This reminds me of a really funny image I saw recently. It depicted the perceived consequences of a status update against the "reality". At the top, Obama was presenting to a cheering crowd and just below, Tom Hanks sat marooned on an island screaming desperately at his inanimate volleyball. It's easy to feel like the master of the universe when the whole world is there to cheer for you through digitally mediated approval metrics. But people are not toys sitting idly to provide us a convenient hit of oxytocin when we need it. It's crucial to be reminded of that! Providing a number to call someone and apologize for bailing on them is a spark of genius. Using all this digital stuff should enrich interactions in meatspace, rather than allow us to decouple from it. Bravo!
I rarely upvote things to boomark them, but this is exactly the kind of thing that I like to read about.
We are building a platform for groups of people come together, kind of like grouper does for 3 guys and 3 girls, but a different approach. And psychology is a huge part of it! Making people want to do what you want them to do, or not want to do what you don't want them to do, is an art. But it is also a science, and there should be some sort of knowledge base of psychological tactics, in social apps or otherwise.
There is a reason there is no Knowledge base of psychological tactics in social apps or otherwise. It's because those that really understand people and these tactics appreciate how valuable it really is and more importantly know how to make you want to throw gobs of money at them for this information!!!
Here is what I can tell you without getting in trouble.
People take action because of emotional reasons, and justify that decision with logic and "objective" reasons to defend their decision to others.
Every single thing you want your users to do is causing them pain. They do not want to click... Before they do even the simplest thing possible, they will rack their brain for excuses to not do it and avoid the pain you created for them.
Your job is to make it MORE PAINFUL NOT TO TAKE ACTION!!!
There are two ways to do this. (you should do both)
1. Make the process as painless as possible.
2. remind them and aggravate the pain that led them to your app in the first place.
Make sure your messaging not only hits on the emotional triggers at play and focuses on the benefits, not the features... (People buy the hole, not the drill)
but more importantly gives them the tools to defend their action to their friends and everyone else who they need to defend the decision to.
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You should read Napoleon Hill's book "Think and Grow Rich," if you read it carefully, you will see it is literally a bible of understanding human nature and the world, etc...
Here is a slightly relevant excerpt and list from the book, "The 10 Mind Stimuli. The stimuli to which the mind responds most freely are:
1. The Desire For Sex Expression
2. Love
3. A Burning Desire for fame, power, financial gain, money...
4. Music
5. Friendship between either those of the same sex or those of the opposite sex.
6. A Master Mind Alliance based upon the harmony of two or more people who ally themselves for spiritual or temporal advancement.
7. Mutual Suffering, such as that experienced by people who are persecuted.
8. Autosuggestion
9. Fear
10. Narcotics and Alcohol.
Curated by Theresa Neilsen Hayden, who at one time modded comments at BoingBoing. As a former forum mod myself, I can attest that there are LOTs of great crowd-hacking insights here.
We hand-rolled it with jQuery and a hook image from iStockPhoto (what can we say, we couldn't avoid the the easy fish pun), but if people are interested we could release it as a jQuery plug-in.
Let this be a lesson: not all your problems can be solved by code. Sometimes you need to take a step back and think about the root cause of the problem. Often times (as well as in Grouper's example), the solution is to reconstruct your model so that your incentives and/or consequences are clearer to your users.
This is so smart! A lot of tech is awesome but lets never forget that its humans with actual psychologies using the technology. These users face social pressures to be upstanding and responsible like we all do in real life - being online is not an excuse for bad behavior - this is a great example of the merger b/w virtual and real lives.
Seems like LinkedIn pioneered this, HN also does this to a great degree, but now Grouper is taking it to the next level as it holds you responsible for your online actions offline.
The wheels are turning in my head about ways to leverage people's desire to manage their personal brand into a mutually beneficial situation for all parties involved. Good job Waxman! You might have stumbled upon something profound here.
I really like this idea as well. Are you pitching it as a dating site or just as a group of people to hang out with? Making it groups, in my mind, takes away a lot of the stigma of online dating websites, though I wonder what you gender breakdown is like - do you have many groups of men compared to women? Is there a wait time before a night can be organised?
i dig how you changed the cancellation process, because it encourages ppl to do what your app is intended to do - get groups of 3 together in real life. your old policy was giving incentives for your core mission NOT to happen. i wonder how your service plans to thrive in nyc, where a similar service - ignighter - had to go to india to really succeed. would love to hear your thoughts.
Right now we require Facebook, because we heavily rely on the graph to match groups while requiring minimal work from our members. For instance, we want to make sure the two groups don't already know each other, and we haven't figured out a good way to replicate this functionality without Facebook (e.g. "tell us all the people you know!")
If you have any ideas, though, we'd love to hear them.
This is one of the very few fair reasons to use facebook. However, I would have liked to see the explanation in the website (why only facebook?) and a stronger wording telling what you will and won't do with facebook. You're saying "We won't post on your behalf" but you don't say anything about what you will do. You might not post on my facebook, but you might be looking through my messages; that kind of thing is unfortunately the hallmark of facebook itself. Without an explanation, a facebook-only site looks very fishy. (heh)
Yeah, I did not foresee that; it's actually quite critical you use Facebook.
Anything requiring the users to confirm they don't know the name of the other party slows the process quite some and removes the laissez-faire element.
And what about people looking to meet with the same gender? Even though you aren't actively advertising as a dating service, I imagine that if me and two friends showed up, the girls looking for eligible single men might be a little sad.
IMO, I'd highlight that its actually not their phone number rather its a Twilio number etc which is used to call them up.
So I would change:
we would give you a number for the other group, and YOU WOULD CALL THEM (not us) TO APOLOGIZE.
To something like:
we would give you a number for the other group which does not reveal their actual phone number, and YOU WOULD CALL THEM (not us) TO APOLOGIZE.
The reason for this, is if users read your company blog it may put them off when/if they read it as, I immediately assumed that their number is be given out which could lead to confusion.
Did overall Groupers scheduled also go down once people realized they couldn't cancel without having to do it themselves? also, is the no-show rate still 0.2% after implementing this policy? I find it hard to believe these other metrics didn't move at least a little bit.
It's extremely rare (see above), but when it does happen we do everything we can to make it up to the other group (free drinks, free Groupers, profuse apologies, etc.) and lay down the law on the other group (including removing them from the community).
Have you sought statistics for no-shows that aren't reported. There's a general prohibition against reporting other people's failings particularly when trying to appear warm and accommodating.
Not sure how you'd do it except perhaps as an exit question for people leaving your community.
Cancellations through the service went down, but did actual cancellations (as in, the person just doesn't show) go down?
If you make it harder to cancel you're relying even more heavily on the integrity or conscience of the cancelling party to notify the other group members of their desire to cancel. 90% seems like a really drastic decrease which is why I bring this up.
