Magicians are good at looking for blind spots, perceptual vulnerable points and limits, can achieve magic effect without people’s awareness.
Product managers are like magicians, consciously or unconsciously tapping into people’s psychological vulnerabilities in a race for traffic.
How did they do it? ** 01 Control options **
While we believe in freedom and freedom of choice, we’re not so much free as choosing from menu items.
We didn’t realize that the menu was already being manipulated. Magicians do the same, providing people with the illusion of free choice (classic magic lines: choose one card from the cards), while designing the menu items for the audience.
When we get a menu, we rarely ask:
What’s not on the menu?
Why do you offer these options? As opposed to the other option?
What is the menu vendor’s goal?
Does this menu meet my initial requirements? Or is it just a distraction?
This scene should be familiar to you
I went out with my friends on Saturday night. When I met them, I pulled out my phone and opened Autonavi/Meituan/Dianping to find nearby bars and browse the menus that popped up. You compare bars, you compare which ones have the better cocktails.
Does this menu relate to your and your friends’ original wishes?
You think the menu on Yelp is relatively complete. When you look down at your phone, you don’t see a band playing live music in the park across the street. You don’t see a gallery at the end of the street displaying famous paintings and serving dessert coffee. Because it’s not on the menu.
The more apps offer choice in almost every area of our lives, the more certain we are that they can provide us with the most useful options, right?
The most popular app is not the most comprehensive option.
By customizing menus, technology blinds us to our inner choices with new ones. The more we look at these options, the more we realize they don’t fit our real needs.
02 Fear of Missing out
You have a 1% chance of missing important information, which is another way technology corrupts the mind.
If you’re following The story of Yanxi Palace, you may have accidentally opened your iQiyi feed for fear of missing the new episodes that are regularly broadcast every day.
“What if I miss the hot spot? What if I don’t know what my colleagues are talking about?” This anxiety makes you want to check twitter all the time.
The more nervous we are about missing out, the more fearful we are of missing out on important information when we cancel certain app alerts.
Surprisingly, once we let go of our fears, we wake up from our fantasies. Go a day without your phone, cancel your subscription notifications – the “miss out” we were worried about didn’t actually happen.
We don’t miss what we don’t see.
03 Social Identity
We all crave social approval. The sense of belonging, identity and worship is the basic motivation for human survival. But one of these three identities is now firmly in the hands of tech companies.
On Weibo, people who think “@” may not be consciously “@”, but the automatic suggestion function of Weibo, which is conveniently selected.
On Facebook, every time a user updates their profile picture, they are placed at the front of the queue for comments or likes. Every time someone comments or likes it, it gets an alert and pulls back to the corresponding screen.
Teenagers were more affected by disapproval than any other group.
One return for another
** I helped you, don’t you forget?
We agreed to be fans and you secretly followed someone else. **
In some cases, tech companies are manipulating how we normally experience apps.
LinkedIn is the prime example. LinkedIn takes advantage of perceptual asymmetry. When you receive an invitation for attention from someone, you imagine that person consciously chose to invite you; In fact, they may be unconsciously responding to LinkedIn’s suggested contacts list.
In other words, LinkedIn turns your unconscious impulse (to “add” a person) into a social obligation that millions of people feel obligated to repay. They profit from the time people spend.
Imagine millions of people interacting with each other over the course of the day. All designed by the companies that profit from it.
It’s social media.
05 Automatically play the next link
“
BrianWansink, a professor at Cornell university, found in his research that people could be tricked into continuing to eat soup by giving them bottomless bowls that would replenish themselves when they were about to run out. With bottomless bowls, people ate 73 percent more calories than those with regular bowls.
“
Tech companies cleverly use the same principles.
News feeds are designed to auto-refill so you can scroll, and deliberately avoid any design that makes you pause, reconsider, or walk away.
That’s why video and social media sites like Netflix, YouTube or Facebook automatically play the next video after a countdown, rather than waiting for you to make a conscious choice (just in case you stop browsing). Most of the traffic on these sites comes from “autoplay next”.
Tech companies often claim that “when we serve the interests of our users, we just make it easier for them to see the videos they want to watch.” You can’t really blame them, because increasing retention is a competitive advantage.
06 Instant Interrupt
Interrupting people’s messages immediately is more likely to persuade people to respond than having messages sent asynchronously, such as emails or delayed inboxes.
Wechat prefers to design their messaging system to immediately interrupt recipients (and display chat boxes) rather than help users respect each other’s attention.
It is also in their interest to promote a sense of urgency and social reciprocity. For example, Facebook automatically tells the sender when you “see” their message, rather than letting you avoid disclosing whether you read it or not. There’s reciprocal pressure: “Now that you know I’ve read the message, I feel even more obligated to respond.”
In other words, interruptions are good for grabbing attention.
The problem is that enforcing “disruption” in the name of business creates public tragedy, undermines global attention and creates billions of unnecessary interruptions every day.
07 Benefit Oriented
Capture your reasons for visiting your app and connect them to the business reasons for your app to maximize user time consumption.
For example, the two most popular categories in supermarkets are snacks and milk. But the supermarket manager wants to maximise the amount people buy, so he “hides” snacks and milk in the back of the store.
In other words, grocery stores tie what customers want (milk, snacks) closely to what supermarkets want. If supermarkets are interested in making shopping easier for people, they will put the most popular products in the most prominent position.
Tech companies design their websites in the same way. For example, when you want to check out a Facebook event that happened tonight (your reason), the Facebook app prevents you from accessing it without first logging into the news feed (their reason), Facebook intentionally. Facebook wants to make every reason you use Facebook work for them.
08 Awkward Choices
Tech companies have always been nonchalant in saying,
“If you don’t like it, you can use a different product.”
“If you don’t like it, you can take it off”
“If you get too addicted, you can always uninstall our app.”
Companies naturally want you to do things they like, not things they don’t like. Magicians do the same thing: make it easier for the audience to choose what you want them to choose, and harder to choose what you don’t like.
The New York Times, for example, allows you to “opt out” of your digital subscription. However, when you click “Unsubscribe,” they don’t just do that, but cancel the account by calling a phone number that is only open at certain times.
Are you uncomfortable with the technical controls? Imagine tens of thousands of product managers trying to create new ways to engage you every day.
The ultimate freedom is freedom of thought, and we need technology to help us live, feel, think and act freely. We need smartphones and web browsers as shells around which our ideas and values can be formed. People’s time is precious. We should protect and cherish it like privacy and other digital rights.
— TristanHarris, former Google designer