In Designing, Fast or Slow, I borrowed Daniel Kahneman’s framework for how the brain has a fast, emotional decision center, and a slow, analytical, deliberate one. I gave examples of how we can design digital products to activate one or the other, how the “engagement trap” is about designing for System 1 over System 2 deliberately and how we should use this power responsibly.
Reddit and HackerNews have similar mechanics, but optimize for System 1 and System 2 responses through design decisions.
In this follow-up, I’m going to look for that sweet spot, making products that are both viscerally appealing and are valued upon long-term reflection. [1]
A recap of System 1 and System 2 thinking
I’m going to structure this through examples from outside of web or apps because as a relatively new media type, mainstream user generated content products still bias towards designing for simple System 1 thinking. Meanwhile, other media types and distribution channels have taken decades or centuries to find a healthy balance. As a field, software products are constantly struggling to measure and compare short and long-term value. So I think it’ll be more effective to show you examples from more mature fields and let you make the leap to social systems software.
Case Study 1: Games
This might seem counterintuitive given that games get a bad rap for addictiveness but great games are deep, change the way you think, and give you skills and strategy that transcend the medium. Think chess, or poker, or Starcraft.
But above all, any good game needs to be fun to start playing and game designers have dabbled in psychology for a very long time, learning many of the same lessons but in their own language. Video games are in particular a great subset to study because they let you build rich worlds, many deep storylines.
Video games are always trying to keep you in a state of flow. Flow is the same being being “in the zone” or really engaged, and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book is the seminal volume on it. My favorite part of the book is this diagram that highlights when an activity produces a state of flow.
In general, Game Design is a field that has a lot to teach us about taking difficult tasks and breaking them down to make it enjoyable, and I have a handful of recommended readings in a footnote below[2].
Case Study 2: Teaching
Education tries to encapsulate as much valuable human knowledge as possible and transfer it to the next generation. Faced with this extremely difficult challenge and the reality of students’ varying motivations the best teachers inspire more than they regurgitate in order to be effective. They call upon storytelling skills, effective metaphors, variable rewards, progressive disclosure, level design, etc.
In other words, they trigger System 1 to get you to invest in an activity that’s ultimately very System 2 intensive.
Duolingo’s progress map, which progressively fills out as a learner understands increasingly complex concepts.
As you see, effective game design and education have a lot in common! I have a handful of recommended readings in the notes for game design too [3].
Case Study 3: Cooking
I wanted to do an example far out from the realm of digital, because it allows the common patterns to emerge more effectively. Cooking is arguably the most System 1 activity of all. It engages taste, smell, sight and sound.
But building an an ability to create and appreciate complex foods, for example skills in molecular gastronomy is a highly scientific process with lots of careful measurement, enumerating and evaluating combinations, and painstaking patience.
But just like a great game or mastery of a field, the best food can be appreciated at many different levels, from simple smells bringing back childhood memory to a deep appreciation of how much work went into creating a unique texture, or great use of a local ingredient.
We’re all drawn to food through very System 1 behaviors, but a progressive, rigorous training with gradual, well directed System 2 investments in learning technique that we then encapsulate and abstract lets us draw ever-richer rewards makes cooking a very satisfying activity for both System 1 and 2.
The Takeaways
Games, teaching, cooking food. The common thread across all of these is that they are effectively designed learning experiences. These often have the following attributes:
- Initially grab the user’s attention using System 1
- Have a long-term goal strongly aligned with the user’s deep values
- Get them to invest progressive amounts of System 2’s time
- Weave information into narratives
- Keep offering System 1 little small rewards along the way. This could be a snack, a digital badge for leveling up, or a gold star at school.
- A unit of reward is usually offered within the timespan of focused attention. In other words you have to create good atomic units that add up into sessions, and it’s important to keep in mind limits of human cognition, e.g. the 25 minute pomodoro rule [4].
- Offer rewards of increasing complexity to System 2, keeping your users in the flow channel. Often, the reward is an encapsulation of the knowledge gained in the last round, so the user can add it to their toolbelt and move up a level of abstraction. There is inherent satisfaction in crafting a quality tool.
The ability to appreciate moving up and down ladders of abstraction [5] is something humans enjoy, in work, games, coffee and nearly everything else. This is what the wine snobs probably mean when they say “complexity of aroma.”
Finally, I’ll leave you with an assortment of examples from digital design.
Video Learning
The initial approach to video-based learning was to record lectures in class and make them downloadable. But as the media is evolving, it’s experimenting with shorter unit sizes, breaking down content into chapters and subchapters, and inline quizzes to draw continuous investment from learners and give them continuous feedback.
Interactive Reading & Visualizations
This interactive component in a NY Times article progressively discloses information and builds on previous abstractions through time.
Academic Publishing
Some of the best knowledge representations are often visual and interactive, but the standardization practices often force ideas into a medium they’re inadequately expressed in.
For example, some Deep Learning research is finding it much more effective to convey its ideas through interactive publications like the Distill.pub effort and trying to standardize it as a new format for academic discourse.
At Quora, making dense knowledge accessible isn’t just an abstract problem but something we and our writers deal with every day. Processing knowledge is inherently a very System 2 activity, but our reality is that opening the app or your digest email competes for your attention with image and emotion heavy alternatives, and so we’re always striving to find the right System 1 hooks into an ultimately System 2 experience.
Notes
- The framework for visceral and reflective emotions is borrowed from Don Norman’s Emotional Design
- Recommended reading in Education
- Salman Khan’s One World Schoolhouse as a starting point, because it’s contemporary and maps old-world learnings to the world of digital.
- The Wikipedia article on Mastery Learning or the original paper.
- The Smartest Kids in the World is a book that studies very different but all effective education systems in Finland, South Korea and Poland.
- Recommended reading for Game Design
- The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses. I like this one because there’s lots of small chapters, each with independently usable knowledge. If you have an even lower attention span, there’s a card deck version.
- Rules of Play is one of the standard textbooks in Game Design and a great resource to get started in the field.
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The Pomodoro method is a time management technique that breaks down up into 25 minute chunks and breaks in between.
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This term is borrowed from Bret Victor’s essay, which is the best exposition of this concept I’ve read by far. The essay itself is wonderfully presented with a great set of interactive illustrations.
This was originally posted on the [Quora Design Blog](https://quoradesign.quora.com/Grabbing-Attention-Delivering-Satisfaction.