Your User is a “Human”
Your User is a “Human”
A Crash Course on Romancing Members of the Opposite Side of the Transaction.
A Crash Course on Romancing Members of the Opposite Side of the Transaction.
Sometimes we tend to forget that who we design for doesn’t feel the same way we do about our value proposition.
It’s nothing personal, they are just not that into your software.
Why is that? We create these powerful products and give free trails, write informative blog posts, incentivized salespeople and marketers to get the prospective customers attention, and in the case of where I work (FamilySearch), their powerful suite genealogy software is free!
Yet, even though your smartest engineers have packed powerful features and have given the customer a Swiss army knife of functionality, the adoption of your product is not the way you envisioned it.
Maybe we should reframe the problem…
Lets consider human relationships for a moment.
How long does it take to go from not knowing a person, to getting married?
I assume we can all agree, marriage is a pretty big commitment. Not only are you entering into an exclusive relationship till death & swearing off other potential mates for only each other, you are joining financial resources and accepting legal ramifications (for better or for worse).
To leave this relationship will cause much grief and inconvenience, and if you have children, the greatest indicator of investment into a relationship, you risk bad blood and ruined childhoods.
Big decision right?
I’m not prescribing a specific timeframe to getting married, and to be honest, marriage is not for everyone, but for those who aspire to such an ideal, you probably want to cover your downside right?
H2H Marketing (Keyword: Human to Human)
Ryan Deiss of Digital Marketer teaches that we shouldn’t frame our marketing efforts in the parameters of B2C or B2B scenarios — instead, we should think of whoever we are trying to influence as what they are, humans.
The thing is this: nothing really changes in human decision making when it is between a business and consumer or a business to a business. You are talking to people that have their own agendas for doing what they do.
For example: You are not talking to a business, you are talking to a procurement agent who has her own ambitions to look good to upper management.
In a human 2 human marketing situation, Ryan explains it in the context of marriage.
You don’t go on a first date and ask a person to marry your right?
Unfortunately, many first dates go like this meme:
If you ask any couple who is in a successful marriage how they decided to get married, the narrative usually goes a little like this:
They met on a train, yoga class, or a mutual friend’s party.
They struck up a conversation, hit it off.
One of them says, “I really enjoyed, talking to you, we should grab a coffee sometime!”
They go on the first casual daytime date where they continue to talk and build rapport until someone says, “I really enjoyed this, would you like to go to dinner with me this Friday?”
So things get more serious, they like each other, and they put a little more effort to look nice before the big day. She might buy a new dress and he might get a haircut.
Spoiler alert: the date goes well, and from that point on, the couple habitually goes dates until they are spending almost every day together.
This is when the couple puts on their rose colored glasses, the person can do no wrong. They are all over each other and scientifically speaking, chemicals that create emotions of infatuation push the two to get things physical.
Fun fact: those infatuation chemicals are to help with reproducing offspring and only last around 6 months. After that, if you haven’t had sex, the bodies assume you are not into each other and the chemicals subside. You could say staying together over 6 months is a solid timeframe to see if you want to go into a serous relationship. But I digress…
After steadily dating for awhile, the couple decides that they mutually like the personalities, intellects and talents of their partner enough to consider marriage.
Then, and only then, does it make sense to marry for this couple.
The Rapport Curve: how a normal, healthy human relationship works.
Diagrammed, the journey of the couple looks like this:
The x axis shows the level of commitment in a relationship, and the y axis demonstrates the time that is spent together. I call it “relative time” because it is different for everybody. The more time you spend together is an indicator of how committed you are to a person.
It is an exponential curve. Once you commit to marriage, the amount of time and investment into the relationship increases and the prioritization and commitment to the other person compresses as other priorities fall to the side.
Human to Human User Experience Design
I argue that this principle doesn’t just apply to marriage or marketing, but to the designing of user experiences as well.
At FamilySearch, I was just recently put in charge of the design a marketing campaign to open up the market in Mexico.
But first, context is in order…
FamilySearch boasts a worldwide “wiki” powered family tree that is crowd sourced and connected to all account holders. The tree product itself helps you to document your genealogy by using algorithms that crawl the worldwide family tree in order to find potential ancestors for you. With everyone collectively working to document the human family, it allows the tree to find out some cool things about your heritage like:
Show how you are related to famous people or even see how you are related to people in the same room.
See where your ancestors lived on a map.
If you had ancestors in events like the War of 1812 or WW1.
This only works if the tree is built out by the users. But outside of North America where most of FS’s users reside, the wiki tree is not built out enough to offer these really powerful genealogical experiences.
In order to do that, the user (human) needs to build their tree up to something called a “dead horizon” or the first dead person in your family tree that connects to the worldwide family tree. This unlocks the true power of the FS product.
The goal of the marketing experience is as follows:
Design an experience that gets more people to sign up for the Family Search service so they can build out their tree and have access to discovery experiences.
Seems pretty straightforward right? Well in a way it is, but there is the problem…
Here is a simplified view of the FamilySearch product offerings on the rapport curve:
Keep in mind, this isn’t a full representation of all FS products, but the power of the FS platform depends on a well built section of their wiki tree. If it isn’t built, there are limited discovery experiences & there are also slimmer chances to get things called “record hints” which help you in your genealogical research.
So as things stand right now, FamilySearch’s value proposition in marriage terms (with discovery experiences akin to getting that first coffee & tree building being akin to committing to marriage) is this:
That was an awesome first experience with our product right? Why don’t you work in the salt mines to build our tree?
To get to the “dead horizon” where you unlock the full power of the FS tree varies by the individual. One person might just have to fill in three generations but for others, it can be several before anything happens.
This is a huge commitment of time!
The learning curve to properly building a tree is so steep that you need to take classes, and rely on family history consultants to assist you.
The investment of time is incredibly daunting and during that “salt mine” experience, you just hope that you find something that “flips the switch” and gives you the desire to keep using the software.
That is probably why many of the platforms greatest power users are retired baby boomers who have the time to commit and conversely, the lack of time to motivate them to preserve their legacy.
Latin culture and photos
After living in Latin American communities two years and being married to a Latina, I learned a thing or two about how important photos are in Mexican culture specifically:
It is common in a Mexican home to see a wall that is covered with family photos, a hodgepodge of clashing frame styles (and sometimes the photo doesn’t have a frame) that document the history of the family that lives in that home. At my father-in-law’s childhood home, I can see photos of him as a baby, teenager, and young man scattered in no coherent order across the wall. The purpose of the wall is not to tell a narrative, but to remember.
Nobody did it better than Pixar when they researched for the movie Coco. In The film, Pixar uses the Mexican holiday, Dia De Los Muertos, as a vehicle to share a message on remembering our ancestors. You see, in Mexican culture, true damnation is to be forgotten. That’s why every year, they create these shrines to remember their forbearers.
That is why women keep the surnames of their family when they get married.
Why Mexican families are so strong and tight knit.
And explains why my in-laws take an inordinate amount of pictures.
Why talk about how Mexicans love pictures so much?
Because that is good UX… Dingus.
There is one product I didn’t mention that FamilySearch offers:
Memories.
In Nir Eyal’s Hooked: How to Build Habit Forming Products, Nir outlines the Hooked model, which explains why some of the world’s “stickiest” products ,like Instagram, are so habit forming. It is because they have a trigger, an action, variable reward, and investment in the platform.
Trigger: the product first has to contain a call-to-action, something like an ad, a push notification, or a badge app icon engage the user to open the product. With memories, that will be the landing page I design.
Action: In order for the product to become a habit, the action to perform while using the product need’s to be easier than thinking. With Memories, it is the easiest product to use on FS’s product portfolio – you just upload and caption pictures. If framed correctly, it can be seen as a place for people to store all family photos.
Reward: In order for the action to become a habit, the reward need’s to be variable, with new experiences the more you use the app. With memories, you can tag the photos to your tree, and as you build you tree and tag photos, the FamilySearch software serves up new photos of your relative and might even find more relatives you didn’t know existed.
Investment: The more you work on a platform the more you value it’s use. With memories, the more you upload photos, the more the product becomes part of your daily life. At least that is my hypothesis.
So in terms of human to human UX: Memories is like dating.
Why every business should have rapport building products in their product portfolios
So that’s why I am designing for the market in Mexico to get on-boarded to Memories instead of asking them to jump into a steep learning curve of tree building. Get them on the platform first, re-market to them so they can receive more triggers, then encourage them to upload family photos and memories to the platform on a regular basis. The point is this: get them to invest in the software through something that is easy, so the work they put in leads to staying with the platform.
Asking someone to jump into genealogical research is like adobe asking people to jump into photoshop with no good reason why they should use it.
Speaking of Adobe…
They have their own form of romancing potential Creative Cloud customers.
If you haven’t used Adobe Spark yet, it is a free service that allows you to rapidly create social media posts, videos and web landing pages with little to know background in graphic design and video editing.
Adobe doesn’t try to get everyone in the Creative Cloud right way. Photoshop is such a steep learning curve that most people need to take a course on how to use it.
But Adobe Spark? It does the work for you. I can say this product in the long term was one of the reasons I bought into Creative Cloud because I used Spark for my families business until it got to the point that I wanted more control of how my content looked.
Only then did I had the proper context and the motivation to learn the tougher software. Think about it.
This post was the result of the research and strategy behind my work at FamilySearch. Keep an eye out for the Case study on cadend.com when I ship the final experience. Thanks for reading!