Hacking the Human Mind :: Designing Addictive User Interfaces
Have you ever found yourself watching Netflix late at night when an episode of your favourite show ends? You know it’s time to go to bed, still “you could start the next episode.” While you’re thinking, a “Next episode” box appears in the lower right of the screen. A counter ticks down.
You don’t do anything. The next episode starts (and ends). Maybe you go to bed or perhaps you keep watching.
There are similar small experiences in many products that are built to make staying in the experience easy.
This next episode experience is not an accident. The automatic next episode is a designed experience. The counter is there because it gives you a sense of control.
This, intended or not, is designed for addiction.
Product Design — What they don’t tell you
Contrary to popular opinion, design is way more than how it looks and then how it works, it goes deep to study human interaction with current occurrences around them, user interaction, experience and research are very important parts of Product design.
Ideally, products are not designed based on what user wants or expect but ideally, how it helps solve existing problems.
Top brands understand this and have maximised their efforts in their product design process. A recent research from NVIDIA shows that From the 1960 till today, processing power has gone up over a trillion times
Whats actually going on
We use software solutions everyday, a major purpose for these solution is the solve already existing human problems, in the focus make life easier, products are built to mirror already existing human actions, in that sense be able to completely integrate with human interactions.
There comes a time where product design cuts across just building or making designs to actually thinking different ways in which a single product can impact users
Advertisers are major players in this loop, with the advertisers in the game, they simply become the end goal, so the need result from investments being made and at the end, the products and the users ultimately become their users!
Push Notifications
Since the early stage of advanced inventions, push notification has been at the fore front of user interaction on various type of interface, it has suddenly become a normal for all products of any kind. Push notifications has been further decentralised to fit an device.
Infinte Scrolling
The concept of infinite scroll was invented by Hugh E. Williams at Microsoft in the year 2005. Ever wonder what keeps you stuck to using products like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. Its not because you enjoy the contents of your timeline but the expectation you will see something better as you continue to scroll and that keeps you on product for as long till you decide within yourself that enough is enough!
Spinners or Loading screen
Whenever you meet these loading screens, be it mobile or desktop, majority would think their internet connectivity is slow, but research shows that 85% of those occurrences are actually the inbuilt AI system trying to predict content to offer the user, content or adverts that would keep the user engaged on his/her device
InApp Rewards
Games are a major player on app rewards design strategy, sometimes these app rewards are embedded in the gameplay, they keep you playing and coming back everyday. A perfect example is the daily rewards on NBA2K
In Bubble Replies
Having a chat with someone face to face is pretty easy and straight forward, now when it becomes a chat interface, thats where it gets a little bit complicated, a lot of designing thinking has been done to further simplify online chats to reflect face to face conversations. Some products even go to the lenght of telling you when your replies were seen!!!
In App Clicks/Emoji Prediction
Every time you consistently use a product, an AI system gathers your interactions and further uses them to predict what is most likely to keep you engaged on the product. This is a major tool for advertiser especially the guys from Google
