Out of Body Design Patterns
Battling the itch to “Start Webinar”
I participated in a panel last week about product management. As a speaker, I was asked to log onto the webinar twenty minutes early to make sure that I was ready to go when the panel started. Getting onto the link was as smooth as can be. The moderator could hear and see me. I bantered easily with the other panelists.
But while all of this happened around me, my finger twitched. My mind knew that I shouldn’t press it. But I wanted to. So. Badly. It took all of my self control to hold myself back from clicking “Start Webinar” just so that I could make the CTA go away. Have you ever had this feeling?
It’s not just technology that can make you feel hooked. These patterns are everywhere. For example, imagine you’re jamming to Ed Sheeran’s Bad Habits. Suddenly, your internet cuts off in the middle of the chorus and you hear “My bad habits lead to…”. What a cliffhanger! Whether it’s filling in the missing word of “you” or landing on the B note to bring resolution to the chord progression, you feel unresolved and on edge until you can complete the phrase.
Powerful design makes you feel compelled to act. The unread email count on my inbox makes me want to click in to see what messages are waiting for me. I feel anxious anticipating what I might need to know about. The promise of collecting extra coins in Subway Surfers makes my son beg to log in daily. He feels agony knowing that he will forfeit the reward once the time passes. These design patterns make the user uncomfortable and create a nearly overwhelming urge to complete the action.
With power, comes responsibility. For example, you can’t overwhelm your user with excessive notifications. They will realize that your notifications are not valuable and learn to ignore them, so that the notifications lose their efficacy. But when you rarely get a notification, like an Amber Alert, then you immediately recognize that this is an important piece of information to pay attention to. As a PM, you must choose wisely the times that you really want to push your user to do something.
I’ve found that the simple principle of doing what’s right for the user provides the best guidance. Before you put your user on pins and needles, ask yourself: Does this solve a problem for the user? Is this what I want or what the user wants? Is it for the user’s good?
Powerful design makes the user feel compelled to act, but don’t make your user itch too often. Responsible design recognizes the balance between what’s important enough to be stressed and what’s unnecessary to create stress. Just for the record, I resisted the urge. I didn’t start the webinar.
🗞️ Subscribe to my newsletter
I write about once a week about topics like product management, design thinking, becoming a better leader, and personal branding. By subscribing to my newsletter, you’ll get these insights emailed right to your inbox every time I post.
📹 Reflect with me on Friday Flashes
Friday Flashes is a series of quick one-minute videos that introduces a topic of reflection for the week. Each prompt is product-focused and ties back to one of the ten disciplines in the Product Decagon.
📖 Get your copy of The Productive Product Manager
The Productive Product Manager is a guided journal that combines the weekly reflection with weekly review and other goodies. You can see the inside of the journal in the Friday Flashes announcement video. Don't worry - the journal is not dated, so it's ok if you don't start at Week 1.
