Yeah you should. Here, all you have to do is push this link with your cursor/finger/stylus-type interface device.
Now to reward your self for your good deed of the day, you should watch this rather fantastic video on called ‘The internet is my religion’.
Ta ta for now.
This is a conundrum that has puzzled me all of my public-washroom-using life. As I leave the washroom with soggy hands and a feeling of disappointment in hand dryer designers everywhere, I wonder ‘why do hand dryers even exist…they’re shit.’
After years of inadequacy I have finally adopted the mentality of ‘just wipe your hands on your pants and be done with it’.
For years, millions of people across the world have been using their own clothing to finish off the job of crappy hand dryers. Where else in product development would we happily accept such tardiness? Would you buy a kettle that only boiled your water to 56°C? No, you’d take it back and complain it doesn’t do it’s job. So why do people keep buying hand dryers for washrooms and then offering hand towels as well?
I think the whole debate is being looked at backwards, this is what we need to do: Stop trying to prove that hand dryers are better for the environment and just concentrate on making paper towels more sustainable.
* To see how we can make paper towels more sustainable just skip right to the end of my rationally laid out, scientific rant.
This is going to be a super quick post for two reasons:
1. I’ve had too much coffee and have a really short attention span right now
and
2. The infographic is as self-explanatory as is it astounding
Can you believe that in just 1 week, we share more data than the Hubble Telescope captured in the first 20 years of it’s life? This requires an ‘OMG’ as you visually absorb the information in this vertically scrolling picture.
**If the image that I cmd+c’d isn’t displaying, you can see it in all it’s non-copywright infringement glory here on Mashable.com**
Like water and electricity, the internet has become a utility. We use it everyday and so, naturally, we are becoming more conscientious about using our time and resources wisely. We’re more considered now about what videos we watch on YouTube, who we follow on Twitter, what emails we open and what links we click. Because of this, more and more emphasis is being placed on User Centric Design.
I love User Centric Design, it’s a big part of my job, but I do think it’s too easy to get caught up in the word ‘user’. Makes it sound like users are a special breed of human only found online, somehow different to people in the offline world. I prefer to call it ‘people centric design‘ – because, as humans, we base our decisions on past experience. Offline experiences definitely influence online behavior.
What the brain does when confronted with your content
Something I think we, as digital marketing people, wrongly assume a lot of the time is that the choices we make are always conscious. Everyday the brain gets bombarded with thousands of different stimulus (from adverting alone) and tries to make sense of it all, regardless of the medium. But, as clever as we humans are, the brain can only process one stimulus at a time (yes people can multitask, but it’s essentially how quickly your brain can move between stimulus making it seem like multi-tasking) and within a millisecond the stimulus has been put into one of two boxes a. needs more attention b. irrelevant at this current time. How the brain makes that choice is based on all the information it can gather in that millisecond before.
A stimulus can be anything from a new email in your inbox, a call to action to ‘click here’ or someone asking you to jump off a cliff. The brain doesn’t treat offline and online differently when making this decision. Online stimulus are ignored just as instantaneously as stimulus in the real world.
So. To get people to do stuff online, we need to tell the brain, in a millisecond, why it needs to pay attention before it has chance to put the stimulus in box b.
Why ‘click here’ will get you in box b.
Here is an example of why using only ‘click here’ and adding a hyperlink will get your carefully crafted content in box b.
E.g. 1. Hyperlinking is essentially the same as bolding. It tells the brain ‘hey, look at me’. So it does. And by having only ‘click here’ as your call to action you’re limiting the information the brain can get quickly from the text.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Click here to Find out why jumping off a cliff is bad for your health Proin ut blandit ipsum. Morbi augue nulla, viverra non mollis id, pretium eget tellus. Maecenas adipiscing leo convallis nunc iaculis in pharetra lacus laoreet. To see the common injuries as a result of jumping from cliffs, click here. Donec erat neque, vulputate in mattis eget, interdum non ligula. In hac habitasse platea dictumst. Nunc porta posuere arcu, non posuere nisl viverra sed. Jump from cliffs safely – to find your nearest parachute club, click here. Sed aliquet risus non nulla rhoncus suscipit. Sed sem ante, molestie nec feugiat id, blandit at neque.
E.g. 2. This example gets the brains attention right away. Telling it instantly what the text is about without having to actually read it.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Find out why jumping off a cliff is bad for your health Proin ut blandit ipsum. Morbi augue nulla, viverra non mollis id, pretium eget tellus. Maecenas adipiscing leo convallis nunc iaculis in pharetra lacus laoreet. Common injuries as a result of jumping from cliffs Donec erat neque, vulputate in mattis eget, interdum non ligula. In hac habitasse platea dictumst. Nunc porta posuere arcu, non posuere nisl viverra sed. Jump from cliffs safely – find your nearest parachute club. Sed aliquet risus non nulla rhoncus suscipit. Sed sem ante, molestie nec feugiat id, blandit at neque.
So you’ve made it to box a. What now?
Should the stimulus make it to box a. the brain then takes a number of steps to decide the appropriate reaction.
Ok. Lets say I ask you to jump off a cliff. What would you say? Well hopefully you’d say no. Why? Because some kind of past experience tells you it’s a bad idea. So why should it be any different if someone asks you to ‘click here’. As a person in the digital world, when you see example 1. and are asked to ‘click here’, questions arise: ‘Why?’ and ‘Where will it take me?’. Then you have to devote time to reading to the text before the link to find out why you should ‘click here’. Then it’s too late, attention lost.
People will spend an average of 4 seconds scanning a webpage to find information of relevance to them. You know how many milliseconds there are in 4 seconds? 4 million.
That’s 4 million chances for the brain to disregard your content. Fact.
If ever Dragons Den needed an invention this is it, right here.
The Mind Rape Helmet. (to prevent mind rape, not encourage it)
To help you understand a little of what I’m referring to, here’s a quote from my favourite moral teacher – Stan, from American Dad.
Stan talking to Francine: “So, what do you think of your new car? Do you love it? This is the Phallus. No, it’s the Phallus ES. Felix said it was the last one on the lot. I had to act fast or this other guy was totally going to buy it. Son of a bitch! He mind–raped me!” *
I find that this unapproved penetration of the mind happens to me quite a bit. Most of the time I don’t even realise that I’ve bought something until I leave the shop with more bags than I entered with. Recently, even my own mind has been trying to double bluff me. Putting the newly bought items into bags that I already have with me so that i don’t realise until I get home. Then it’s too late.
It’s not me. It’s them. They made me do it.
I’ve been doing some thinking. And in an effort diffuse the responsibility for my actions on to someone else, I have manufactured a bunch stratagies that retail assistants (the good ones) execute with military precision on unsuspecting minds.
This is how I get talked into buying things that I don’t need, or really even want.
– They tell me it’s fashionable. This one I’m slightly ashamed of. I’ll profess to the bitter end about how I’m not influenced by fashion and that I do my own thing, but as soon as anyone shows any interest in anything I’m doing, wearing, eating or reading, I love it. Inside there is a small, but very loud, part of me that likes being the popular one with the cool new shiny things. And I know I’m not the only one.
– Apparently it’s better than what I have now. This feeds off the 1st one and our need to satisfy some kind of internal or external worth. Whether it’s seeking the gratification of others or appeasing your own moral compass, this one will always get you – even if you live in a hemp box in a forest and eat leaves. If someone came along and told you they had a new species of leaf that contained all the nutrients you needed and when you pooed a tree grew – you’d buy them.
– They convince me I’m richer than I think (this last one I blame Scotia Bank for). They say things like ‘if you didn’t buy a coffee everyday for the next week you’d save $25. That’s more than this book costs.’ It’s not that I’m actually richer than I think, it’s that I have the ability to compartmentalize my finances and temporarily, in my mind, re-prioritize coffee money to book money – then I’ll go buy a coffee and sit and read my book.
I believe that retail assistants across the nation are the secret key of successful marketing – and they don’t even know it. So I’m warning you all. So that when you’re mind raped you can have some comfort in thinking ‘well at least I know how they did it’.
*I totally tried, for like 20 minuets, to find a video clip on YouTube so you didn’t have to strain you eyes and read words, but I couldn’t find one, sorry. I’m sure through the power of imagination, you’ll get the humour.
*Stolen image* I found this awesome visual representation on gbfans.com
badly stuffed animal 