The thing about explaining things

How do you motivate readers to learn about complex topics?

“It’d be nice to catch up with a topic so that I can go back into the world and have the vocabulary and have the background to have more informed conversations.”
— From a user interview with a 26-year-old casual news consumer

Since 2012, the Newsbound team and I have been crafting explainers— some for clients, some for ourselves — on a variety of tough subjects: the minimum wage debate, the history of groundwater drilling, the international impact of family planning, the Senate filibuster, the rise of license plate cameras, the concussion crisis in football, even the ecological importance of the lowly vulture.

We work exclusively in our click-through stack format. It’s a linear, visual reading experience that generates excellent data on reader retention. Using that data as a feedback loop, we regularly experiment with different story structures and styles. These experiments have been iterative in nature (though not comprehensive or highly controlled) and we’ve gradually gained some insights along the way.

For instance, I previously wrote about how we learned that big shifts in text density from frame to frame can cause the reader to bounce prematurely.

Here I want to focus on the challenge of the “hook.” Whether you’re producing an explanatory video, podcast, blog post, or stack, how do you kick it off in a way that motivates the reader to dive deeper with you?

After all, once your explainer is loaded in your reader’s browser, it’s up against an array of competing distractions. Your job is to motivate or engross the reader to the point where she ignores the beeps and chirps and bouncing dock icons. Your job is to carve out some space in her hectic day — in her busy mind! — and fill it with some useful context and backstory.

Looking through our analytics here at Newsbound, it’s clear that we’ve done a great job of hooking the reader in some cases and a subpar job in others. Behind the numbers, a pattern is starting to emerge.

Ten clicks or bust

On average, our explainers run 25–35 frames in length (i.e., they require that many clicks or taps to complete).

We’ve seen that most reader abandonment happens in the first ten frames, with the bounce rate usually leveling out after that. So to gauge how well a piece hooks its readers, I focus on the percentage of the audience that makes it to the 10th frame.

Judged by this metric, here are the four top-performers in our library:

91%: The Curious Case of the Silent Filibuster
90%: Shanghai’ed!
88%: De-mist-ifying The San Francisco Fog
84%: Cookie Dough: The Big Business of Tracking You Online

What’s interesting is that these top-performers have something in common. In the opening frames, they all remind the reader why learning more about this topic will be valuable going forward.

The power of vocabulary

In the case of the filibuster and shanghai’ed explainers, it’s all about vocabulary.

We start off the filibuster explainer by showing the reader a bunch of newspaper clippings referring to bills that failed to get the “60 votes necessary” to pass out of the U.S. Senate. We remind them that they’ve seen headlines like this in the past, that they’re going to see more in the future and that, if they read on, they’ll understand them better next time.

Shanghai’ed is a bit more straightforward: We’re identifying a strange phrase that you’re likely to have heard at some point and promising to demystify it (while teaching you some sordid San Francisco history along the way).

Confusing words and phrases are a great point-of-entry for explanatory content. We all know the insecurity that comes with hearing an unfamiliar word in the context of conversation — whether as a child at our parents’ dinner table or in the car yesterday listening to an NPR interview. The news is littered with these types of speedbumps. Words like: entitlements, bitcoin, insurgent, progressive, inflation, gerrymandering, amnesty, fracking, neo-con, gentrification, fundamentalist, mandate, libertarian, and so on.

Understanding these words allows you to read deeper and more confidently, to dive into conversations rather than observe silently, to engage where you might otherwise retreat. For the casual information consumer, it can be like unlocking a new level in a video game — and your explainer is the key to getting there.

The pull of familiar experiences

The next two explainers down the list start similarly: they remind the audience of a time when they were confused about the subject at hand. Except in this case, the confusion is in response to an experience, rather than a word or phrase.

In the fog explainer, we talk directly to those who live in the Bay Area or have visited recently. We prompt them remember the last time they were blindsided by the fog that visits the area almost every day.

In the cookie explainer, we describe the all-too-common experience of browsing the internet and having targeted ads follow you around from site to site.

Just as the news tosses strange words at us daily, the physical world is constantly prompting little puzzlers. Questions like: What’s the purpose of the green mailboxes ? Where did the peace sign come from? What are those vertical white panels you see on roofs everywhere? (Spoiler: they’re cellular network antennas.)

These questions wash over us and we rarely have the time or energy to actually answer them. Case in point: when we published our fog explainer, we heard from people who had lived in San Francisco for decades, had regularly scratched their respective heads about the fog, and had only now figured out how it works.

To motivate the reader to learn, it’s sometimes necessary to remind them that they’ve asked themselves about the topic in the past — or convince them that they might do so in the near future.

What hasn’t worked as well

In lots of other cases, we’ve lost more than 20 percent of the audience in the first ten frames.

In our football explainer, for instance, we started by focusing on President Obama’s concern about the concussion crisis.

Share of our audience remaining after the first 10 clicks: 75%

In our vultures explainer, we listed a bunch of popular misconceptions about these birds.

Share of our audience remaining after the first 10 clicks: 74%

In our aquifers explainer, we began by quoting a California farmer whose well recently went dry.

Share of our audience remaining after the first 10 clicks: 70%

In all of the above examples, we attempt to spark the reader’s curiosity in slightly different ways. But we fail to directly reference their own experience. And we appear to pay for it.

When it comes to crafting explainers, the best hooks seem to do the following: directly acknowledge that the world is a puzzling place and promise the reader they’ll soon have one less thing about which to be confused.

ENDNOTE: You can see me hedging a bit in these last few grafs, using words like “appear” and “seem.” That’s because this is still a hypothesis, though one that makes logical sense. The next step is to do some A/B tests to see if my theory about what’s driving the higher engagement is borne out by controlled experiments. Stay tuned …