Designing for Organic Social Behavior

Ankur Bagchi at UXDX Community: Social Products and Rethinking your Product's Vision. Video: https://youtu.be/P3J2V4D0GCI

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

What organic social behavior means

[00:00:00] Beautiful, thanks a lot, happy to be here. Just to introduce myself a little bit, I've been a product designer for the past five years and I've designed for companies like Domo[?], which is the largest South Asian social dating app in the world, as well as founded a company called Weekend which focused on creating meaningful in-real-life social interactions. So essentially this space is something that I'm personally very fond of, and while this talk does go over things at a very high level, I'd love to have conversations about any and everything that you guys see in this.

[00:00:34] So what does organic social behavior mean? That's a lot of words, but at the end of the day it just means how people behave in very natural, organic settings. When you wake up in the morning and drive to work, what does that commute look like? When you meet your colleagues, what does that look like? When you come home, meet your family, watch TV together, when you go out and meet your friends for brunch, all of these things that humans naturally will do, that's all organic social behavior. There's nothing else to it.

[00:01:04] One thing that I want to touch on before anything else, before going and looking at other products and features, I want to talk about the constancy of humans. And if there's one thing you take away from this whole presentation, if there's one thing that makes this half hour worth it for you, it's this thing. Human needs have been constant for the last, as long as you can imagine, the last two thousand, five thousand, ten thousand, fifty thousand years.

[00:01:32] That little pyramid you see on the right, Maslow's hierarchy of needs, while it can be debated back and forth it serves as a pretty good approximation for how humans have very basic physical and biological needs. Those core drivers have been the same throughout human history, throughout recorded human history, because evolution is very slow. And because our needs haven't changed so much, our social structures have evolved in appearance but in essence they're still the same. So essentially we still have the same family, community and relationship needs as people in ancient Egypt. Our social needs have not changed so much.

[00:02:10] And so because of that, the way we design for organic social behavior is by empowering pre-existing behaviors, by reinforcing pre-existing relationships, and by gamifying social interactions. We're not starting from scratch. Humans already have existing behaviors, relationships and interactions that we want to empower, reinforce and gamify respectively.

[00:02:35] To summarize all of this, if I could sum all of this up in two sentences: you cannot change basic human behaviors. What you can do, and the only thing you can do, is re-channel or reinforce existing behaviors. To reiterate, you cannot change basic human behaviors. All you can do for some people is create better habits for them, which is about re-dialing[?] existing behaviors.

[00:03:02] How do we design for organic social behavior? I think it's very important to ask the questions in the right way. The question is not what features do I need for organic social behavior, but how do humans behave naturally in a specific situation? How do humans behave, how do humans do this offline, how do humans do this when it's not virtual? Essentially, we talked about several settings of organic human behavior, so how do humans accomplish those things with other humans when they're not doing this on an app or a product that you're building? How can I empower humans to behave the same way, to behave naturally, in virtual settings? That's what we're exploring.

[00:03:39] And again, to reiterate, you cannot change basic human behaviors. When I say re-channel, I mean take an existing human behavior and move it to a different medium. So if I'm having a conversation with you in person, we can re-channel that through WhatsApp or a Zoom call or a phone call. Those are re-channeling existing behaviors, where we want to have conversations with each other.

Types of social discovery platform

[00:04:02] So let's talk a little bit about social discovery platforms. There are a few types of social discovery platforms. The biggest subset of this is content discovery platforms, which include TikTok, Reddit, Instagram and even Facebook groups these days, after it has been making a huge push towards content discovery. A content discovery platform is essentially where you find different niches of content. So if I'm interested in board games, I might find a TikTok section for board games or a subreddit for board games.

[00:04:31] The people discovery platforms usually help you find people of a specific type, for example people you'd want to date or people you'd want to make friends with. Tinder, Bumble, Hinge and Facebook are good examples of these.

[00:04:44] And lastly, event discovery is another niche where you discover local events, or events around town, or virtual events around the world. Meetup, Eventbrite and even Facebook events are great examples of that. For the purpose of this conversation we're going to talk about content discovery platforms, because they have very interesting and advanced features that enable social discovery as well as social interactions in a very natural and fluid way.

[00:05:14] So most social content platforms like Reddit, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook have three levels of interaction that people do on them. Ninety percent of people, who I kindly call explorers here, other platforms might call them lurkers: 90% of people do not engage actively on these platforms. What ninety percent of people do is just consume content, discover new content and keep essentially scrolling on their feeds.

[00:05:43] Then there are the other nine percent of people. I call them affirmers. They are also called low engagement folks. Essentially these folks do not engage very heavily. They will engage with other created content, but they won't create a lot of content themselves.

[00:06:01] And lastly we have the kings and queens of social media, the creators, the folks who actually create original content and bring it to social media, the folks who allow our affirmers and explorers to exist and enjoy being on these platforms. They create new content. And so what we're going to be looking at over the next few slides is essentially how to serve the explorers, the affirmers and the creators in a social media space.

[00:06:27] And just to dive back, I will keep diving things back to how humans do this organically, just to dive back, most social events where we go usually have this sort of composition. For example, if you go to a sporting event, most people are watching the sports, there's a few people playing, and then there's more people selling hot dogs and organizing the event. Those are the affirmers. So essentially you have a sports team that is a creator, and you have the stadium and the people selling hot dogs who are affirmers, and you have explorers who are watching the event.

Designing for exploration: the infinite feed

[00:06:59] So how do we design for exploration? In the wild, discovery is essentially the act of finding something unexpectedly or during an intentional search. How people did discovery before social media is, for example, a merchant finding a new marketplace looking for the best goods to trade, a scholar enters a library looking for a specific book or a piece of information, a grad student walks into a bar looking for a potential date, or an executive at a networking event who's looking for an interesting group to walk into and join. Discovery is all about finding the right fit of content or people for you. And so 90% of people, ninety percent of the time on social media, are exploring, they're discovering new content. So how do you best serve an explorer?

[00:07:50] We're going to look at a feature called the infinite feed, which Facebook invented in 2006. This feature alone was one of two or three things that was single-handedly responsible for the behemoth Facebook is today. Before the feed there was no inherent method of discovery wherein people could see each other's posts easily. Myspace had a very rudimentary version, but the feed is the first thing to revolutionize social media. It made social media social, it made social media a content-driven media. Today it's responsible for all social media engagement globally.

[00:08:27] But again, to look at why this works, we need to understand what it simulates that is a natural human behavior. The infinite feed simulates window shopping, or gauging a crowd. When you walk into a room you quickly glance through everyone and you identify potential fits for conversations. Then you walk into a shop, you browse around, you walk around, you think about buying different things but you don't really buy them. The infinite feed is a very low effort way to glance through a ton of content the same way. You can just keep scrolling, you don't have to stop for any content.

[00:09:01] The one thing that makes this gamified, the one thing that really makes the infinite feed powerful, is the personalization system, which can create a strong variable reward. Variable rewards have been proven to be much more powerful than static rewards. For example, if I give you a candy every five times you press the button, versus if I gave you candy every one to ten times you press the button, you probably have much more fun pressing the button in the second version because you never know when you're going to get that reward. So essentially, in the act of discovery, when you come across an amazing post the dopamine that hits your brain is much stronger than if we gave you every post at the same quality. And so that's one of the ways in which the feed is gamified to make you hooked on to other people's content.

[00:09:47] One thing I want to ask everyone, and this is not something I want to go into, but if you want to take this away as homework or just learn more about it: why does TikTok's feed work so well? TikTok has taken over social media. TikTok was responsible for over 40 percent of social media engagement last year and it has absolutely taken over the world by storm. There are many reasons for this and I suggest you read a really interesting article by Eugene Wei on this. Heavily recommend it. But definitely something to think about in terms of the design of the product as well as how their feed works.

The profile swipe, and what Hinge does differently

[00:10:27] Next we move on to the profile swipe. As someone in the dating space, this is one of my favorites. The profile swipe was created by Tinder in 2012 and today it's the building block for dating apps everywhere. But we want to talk about why this works and what it mimics. The profile swipe simply mimics the natural way you glance at someone and kind of rate their attractiveness, if you're interested in them as a potential match. Humans, whether we like it or not, love to judge each other. We love to internally make a decision on whether this person's a great match, and swiping is a very easy, very quick way to do that, and we all love doing it.

[00:11:09] The simple way this is gamified is that Tinder caps daily swipes, and so every day you can only swipe on 10 to 20 to 50 people, and the next day you'll get a notification asking you to keep swiping. And like I said, even if you're not really looking for a match, it's fun swiping on people, it's fun judging people, it's a very natural human behavior. And that's why Tinder worked so very well, with the same variable reward system where you might find that soulmate after maybe three swipes or ten, you never know.

[00:11:42] To expand a little bit on the swipe system, Hinge is a product that does things a little bit differently and has in recent years come out much more successful than Tinder. What Hinge does differently is that it lets you, in double quotes, shoot your shot, where it lets you add a single message along with sending a like. And the reason that's interesting is because when you look at organic social behavior, when people do this naturally, chemistry is usually formed by one person walking up to the other and saying something bold or provocative, or even a simple hi. And it's that asymmetry that creates the tension of chemistry and then builds on the relationship moving forward. So it's not just two people looking at each other, it's someone walking up to another person and saying, hey, I like you, let's talk.

[00:12:29] And so, given that that's how humans naturally bond and mate, Hinge actually does really well among women. Hinge has one of the best balanced gender ratios on dating apps, narrowly beating Bumble at 36% women, which is much better than Tinder's, often 20 to 25 based on which country it's in. So definitely check out Hinge if you're single.

Designing for affirmation: the like button and the comment section

[00:12:54] Next we move to designing for affirmation. We looked at a few ways that we can help explorers. Affirmation is essentially about emotional support or encouragement. In the wild, if you look at how people affirm others socially, naturally: in a rally a political leader might shout a slogan, the crowd might salute back and say the slogan and cheer. Or a colleague says something profound, you just smile and nod your agreement. Your favorite football player scores so you and your friends stand up and start cheering in the stands. All of this is affirmation.

[00:13:31] The reason affirmation is extremely important is that most human conversational content is about emotional affirmation. Every conversation, whether you're at work, whether you're talking to your spouse or a significant other, every conversation is wrapped in affirmations. So I would say, next conversation you have, pay attention to how much of your time you spend reinforcing the other person's emotional state. You're going to find that it's about 70 to 80 percent.

[00:14:01] And so this comes back to one of the classics of social media, the like button. The like button was created by Facebook in 2009, that's just 14 years ago. I don't think any of us can imagine our life without the like button, but it's just been 14 years since it came out. And the staggering statistic is that in the seven years after the like button came out we've seen 1.13 trillion likes. In a world where every B2B salesman is trying to get people to click one button once to convert, we've seen 1.13 trillion button clicks. That's how easy and ubiquitous the like button is.

[00:14:40] The reason it works is very simple. The reason it works is because affirmation is a very, very important part of human conversation and human behavior, human social behavior. It's as simple as just an approving nod, just saying, yeah, I like what you said. And it's very, very easy, it's one tap, positive affirmation for any content, any channel, any media. The way the like button is gamified is actually interesting. It's not gamified for the person liking, but it's gamified for the creator, and we'll come back to that in a little bit.

[00:15:15] Another very low hanging fruit that enables social media for affirmers is the comment section. The comment section was created a very, very long time ago. It was one of the first pieces of affirmation created, one of the first ways that people could affirm, back in 1998, and it was an initial part of blogs back in the day. It was popularized first in Tumblr.

[00:15:44] And the reason it works is because it opened up the gates to creator-fan relationships, or creator-consumer relationships. The comment section is actually the thing that gave birth to influencers and people who could start talking back to their fans live, because there was no other way for them to communicate on the same channels outside of something like an IRC chat, which was just very hard because nobody was live all the time. And it essentially simulates a fan being able to shout "we love you" in the crowd. So it gives fans a voice, and that was what gave birth to influencers a long time ago.

[00:16:22] One thing I want to ask everybody here and everybody watching this, and these are all questions that I ask myself and found very interesting questions and led to a lot of insights: when would you, in a social platform, use the post-comment style versus the chat style? The post-comment style, for example on Facebook, is when someone makes a post, whether that's a text post or a photo, and then everybody else sort of comments on that, versus you have a Discord style or WhatsApp style chat. What are the differences between the two? What does each facilitate and what does each promote, and when would you use each? Just something to think about and consider.

Designing for creators: status systems

[00:17:00] Next we move on to the one percent, the people who actually make social media work. We move on to the creators. You know who they are. In the wild we've seen creators all the way back from the dawn of time, from philosophers imparting knowledge through stories to their students sitting around them, gladiators dueling in the Colosseum, a bard singing for a supper in a tavern, a traveling circus troupe, a radio jockey, a news anchor, and even today a sports team. These are the creators, these are the people who draw crowds around them, these are the people who are in the thick of it all while everybody else is cheering from the sidelines.

[00:17:42] The way we enable creators and reinforce creators to keep creating content, the main way, is status systems. There are many reasons creators create content. Some of them are very altruistic or want to just display their art, but most of what drives most creators today is status systems and earning social capital. This is a huge topic and so I'm not going to cover it in a lot of detail in this very moment, but it is an incredible topic to look into.

[00:18:15] The way status systems work is essentially you put content out there into the internet and in exchange you get status, and that social capital, that status, is measured by a number, whether that's number of followers, likes, comments, karma on Reddit, whatever it is. Social capital is what you accumulate through these numbers, through this gamification, in order to essentially say, hey, my brand on YouTube is 150,000 followers, 150,000 viewers, look at my video, it got a million views.

[00:18:48] The reason this works is because people are status seeking monkeys. I apologize if that's offensive, that is a direct quote taken from a beautiful blog post on this called Status as a Service, highly recommend looking it up. But essentially people are status seeking monkeys. People seek out the most efficient way to maximize social capital. What does that mean? People want status. Most people today, whether it's me or you, want social status. When we talk to another person we want them to respect us, we want them to appreciate us.

[00:19:20] Social media is one very interesting way to get social status, to earn social status, because it's very easy to say I have 150,000 followers and command respect on a certain platform. It's also a way to convert social capital into other forms of capital. If I have 150,000 followers, they're probably clicking ads, they're probably going to buy some of my merchandise, they're probably going to sign up for an online course I have, they're probably going to allow me to cross-promote other products as an influencer. So essentially the main way you promote creation of content on your platform is building systems that allow the storage of social capital.

[00:20:02] And so, yeah, it's gamified pretty easily. Numerical stores of this status naturally make you want to push those numbers higher, because we're all competing that way, and they create milestones. When you're at 100K you want to hit 150, when you're at 150 you want to hit 200, that's how it just works. Status systems, a very important piece of the creator ecosystem when it comes to social media.

The repost, and the rise of the curator

[00:20:28] Another small interesting feature which revolutionized social media in a way is the repost, the retweet or the reblog button right there on Twitter. It was popularized initially by Tumblr. It's a very old feature which started off with blogs, but we see it very powerfully in the share features in Facebook and Instagram and the retweet button on Twitter today.

[00:20:51] The reason it works is because it creates an entirely new, different kind of creator. It creates a type of creator that essentially specializes in curation instead of creating original content. It allows you to create a curator, and a curator is essentially a person that has one niche and accumulates and curates content along that one niche. So for example you could have meme pages. I for example have seen a lot of meme pages that are specifically about South Asians and Indians on Facebook. You could have sports pages that retweet sports news, you could have people that retweet news about AI. So essentially this helps you create the curator, which doesn't need to create their own content but plays arbitrage and sells the content of others in one package on social media.

Live chat and live social events

[00:21:45] Lastly, one huge phenomenon that I want to talk about that is a growing space is live chat. For those of you who don't know what Twitch is, Twitch is a platform where you have gamers who play games, content creators who are live streaming themselves playing games, and you have a live chat where you could talk to the streamer and the streamer can essentially look at what you're saying and respond back to you. It essentially mimics a live social event, very similar to a sports game, or a comedian interacting with the crowd, or a circus, a gladiator match.

[00:22:23] The reason this is so powerful is because since the dawn of time the most powerful social group that we've ever had have been live social events. Live social events have been the backbone of human community, from all the way back when we used to have village fairs, when we used to have fairs crossing by, circuses crossing by, when we had gladiatorial events where everybody came around to watch, when we had religious events. Live social events have always been the one thing tying humanity together socially. It's the one thing we pay money for. We don't pay money for friendship, we pay money to have excuses to spend time with our friends.

[00:23:01] And so live chat perfectly captures the situation of catching someone doing something live while being able to chat with our friends and interact with the event live. And so it fulfills both a social need and a content need for explorers and affirmers. You can watch your favorite content along with the people you really care about. And lastly it provides an interactive stage for creators, so they're able to fine-tune the content better for their viewers.

[00:23:30] So definitely live chat, one of the best ways we've seen of creating social content that promotes very organic behavior, because it very closely simulates something that is the backbone of human social behavior. Live chat is also seen on things like Instagram Live, Twitch live. We're going to see much more of this as we move forward.

Why did Clubhouse fall off, and trends in social

[00:23:53] So, using all of these concepts, thinking about why certain features work and how they gain traction, one thing that's very interesting to think about is why did Clubhouse fall off? If you don't know what Clubhouse is, Clubhouse is an app where you can talk in rooms to each other. You can join rooms and just start free-flowing conversations. Clubhouse reached its peak about last year when it was valued at four billion dollars and had an incredible growth team. You had people like Elon Musk showing up in Clubhouse rooms. Incredible product, very fun to use, very well branded, but unfortunately Clubhouse fell off and this year it's about 60% down from its peak user base. So one thing that I really like to think about, and I have a lot of theories but I'd love to hear from you, why did Clubhouse fall off? And I think there are some interesting answers based on how people use products organically and what Clubhouse might be missing.

[00:24:50] I want to end this with a few trends that we're seeing in social today. Just if you're exploring social products, if you're listening to this because you want to explore social products, these are some places where I see a lot of growth and potential. One is creator economies. Platforms like Patreon, like Substack, like OnlyFans. We see creators becoming much more independent, we see content creation become much more democratic and decentralized, where people can directly charge money for the content they create instead of having to go through a platform like YouTube. And so we're seeing this being fueled by the growing crowd of influencers today who are able to go multi-platform and just create a very niche fan base, just because there's so many people online and watching today.

[00:25:36] The second thing is social commerce. We've already seen TikTok and Instagram try social commerce. Brands have started realizing that individual content creators are very powerful mods[?] and brands for them. We're seeing a lot of individuals very successfully sell products on TikTok and Instagram. So for example, TikTok a few months ago launched a way to buy products directly off TikTok pages. So we're going to see a lot of growth in social commerce where you see individual creators trying to sell products.

[00:26:09] And lastly, this is my favorite and this is my jam so I had to give it a shout out. We're seeing a huge wave of startups that are focusing on IRL, that are focusing on meeting up in real life. Two products I want to give a shout out to in that space are Clock Out and Saturday. Both are very new products, both are exploring ways in which you could actually connect with the people around you, the people in your neighborhood, the people in your community, and create serendipitous moments where you just rediscover, rekindle a spark with someone you haven't seen in a long time, or a stranger who just lives near you and shares a lot of your interests.

[00:26:45] That's about it, that's all I have for now. If you have any questions I would love to hear it, I would love to have deeper discussions on this. I'm available on LinkedIn, I'm available on my website, I'm available through UXDX channels. So if you have any questions or any thoughts, always open to hear, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn or anywhere else. That's about it.

Q&A

[00:27:10] Rory: Excellent, thank you, thank you very much. I really enjoyed that, because you went deep into each of the different categories and how to focus on them. So I hope everybody out there enjoyed it as much as I did. And we have time for a few questions, because we did start a little late, so if anybody has any questions then please do post them in and I'll ask them to Ankur.

[00:27:38] Rory: I kind of have two questions but I'll go with the one, because those last two apps that you mentioned there, Saturday and Clock Out, they seem to me to fall into the same category as Clubhouse. And to me the problem with Clubhouse is that I need to be there at the exact same time as somebody else, and otherwise it's gone, I've lost it. So what was yours, because I was waiting to hear your opinions on why Clubhouse hasn't succeeded? So what are your opinions for why Clubhouse hasn't succeeded, or sorry, I guess it has, from a generic point of view it's a success story, but rather why it has the drop-off?

[00:28:24] Ankur: So, Rory, I think the main two reasons I can give off the top of my head, this is a longer conversation, but one, Clubhouse doesn't have a very good way to store status. It does have a follower count, but it is very hard to catch someone on Clubhouse unless you also come online at the same time, and so it is very hard for your followers to catch you.

[00:28:48] Ankur: And secondly, Clubhouse is very bad at signal to noise ratio. So for example, there might be a one hour conversation where your favorite people are speaking, but how much of that time is actually high quality content? I'm going to assume maybe there's five to ten clips you can make out of that, ten second segments which would be extremely insightful to you, and the rest of that time is not very insightful. And so you see these clips on Instagram, you see these clips on Twitter, and you love Twitter and Instagram because you find these things. You have to sit through the recording on Clubhouse, there's no way to find these high impact clips. And so on Clubhouse I just think it's very hard to find signal among all the noise.