If you work a l__tle then you r_membe_ lots
Using a little effort to create a memory handshake that lasts forever.
Checking my screen time, I spent 25 minutes on Instagram yesterday and I can confidently say I cannot remember a single post I consumed.
Attention and Recall are separate. In a world that credits the duration you can zombify a person for, memory takes a backseat.
For those who think Product Management is about creating meaningful products that benefit the user - how do we get our users to maintain executive function, and use software as a tool, over becoming the fuel?
I don’t actually know. 🤷
So let’s explore this together, starting with how we make things easy.
Driving with the handbrake up
The Fast and Furious franchise peaked at number 3: Tokyo Drift. Talk of handbrake turns were popular on the school playground with the boys. I couldn’t help but dream of the day I’d own my own Peugeot 106 that I could skid around the Morissons car park.
Aside from the very expensive and singular use case of drifting, there are very little or no extra benefits to driving with the handbrake up. Yet so often companies are pumping the gas and churning out features in blind hopes of maximising revenue with much less consideration for improving the life of users.
Daniel Kahneman suggests, it can often be more beneficial to diminish restraining forces to encourage the right behaviour.
The emphasis on mitigating restraining forces helps us reframe how we question user behaviour, moving from “How can I get him or her to do X?” over to “Why aren’t they doing X already?”.
This insight isn’t new, and companies such as Instagram have been doing a hell of a job of implementing Aza Raskin’s infinite scroll to monopolise my (and most likely your) screen time.
Removing friction is good, having no friction? Well that’s a sentence without punctuation. It’s mindless, meaningless andeverythingjustfadesintothesamething. Why remember any of it?
Oversimplification can lead to desirable behaviour up to a point. After that, you risk conceding engagement for attention. So how do we elevate our product to elevate engagement?
We’ve been drifting, now we’re dragging.
You’re clubbing. All you see are silhouettes of people rocking through the clouds of smoke that fog your vision. Your T-shirt is drenched in whoever’s sweat and your calves hurt because you cannot help but hop to Rhythm of the night. Afterall, it’s 128bpm.
But now it’s 2:47am and the DJ didn’t quit his accounting job to play it safe with 90s classics. Genre turns to dubstep and as the beat builds and builds, a stick thin boy with the baggiest eyes catches your gaze.
He utters the most expected four words you know were coming…
Wait for the drop.
Everything has a beginning, middle and end. Finding that sweet spot of building anticipation and becoming a bore is no easy thing. Apple has perfected this art beautifully with their product packaging.
The box just feels different in your hands. The green dotted security stickers are a little hard to get your nails under, but not impossible.
The top is heavy, and there is resistance but without much effort the box slides off.
The unboxing of Apple products is ritualistic. An initiation ceremony into the not so secret club of the self selected few who reign supreme over the common Windows using ordinaries. You are alert, present, as you carry out these mini jobs Steve has put together for you.
James Clear, author of Atomic habits, recently released his own habit tracking app called Atoms. The app team has incorporated such a nice touch & hold based trigger to log each habit. The growth of the bubbles, the rumble of your phone’s haptic engine that grows and shrinks as you play. It’s so damn satisfying. It’s ritualistic, it’s a ticket out of the ordinary and it makes me interact with it attentively. Nicely done James. It’s super clear.
So now we have engagement, let’s talk about how we can make it memorable.
17.5 Flam_n_os living on my ba_co_y.
Everyone’s familiar with how Duolingo takes users through their curriculum. Questions are left blank and you, the user, are presented with different ways to fill those gaps. It puts the user in the driving seat and it works.
The phenomenon that Duolingo plays on to achieve successful recall is called the generative effect. It states that actively engaging with information by generating it yourself, rather than passively receiving it, enhances memory retention.
This notion isn’t tied only to how Duolingo employs it, and can be applied laterally. If memory just requires you to engage your brain a little more, then surely you can hero key things you want users to remember by making things a little harder. Perhaps you can play with the readability of the font?
Princeton’s Daniel Oppenheimer (not Cillian Murphy), conducted a study on 28 participants who were asked to recall the descriptions of multiple fictional aliens. The only difference was how easy to read was the font. As you would have guessed. Those who were shown the harder to read version recalled way more from their tests.
Those who read about the aliens in an easy-to-read font (16-point Arial pure black) answered correctly 72.8 percent of the time, compared to 86.5 percent of those who reviewed the material in hard-to-read fonts (12-point Comic Sans MS or Bodoni MT in a lighter shade) Link
In essence, by integrating interactive elements and optimising the presentation of content, software developers can leverage the generative effect to enhance learning and memory retention in users.
To wrap this all up
Creating good products requires us to major on removing restraining forces up to a point - because no friction slides us into the void. For great products, we need to think about adding the right dose of friction at the right time so that we’re engaging users at the moments that matter. Finally, to keep our experience memorable we should question how we could make our users work a little bit, so our product lives on in their long term memory.
If anything above resonated with you, I’d love to hear about your experiences in the comments below. Happy travels!
Rich
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P.S. How many flamingos live on my balcony?