Considerations for service planning, book

Chapter 1

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It's better to discard the thinking that "if you just build it, users will come." "You need to learn how to figure out where users are looking and wait for them there in advance."

Neuroscientist Daniel Levitin writes the following about task-oriented mode and task-avoidance mode: these two brain states are similar to the relationship between yin and yang. When one is activated, the other is deactivated. To survive such bottlenecks, you need to know when and how often users fall into each mode. And you'll need to strive to apply a design that fits this.


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It's a clear case showing that, depending on the type of information to be acquired, the observer is focusing their gaze on different parts of the meme.

The same phenomenon appears in most content, including social media and commercial websites. As always, users' goal is to grasp the meaning of the page quickly using the minimum attention-capacity resources. Usability expert Jakob Nielsen discovered in 2006 that people scan pages in an F-shaped pattern. They read the page in the order of putting their eyes on the top-left first, then scanning the body.


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Placing the core content within the F-shaped pattern where users' gaze mostly rests is a great help in enabling the user to quickly achieve their desired objective. But you, who built the meme, also have business goals. If it's a site sustained by ad revenue, you'll have to pull users' attention away from their own goals and redirect it to the ads you produced or to content helpful to your profitability. If it's a smartphone, you'll use push notifications to keep your app top-of-mind. According to statistics published in 2016 by U.S. app-usage analytics firm Quettra, 80% of users no longer use an app 5 days after installing it. In this case, you need to stir up the user's attention and induce them to use the app again.

However, methods of drawing involuntary attention should be minimized. And you should have a good understanding of the psychological background behind them. Since users' attention is already a limited resource, such methods can worsen the attention-focus bottleneck.



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Moving pop-up notifications and red meatball dots are very effective at drawing users' attention. But what happens when a meme developer uses too many of them? The problem is that these notifications are no longer perceived as special by users. That is, users come to perceive them as commonplace events. When this happens, our brains include them as part of the normal neural model and no longer focus attention on them. This is a form of habituation, the opposite concept of attention. The principle is that when there's no reward upon focusing attention, the probability of giving it a glance gradually decreases.


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If even important memes like AMBER alerts have to worry about habituation, we must assume that almost all memes carry similar risks. If you're not sure where users' attention will go next, or whether your meme will be waiting for them there the next time, you have to exercise the same level of care — as when sending an AMBER alert — every time you use design tools that excessively draw users' attention.




Chapter 2
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You might feel that to get users to interpret the meme you designed correctly, you only need to display the proper label. But as we saw in the previous chapter, users tend to avoid using the resources needed for recognizing things as much as possible. That is, it takes considerable effort to get users interested in the meme you designed. Over the past decades, psychologists have confirmed that humans are stingy in using cognitive resources. In other words, humans allocate only the minimum cognitive resources to figuring out what important meaning your meme has.