37 GENIUS INTERVIEW Dalton Combs
FEED: Do you think there needs to be increased regulation or legislation around these technologies? DC: I don’t know. I think there’s no substitute for a literate user base, but there’s probably also a role for regulation. The most important thing though is a literate user base. FEED: What innovations could you see for behavioural design in video distribution beyond just an auto-play that keeps you locked in? DC: For me, the most important part about designing a sticky product is less about content and more about interactivity. YouTube is a platform that you might spend two hours on, but it’s a very interactive experience – there are lots of choices for the user to make, there’s clicking, there’s commenting. That interactivity is going to make it win out over long-form content, because long-form content is never going to be as interactive, and won’t have the opportunity to use the techniques of interactive behaviour design. Things like HQ and Snapchat are hyper‑interactive media formats. I think those interactive styles of media consumption are going to win out because they have access to tools that straight, long-form content consumption just cannot use. FEED: What advice do you have for someone (ie, the editor of FEED ) who is addicted to media tech? How
FEED: Are we talking about something that is genuinely addictive? Or is it just that people have developed lazy media habits and need to snap out of it? DC: These mechanisms of our psychology that social media use are the exact same brain mechanisms – at the synaptic, neural level – that are responsible for all behavioural addiction. This cue- action-reward cycle is where genuine addictions come from. Now, there is more to an addiction than being exposed to a cue-action-reward loop, but that same psychology, which is critical to the addiction process, is also essential to product stickiness. But these are also the mechanisms of learning. In the same way that they’re the root of the psychology of addiction, they’re also the root of the psychology of love and friendship, the psychology of everything that’s great in your life. Everything you’ve ever learned is rooted in this same psychology of cue-action-reward. It is the most fundamental part of how our experiences change us. When it happens for good, we don’t call it a toothbrushing addiction or a workout addiction. Human attention is the last finite resource on earth. As our economy continues to develop, the war over attention is only going to intensify. As everything else becomes abundant, people are going to focus more and more on the very small things that are forever scarce – attention being the most important one.
HUMAN ATTENTION IS THE LAST FINITE RESOURCE ON EARTH can they disengage or improve their relationship with that technology? DC: We have made an app for people who are addicted to apps. I do see the irony in that, but the app helps you set up your phone and your relationship with your apps to help break the habit cycle that drives that compulsive behaviour. It’s designed to do the same thing that our main AI does to make apps more engaging by making the app you’re using less engaging. I would also recommend people look at their habit loops. What is the cue-action- reward loop they are using in interacting with the technology and how can they short-circuit that? What can they do to delay the amount of time between the action and the reward? What can they do to remove certain cues from their life? What is in their environment that causes them to binge on Twitter – can they remove that cue from their life? Can they figure out how to take the ‘surprisingness’ out of the interaction? Those are the things that will weaken the hold of an interactive experience on your psychology.
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