Save Your Friends
How I found emotion hidden within product design for information management
It’s a different monster entirely to see your friends drown.
Frighteningly real or abstracted into an information management problem, we’re a species highly evolved to mirror each other.
We empathize, and we sympathize. And when we see a person close to us in danger or discomfort there’s an instant pang of their pain mirrored within us.
You want to save them before you have time to waste the moment thinking.
If you do stay still, waiting and doing nothing about a friend’s situation, the buildup of anticipation can become maddening. The anxiety, the shame, the guilt—this is depressing stuff. We can’t accept ourselves as people who would stand by doing nothing for our friends.
As I write this, I’m actively drowning in information, myself.
Just take a quick peak at some of my inboxes:
Email: My unread messages in Mailbox are at 44000+ right now.
Messages: I’m not (intentionally) ignoring you, promise!
Notifications: Not even going there. I’m so far behind I wouldn’t even know what to tell you.
Tasks: Ha! What a joke…
It’s not like we don’t know this is unhealthy for us, in a way. This itch, scroll, scroll, scroll, scratch, scroll, scroll of daily digital life. But, we have our hodgepodge of small solutions and almost superstitious advice about how to cope. It’s all overwhelming to think about and simply coping becomes more than good enough. Just make it go away!
But I can’t turn it off. Frequent use of airplane mode doesn’t cut it.
My problem: These are all perfectly reasonable, all too valuable calls to my attention and my action. I’m staring at a never to be reached horizon of demands, deadlines, and unmet expectations from coworkers, friends, and family members who I never want to let down.
Worst of all is how I’m doing this to myself.
I feel swell.
Yet, all hope isn’t lost. We really can make a difference.
Say you’re a product designer, or anyone in charge of finding solutions to the problems of real people . You’re continuously in a position to help others act on this emotional state.
By suggesting an instant action they can take to make any difference at all—even just the hope of making an impact—they will rush forward claiming the chance, and thank you for it later.
Going up against an impending information apocalypse starts to feel almost reasonable when you pick up a few pearls from people much further along than me in their studies of human behavior. People like Nir Eyal, Jon Kolko, Whitney Hess, Don Norman, Dan Pink, Charles Duhigg, Tim Ferris, and so many more.
It’s still more of an art than a science—but it’s more of a science than you might expect.
For a great start on how you can put this science into practice, take a look at Nir’s Hooked model. It takes you through the four stages of building an emotional trigger into a consistent habit within a product.
One key I use is to think of users as if they were my real friends.
To frame this in a more personal perspective, this is also the heart of why we’re making inboxio.
Our (not all that) secret insight: What I need to save my friends from the overwhelm of their lives is a way to… control the flow of time!
In the physical world, this doesn’t exist. (Trust me, I’ve looked everywhere.) But, in the digital world the rules for how things work can be a little different.
Imagine being able to put a person on pause. What if you could fast-forward a conversation to the point where it’s actually rewarding? What does it even mean to rewind / unwind if it isn’t to make your experiences into more manageable batches—grouping them in a way that’s easier to digest, or distilling from them only the best?
And, saving. That’s where things get interesting.
I was thinking about classic games like Super Mario Bros and Final Fantasy. Don’t entirely remember why.But suddenly something clicked. AHA! What’s the difference between a git commit and a save point? Or between a save point and an extra life? What if we had extra lives in real life!?!?
It’d be a lot like if I had a clone of myself who I could sync up with whenever I wanted to. If I had that, I might even have the power to do something about that friend drowning from information overload.
Within a product, save points can be seen as the way to keep the progress and history you’ve made without having to start all over again. This is critical. Sometimes, life doesn’t give you a choice to start over—once an opportunity is missed, it’s gone.
This is repeatedly true for each individual person we connect with. We share and say so much to each other—making us get that drowning feeling far too often. But what happens when we want to roll back to a previous save point? So far, we’re out of luck.
I think it’s time to change that with simple version control and leveling up with your friends. Take it with you anywhere, and use it to control more of your life from your pocket.
How we help you do that is easy: quickly add in a montage scene of unimportant magical details (which I hope you’ll be discreet enough to overlook), and voilà:
With inboxio, you can save your friends from their inbox as you fast-forward, pause, and unwind your life.
Save your friends, save yourself.
(It sounds almost like a monster flick. Bonus.)
Getting to a point where a product vision starts to take shape—rooted in a user pain we can relate to—can be simple. I think it’s summed up in this one line:
Never ever hold back from having a little fun, even while racing to save your friends from disaster.
They’ll thank you for it later.
