
There are many types of videos, But the one with a more informative content requires the viewer to be plunged into it from beginning to end.
However, to achieve an increase in views, Content creator on YouTube, Facebook and other video hosting platforms developed some tricks and guidelines to appeal the viewer, push him to watch more and keep him on the hook.
Capture user’s attention
Flashy, bold and sexy, that is the trend in video thumbnails nowadays, it appeal to our brain, tease our interest. Like a click-bait blog title, this kind of thumbnails appeals us more even when we know what they are.
Once clicked then you have to keep user attention.
And you only have two minutes. After that, almost 50% of audience will be gone and audience decreases even more over time. This is probably why the average user attention is under 6 min long.
The viewer will be drawn to another attracting video by the time the previous ends and the addiction grows.
Here are a couple of video we found while « researching » 🙂
This effect is amplified by advertising.
If you were on YouTube these last few years you probably noticed the rise of preroll ads before your favorite content. You can usually skip after 5 seconds, meaning that ads have to be designed for that purpose far away from traditional TV advertising.
Many of them will use catch phrases to get the user attention like “What if you didn’t skip this ad?” to drive your interest to it.
Keep it rollin’
Video platform earn money when you watch an ad or a video entirely, basically getting you addicted is good for their business. We recently saw a new trend in video coming from our familiar music players. The application now plays the next video of a list. It can be a real playlist or one made of AI based recommendations.
This simple change in the way of consuming videos changes the way we watch them. We are no longer looking at a film or a video we looked for but at something we feel as proposed to us. Everything is actually designed to reinforce curiosity and interests to make us addicted.
This forced feeding, pushes us to skip faster and only stay if the video seems appealing at first glance. We also get used to fresh video that we can consume rapidly before getting another one. By pushing more content on the viewer, his attention span fades out.
Short and catchy videos showing extreme, cute or provocative content will attract more users than a complex and highly detailed video that put more effort into content than form. Keeping that in mind, AI algorithm will push similar content to the user resulting in growing addiction for this short and easy to ingest videos.
But blaming YouTube would be too easy. Algorithms are only pushing more of the same or similar content to us after all. Maybe we should be a bit more careful when selecting the type of video we want to watch then leave aside the ones that feels fishy 🙂
Why We Are All Addicts
Graphic Design
Photo
A biological source
There is a part of our brain which is called the reward circuit which involves prefrontal cortex, nucleus accumbens and VTA.
There are certain activities like sex, food, bonding that rewards you through dopamine which is called the natural reward. This is the reason why people become addicted to sex. The same thing happens with food.
Mmmmh… Baaaaaacoooooooooon – sorry –
Food porn, like sexual porn, is a contemplative activity rather than a participative activity. You see something designed to please you but you’re not required to make, to do or even to taste it.
Let’s experience some stimulation…
This cinematograph is very comforting for winter time, right?
Who wouldn’t want to eat that ice cream right now?!
Check out @_nowo’s instagram account!
Straight to the moon on a today’s culture rocket
This phenomenon is even more visible in Asia where people aren’t taught to express their emotions as much as western countries. Everything is hidden under the weight of the society and strong family expectations.
Sex is a taboo and shameful to glorify. Food is an area where everything is allowed because Cuisine and the Art of Eating is very important across several asian cultures.
Meals are also lived and shared in groups. This is the moment when you meet your family and friends. Food is often assimilated and memorised as a pleasure to spend great time with people.
The combination of food, social media and smartphones is a perfect base to create food porn masters.
Digital Nomad
Being non materialist and minimalist is fully part of a digital nomad’s way of life. The real addiction is discovering new cultures, places and people!
Phú Quốc, Vietnam
The surprise of an exchange of complicity without even needing to speak the same language is the real addiction – otherwise, that’s just being an expat! –
Memory of a real digital nomad