Yo Is The New Like
The underlying patterns of how we communicate
Is Yo the next big thing in communication? Or is it just a simple MVP that hacked its way to the top charts and now looks for a rationale to explain its exponential growth? Either way, it’s worth giving it a thought.
For the last months, I’ve been observing how conversations unfold between different types of people and under different situations and contexts. One of the things I noted is that most conversations tend to follow a protocol-like scheme, usually at the beginning of the talk, to set the tone, expectations and contexts between the participants. This protocol serves both as a way to set the grounds for engaging in a conversation in a nice and polite fashion(Hey, how are you? / fine and you?), and as a way to quickly verify, check or ask something in particular in a friendly way (What’s up?, Where are you?).
What I come to believe is that Yo stands for an easy and fast replacement of this protocol. In the same way as when you come to enjoy a picture, where instead of writing how interesting you find it and why, you just Like it. The Like becomes an easy and friction-less tool to communicate something positive to the creator of the content, without the need of spending time and energy on explaining the reasons why.
So, instead of spending time and effort on communicating with someone for something in particular, people just Yo them. To Yo someone by tapping his name has become the easiest and most efficient way to input information for communicating in a device that is not meant for writing. It’s part of the same reason why friends communicate mostly through Snapchat, where pictures are more expressive and easier to take than describing the same situation in plain text.
As Donald Norman explains in his book The Design of Everyday Things, behavior results from combining information in the head (stored as memory) with information in the world (perception of triggers). Yo is a one-step communicator, a trigger where mutual understanding, culture and context between members set the tone and fill the content of the message.
“We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us”
The tools we use tend to shape what we create. Mobile devices provide us with portable cameras, GPSs and touch screens that allow us to communicate and express ourselves in different and more convenient ways, shaping the patterns and the contents of our interactions.
From hieroglyphs to letters, to words, to images, to Yo, the symbols we use to communicate with each other evolve, triggers of the understanding that relies on the shared culture of the members of the conversations. This is an interesting concept worth exploring from a product perspective, with the goal of crafting and designing new communication experiences.
