Interesting piece over at Creating Passionate Users on the difficulties of engaging people given the sheer amount of life stuff that is competing for our attention nowadays.
As it says, "the secret is to be more provocative and interesting than anything else in their environment".
And here are some suggestions CPU makes for how to do it...
- Be Visual: Pictures are more important to the brain than words, and unless you've already got their attention and are a good enough writer to paint pictures in their head, you'll do better with visuals. The more stimulating the better...(And this) doesn't have to be pictures of naked women. Your brain can't help it, so let yourself off the hook.
- Be Different (break patterns and expectations): as long as we're doing what everyone else is doing (or what we have always done), the brain can relax and think, "Nothing new here... whew... what a relief, that means I can now go back to scanning for something that is". Ways to be different include doing the opposite of what you normally do, or doing something expected in a different domain, but which is wildly unique in yours.
- Be Daring: you know the story on this one--being safe is often incompatible with being provocative.
- Change Things Regularly: this is about continually breaking your own patterns. Consistently shaking things up whether it's look and feel of your website to the product itself. (Obviously the definition of "regularly" and "things" varies dramatically depending on the type of product or service).
- Inspire Curiosity: humans often find puzzles and even questions irresistible. Just try to walk by a TV playing a quiz show and not think about the answer to the question you heard walking by. How many times have you watched to the end of a movie you didn't particularly like, just because you had to find out how the story ends? Our legacy brains love curiosity because it usually means more learning.
- Pose a Challenge: the level and nature of the challenge work only if they're within boundaries that work for your audience, of course. Ask me to solve a calculus problem and I'll keep on walking.
- Be Controversial and Committed: take a stand. Mediocrity is not a formula for holding attention.
- Be Fun: remember, brains love fun because fun=play, and play=practising-to-survive. Nor does fun have to mean funny. Chess can be fun but isn't funny.
- Be Stimulating. Be Exciting. Be Seductive: keep in mind that seduction does not have to mean sexual. A good storyteller can seduce me into sticking with the story. A good teacher can seduce me into learning. A good software app can seduce me into getting better and better.
- Help them have Hi-Res Experiences: this gets back to the notion of being-better-is-better. The more your users know and can do, the higher resolution experience they have. Whatever you can do to give them more expertise will help keep them interested in wanting to know and do more. But they need to be up the skill curve before this really kicks in, so we must do whatever we can to help get new users past the rough spots (i.e. the "suck threshold").
A little recent example of the benefits of being provocative is our new Mattessons commercial, which ticks a few of the above boxes. Only a couple of weeks in, and sales are already up 30% and rising.
