Category: Communication

Designed for the mute scroller

Posted on

Users consume content in a vacuum and it is usually mute. This is a short guide for designing for the mute scroller. How to grab their attention and make sure that your message gets heard…even in mute.

Why mute?

In the Communication Pyramid I mentioned some reasons for mute consumption of content. These reasons are linked to the comfort and discomfort of consuming video. Here are some reasons that relate to sound:

  • We don’t like loud unexpected sounds — for example clicking on something and abruptly hearing a loud soundtrack that you never asked for.
  • It’s rude — because other people didn’t ask to hear what you want to hear, especially on public transport.
  • We are at work and don’t want people to know we are watching videos.
  • It’s a standard for most apps.

Every Snap, Instagram story, Facebook video, starts mute. Upon action, the content will come alive with sound. But does it? To be honest, mobile phones’ sound quality is shoddy and since most of today’s consumption is on a mobile phone, why bother? The smart thing would be to ask, where to bother?

An incentive to click on the video. The post tells us what it’s about and what we are about to hear if we click it.

Users stop!

All interactions are chained to whether people look at your content. For users to absorb your content you need to make them stop and look at it. In reality, many users will do little more than pause to take a cursory glance at your content before they continue scrolling. There is an average conversion rate of 10% for posts, and 4% in newsletters.

I once tried to put an ad on a Medium post I wrote on Facebook. Here are the stats: 12k Facebook exposures, 900 Clicked through to Medium, 100 read it, I got 0 recommends.

The result

There are many facets to fix to make things better but here I would like to focus on typography and video.

Design for mute

In Subtitles were never designed. The missing element in TV typography design I talked about the importance of subtitles. So here is another good reason to do it. Not every person has a budget to create a mini action movie to make people pause and see his content. Not everyone knows how to produce a show-stopping visual frame.

Imagine you’re walking down the street. How many people will make you turn your head after they pass you? How many will grab your attention? How much of it is positive vs negative attention? How much do you remember from walking down the street? If you stand in the street and look at somebody, what can you guess/know about them?

yeah you are angry, but what are you talking about? I don’t know and I probably missed half of it by the time I pressed play. But yeah I’d stop down the street and look at this guy!

Well, this is what typography is for. This is why there are street signs. They give you glimpsable visual information. Some places are busier like Tokyo and some are less, like a highway.

So if you are not a movie producer and you’re not hot the alternative is typography and content. This is a way of grabbing attention by highlighting what’s important in the video.

Good use of subtitles in the French elections

Fast content

A video is the easiest consumption method when users are comfortable. But hey, sometimes users are not comfortable. Sometimes they walk down the street and don’t have time to watch your video, or are just about to get off a bus. So hit it as hard as possible from the very beginning.

Editing is extremely important. The ability to let the observer see the music and imagine how it sounds is the essence of editing. For the mute scroller, it might give them a reason to stop.

Here is an example of a new channel in Israel that shows great editing and can also be seen in mute.

 

Design for sync

Video content pieces just stream. It gives users the feeling of missing out (if done well). But in some cases, it takes users some time to make a decision along the lines of: “It looks interesting, I actually want to hear what this person is speaking about”. If you use typography syncing the user in would be smooth. The user will be informed because he can read what it’s about, and now he can just continue experiencing it.

Typography is not just static. We want to share a feeling and draw users in, which means we need to trigger the right mood. The way the text animates informs the user if it’s a sad/angry/happy story. Nowadays I wouldn’t post any video without subtitles that are matched for the platform in terms of size. But to enhance it further you need to look to the areas of pace, color and size, where much more can be done.

A Facebook example

Facebook recognized this and helped users create these gradients with text. The reason that people turned away from writing is because they believed users would always look at a video or an image, it’s bigger and better at grabbing attention. I think it was a smart decision by Facebook because it works, especially when mute scrolling. People stop and read — if it’s not too many words.

Breathe…

I’m a sound lover and I would love to see a platform that can give me the Facebook feed in audio only. All of these quick consumption platforms are in the business of mini-boredom. They just fill up the empty pieces of our lives. Instead of gaining observation and sociability, we consume isolated from our surroundings. The good thing about sound is that it’s not fully taking over, it’s a secondary sense that enhances your reality rather than replacing it. It comes together and doesn’t take over.

I can’t wait for a world where everyone has an implant in their ear which gives them added information. Personally, I see it as more valuable than AR or VR. I know it’ll be less exciting and grandiose. But it’ll be more intimate, human, and helpful. In any case, I know the future will be exciting, escorted by voices in our heads. In the meantime, we’ll keep on scrolling.

The slipperiness of UX data

Posted on

In my article proving design, I talked about how hard it is to have proofs for making the right product or product decisions. Some projects are so expensive that it takes a lot of convincing to get a budget for them. It’s a natural trade-off. It doesn’t get easier after you’ve done parts of the project, or even after you’ve done the project and are now interested in moving forward with a second stage of development.

Many UX professionals talk about the importance of data but let’s be honest, in the cycle of design and decision making there are countless things that cannot be measured.

What can be measured?

  1. Do people need your product?
  2. The product itself and how people use it.
  3. Ideas, and iterations — Using user research.

Basically everything you can do with your team. It adds up to around 20% of the creation process.

What do you create? What informs your ideas? Are you influenced by other designs you can’t measure? Hell yeah!

What cannot be measured?

Competitors

You can’t know why your competitors behaved the way they did. You don’t have their data and you can’t know their decision-making process.

Pre-product behavior

There are many marketing products that are trying to solve this. However, in this part of the user journey, the designers have zero control. The user journey is driven by the facilitators whether it’s the OS or the platform. Each platform will supply you with some data and measurements but it’s not exactly monitoring UX, it’s more generic and marketing led. In big organizations, it’ll also be a challenge to get these data points. In addition, every piece of data should be verified. With platforms, it’s almost impossible to verify.

Analytics

In your service, you’ll need to check and correlate through different tools (MixPanel, GTM, Data studio, etc.). Understanding analytics tools have become essential for UX and Product roles. This is how companies make crucial decisions and that’s why it is checked and cross matched, usually with three to four systems, to compare and see if the data is reliable.

OS design patterns

The fact that Google decided something should look the way it does doesn’t mean it’s the best way. It means that they probably measured it and it works. It also means that with their level of influence, many apps will adopt it and it’ll become familiar. But it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s better. Some of these decisions are made to differentiate from other platforms like iOS or Windows. Other decisions are a compromised solution to a great design because the design might be patented. That’s precisely why Google and Microsoft bought Motorola and Nokia, stripped them of their patents, and then sold them on to someone else. So if you’ve seen a design, even if it’s famous, it doesn’t mean it’s the best practice.

Just because it works it doesn’t mean it’s a nice experience. Many companies don’t see a reason to change. It’s very common when a company has a monopoly.. For example buying stuff on eBay…does it work?, Yeah…Is it a nice experience? No. Everything is cumbersome: receiving messages, sending, going through versions of eBay from 2000 till today.

It works but it ain’t nice and at times very confusing

In comparison, Amazon are more ambitious and “very slowly” redesign their experiences to be functional and delightful.

You’ve got the Data! But, wait, it might be skewed.

Let’s have a look at how this can happen.

Wrong implementation

Just a simple line of code or a selection of a wrong event could cause every click to be counted as two. That’s why it’s important to check with multiple systems — which, as I mentioned earlier, could be problematic at the stage prior to the user journey beginning in earnest.

Intentions

Even if you have a lot of verified data, how can you believe the data that you see? Every person that collects data (arguably even scientists) is trying to show the data in a way that will flatter their agenda. Data can be collected and presented in a non-neutral way. It’s natural and happens with everyone from marketing companies to UX designers who just want their projects to be successful.

Source giphy.com

Presentation

The medium is the weapon and it’s important to understand why something was chosen, in a similar way to understanding graphic design decisions: What do they show me, and what don’t they show me.

A few current examples of skewed data and how it has been used:

  1. Facebook admitted to having wrong measurements for the 10th time
  2. Facebook is accused of being part of the Fake news problem…Google is too, but it’s used much less for leisure and content consumption.
  3. Facebook is deleting tens of thousands of Fake users, which is why they keep tweaking the news feed, and Google is doing the same with search results.
  4. Cambridge Analytica is suspected of and grilled about their methods for influencing users in the UK / US.

Key ways to deal with it

Critic

Be harsh and critical, try to look for the angle. Life sucks if you always think everyone has an interest but even though awareness drives sadness it’s smarter to look at things critically, especially in business. So when you see a new feature, after you finish getting excited or booing it, think about why they created it? Whose decision was it to make it and what’s their interest? Link its value to the business, marketing, user satisfaction, design etc. Guess which department came up with this concept. Think about where they could take it to next. What’s the future of it?

Influenced but aware

There is nothing public, what you have is a trail of user experience data. I got responses for a previous post I wrote about Facebook that said: “But where is the data?” The answer is: This data is internal and not available to anyone else. It’s too secretive to expose, it’s their secret sauce. Does that mean I’m not allowed to write about or analyze it? I don’t think so.

In Instagram, you’d know how many pictures are uploaded to Instagram because it’s a financial data that affects retention/time spent. But you wouldn’t know how many of these pictures are uploaded from a computer, user’s gallery or a professional camera. It’s just important to accept it when critiquing or being influenced by it and to know the limitations of the data you’re dealing with.

Here is an example where you have data, but can only see part of the picturee: “Apple’s revenue from repair is bundled in with its “services” revenue, alongside digital content sales, AppleCare, and Apple Pay revenue. While there is no good way to figure out how much revenue comes from repair, Apple’s services revenue pulled down $7.04 billion in net sales, out of $52.90 billion total.”

Hack

Be aware of your level of control, but see if you can take it further. The difference between owning an OS and participating in one is huge. When I was working for Samsung we were designing the core of Tizen OS for TV. We had control over everything without limitations. We could track everything we wanted to if we built it. But when you are a part of an ecosystem you need to play by the rules and get whatever you can throughout the process. That’s why designing for a native OS is such fun, especially if others are building and increasing your knowledge.

Data is important, but I would argue that decision making can only be done based on it to a certain degree. In my opinion, around 70% of what constructs the decision is experience, aspirations, and alignment with the other sides of the business. A good designer or product guy should influence and convince but it’s not all up to data. Data is just another tool in the arsenal and it’s good for specific use.

Communication pyramid

Posted on

It is often said that “You are who your friends are,” but in many ways your friends are a product of the environment which you grew up in, your parents’ friends, and the schools and universities you went to. These coteries were hard to penetrate, but now things have changed. In this world, where we’re all led into social bubbles, there are more opportunities to form connections based on content and interest. For example, there are theme-based groups on Facebook, services like a platform for dog lovers, or physical running clubs. In a world where it takes longer to get to know a person and their friends, you can learn about them from the groups they associate themselves with.

Class based parties | Illustration by Tomer Hanuka

In the past, a talented person could have worked all of their lives and not been discovered. Relationships were created only through face-to-face interactions. It was harder to accept that which was different, as it wasn’t as visible. When different came concealed, it got interpreted as threatening. But today, there is an attempt to celebrate this variety and emphasize it. Today, parents care less about naming their kids the same as others; they prefer names that are easier to find on Google.

The value shift was inspired by celebrities and the ability to share. As a result of this, developing special talents, being able to communicate online, and networking are skills that everyone should master in the quest for a normal life. Through this process, the communication hierarchy changed as well. If your communication skills are good enough, you can skip steps and write something worthwhile to your idols. It might change your life.

Special talent? | Photo by Emily Stein

Making friends

Let’s say, for example, that you had a few friends over for dinner and you decided that you liked one of them. How should you proceed with contact after that dinner? There are so many platforms to focus on: messaging, expressing opinions, and sharing your story. It is important to acknowledge that each one of them is good for specific things. Due to the nature of growth in a commercial sense, these platforms all aspire to be the same, but they are not.

The methods of communication today are completely different than they were a few years ago, but the principles and what people value have remained the same. Across platforms, the level of commitment dictates the importance of that platform to the user. The three levels are:

Consumption: A user is there to read and absorb.

Participation: A user is active and talks to the community there.

Leading: A user has many followers and sets the tone while talking about subjects that interest them.

It is really hard for a regular person to be fully engaged in all platforms, so users choose what’s better for their character in conjunction with what’s popular and used within their circles. No one commits to only one platform, but they definitely focus most of their communication efforts on just a couple of them.

I’ve tried to sketch the principles that drive the usage and hierarchy of these platforms. Let’s dive into the factors:

Consumption method — The medium, form and digestion time of the information are key attributes of a platform. When it comes to communication, some mediums are harder to create or consume than others. Some require pre-conditions. For example, video conversations have pre-conditions such as: good reception, a quiet place, being dressed, being in the mood, and being willing to reveal your whereabouts.

Privacy — The medium dictates how much is being revealed on that platform. Many people use other people’s content to communicate, as it’s done better or they identify with it. Some also add their own words to explain the context and to give it a personal touch, which is more intimate than just pressing “share”. Since most of us are not the best storytellers, the rawer the content is, the easier it is to see through to that person. Some platforms are more about public sharing; therefore, they are less intimate and lower in the communication pyramid. Yet some people have a unique expressive personality, which usually elevates them to leaders of a platform. A high level of expressiveness means that it’s less private.

Immediacy — Timing is everything. The more intimate you get, the more the other person will let you disrupt what they do in favour of communication with you. Thus, it is easier to contact a person or start a relationship in a place where there is no need for immediacy. Feel the vibe and see when you can jump in and ignite a conversation; for example, the pace at which messages are exchanged dictates whether it’s a conversation or not. When someone slows the pace, they probably want to end the conversation or are busy with other things. It’s a shift in priority.

Emotion — The more you reveal, the more emotional it gets. In videos, we reveal facial expressions, tone, and environment, whereas text messages can contain a tone, but it can be very difficult to interpret. Stickers and emojis help by giving more emotion, but it’s not the same as face-to-face.

Immersion time — Every relationship is built on time spent communicating, and the same goes for the platform itself. The more time a user spends there, the more comfortable they feel about communicating there. Friction (difficulty of use) could be a roadblock to the success of communication. Some argue that Snapchat’s controversial UX contributed to the fact that only millennials use the app. It was simply too complicated for older people to learn how to use it. Familiarity drives engagement.

The pyramid of communication relies on these assumptions. From bottom to top, basic human interaction is about:

Politeness — Being nice to a different person because you happen to be in the same situation with them. In this case, the relationship is harmless to you and you don’t spend too much time thinking about it.

Self-promotion — Measuring yourself as nice, successful, and someone who the other person should want to have a connection with. Everyone is a brand nowadays.

Communication

This is where we have genuine interactions with others. It’s these people that we actually talk to on some basis and have an interest in pursuing positive communication with.

Acquaintances — People that you know you will meet again and whom you might need for some purpose in the future. It is worth keeping a positive relationship with them. This applies more to a work environment but can also, at times, be relevant in personal relationships — for example, parents of other kids from school. Another way to look at it is the concept of followers or people collection. In terms of public sharing, these are your digital acquaintances.

Far friends —people that are close to you; friendships that have lasted over time.

Close friends — People whom you talk to on some sort of a regular basis.

Relationship / Partnership — People whom you talk to on a daily basis multiple times a day, share information with through multiple platforms and have associated contacts.

This leads to the platform distribution across social circles:

Joining the journey: If someone posts their personal life or whatever they want on a social platform like Instagram or Twitter, it means that they are OK with people from around the world seeing it. This makes it OK for you to look at it. There is also a chance they won’t even know that you are now following them unless you start interacting with them on the platform by liking their stuff or messaging them.

Messaging platforms: There is one thing that really differentiates them from one another: what kind of login they’re based on. For example, Hangouts sits on your Gmail, WhatsApp sits on your phone number, and Messenger sits on your Facebook.

This distinction is extremely important since most people don’t fiddle with the privacy settings. Therefore, if you want to talk on Messenger, you’ll need to be Facebook friends or else it’ll go to a section which could be missed by the person you want to contact. However, that user might prefer communicating in a different way, since being a Facebook friend of theirs would give you access to all of their photos, and they might not necessarily be keen on that. A phone number will give you the ability to actually call them or SMS them, which is also intrusive.

For millennials, Snapchat would be less intimate than Messenger and WhatsApp mainly because it is ephemeral. They are less worried about it staying there. They will be savvy enough to block a user from watching their story, while still allowing communication. Snapchat doesn’t block any user from just adding you, following you, or communicating with you — similar to Twitter and Instagram.

Live video and Video stories — These make it much more immediate and easy to know where you are and when. That could lead to really creepy scenarios, where someone just shows up because they saw that you were in a particular place. Alternatively, they might start to hang out there in an effort to meet you, which is a tiny bit less creepy (but appreciated).

Actually talk (Phone then Video) — Jesus, does anyone call you besides your parents or recruiting agencies? I remember hearing someone talking on the phone on the bus, and then telling my wife that it was so rude. Talking in a way so that everyone hears you? No — talking on the phone in public at all! Ninety per cent of my friends text me before they call, to ask if it’s fine to call. By the way, I’m OK with just calling; it’s so exciting when this finally happens.

I want to put aside the case of audio messages and video messages. It is a bit weirder because it introduces a lot more friction. Many times you are in areas where it’s not really appropriate to talk or consume that message. Moreover, since you don’t know what it contains — we all have that friend that sends porn (yeah, I’m sure I’m not the only one that these things happen to) — you don’t want to view or listen to it around other people in case it’s inappropriate.

I really don’t get why messaging apps can’t translate the voice in the cloud and send it as a text-based overview. That would enable people to get a glimpse of what’s in the audio/video. It seems trivial, especially when they have so much time to compute it.

So, next time you break up with someone, how would you do that? Face-to-face, video call, or Twitter?

Work

The nature of work is different, and it’s mainly reflected in two areas: Privacy (don’t want others to really know what I’m doing in my personal life) and Immediacy (a lot of meetings over long hours). Therefore, face-to-face becomes the most difficult way to communicate.

There is always the possibility to connect via personal, friendly channels, but sometimes it’s simply not appropriate. This is mainly true if it is a corporate person.

Most business-related social networks are not used as real-time communication tools. As a result, people visit them only once in awhile, mainly when they are scouting for a new job. Consequently, the use case is at times wrong. For instance, it is better to know the person’s email address than to find them on LinkedIn if you want a more immediate response. Luckily, this can happen through many of the networking events that happen in big cities.

Getting to immediacy is much harder in a professional world. The emotional aspect seems to be less dominant on the surface of communication.