(2013-07-24) Sierra Your App Makes Me Fat

Kathy Sierra: Your App Makes Me Fat. In 1999, Professor Baba Shiv...(currently at Stanford) and his co-author Alex Fedorikhin did a simple experiment on 165 grad students.

The participants who memorized the seven-digit number were nearly 50% more likely than the other group to choose cake over fruit.

led to one bizarre conclusion:
Willpower and cognitive processing draw from the same pool of resources.

Whether the drain was from something you love or hate doesn’t matter.
Cognitive resource tank don’t care.

An experiment asked one group of dogs to sit, just sit, nothing else, for a few minutes before being released to play with their favorite treat “puzzle” toy

the dogs that had to sit — exercising self-control — gave up on the puzzle much earlier than the dogs that were just hanging out in their crate

Now think about what we’re doing to our users.

If your UX asks the user to make choices

If your app is confusing and your tech support / FAQ isn’t helpful

Or let’s say your app is super easy to use, but designed and tuned for persuasive brain hacks (“nudges”/nudging, gamification, behavioral tricks, etc.) to keep me “engaged” for your benefit, not mine (lookin’ at you, Zynga)… you’ve still drained my cognitive resources.

And when I back away from the screen and walk to the kitchen…
Your app makes me fat.

This is about draining their ability for logical thinking, problem-solving, and willpower after the clicking/swiping/gesturing is done.

we’ll try to limit Cake-choosing features—the ones that really drain them — to that which supports the thing they’re using our app for in the first place.

what about our marketing? Can we honestly believe that our “content marketing” is a good use of their resources?

What you consume here, you take from there. Not just their attention, not just their time, but their ability to be the person they are when they are at their best

instead of “Is this useful?” perhaps we should raise the bar and ask “Will they use it?”

I’m not against “content marketing”. On the contrary, it’s nearly the only form of cog-resource-draining marketing that can be “worth it”. It’s the one form of marketing that can help people become better at something they care about.

Content marketing can (and should) be “the missing manual.” It can (and should be) the inspiration for our users to learn, get better (at the thing they care about), and connect with other users.

But if it’s “content” designed solely to suck people in (“7 ways to be OMG awesome!!”) for the chance to “convert”, we’re hurting people. If we’re pumping out “content” because frequency, we’re hurting people.

I’ve created interactive marketing games, gamified sites (before it was called that), and dozens of other projects carefully, artfully, scientifically designed to slurp (gulp) cognitive resources for… very little that was “worth it”.

My goal for Serious Pony is to help all of us take better care of our users. Not just while they are interacting with our app, site, product, but after. Not just because they are our users, but because they are people.