Designing for status in the world of pixel-driven praise
Understanding social media to level-up as a designer.
In the tech world, it seems that everyone has their place. Designers design, the developers develop, the researchers research, marketers market, and product managers… product manage. But when you look closer inside, one realises that there is a lot of knowledge transfer and cross-functional skills required to make a good contributor to a fast-moving team.
Designers need to know more than just design to be effective, they can learn and grow into the entire tech environment. On that note, my article here is not about creating websites or user research 101, it’s about one such tech strategy concept and its implication for high-growth UX designers.
Social media and status
Eugene Wei (of Amazon, Flipboard, and Hulu fame) is one of the leading product and tech journalists in the world. I came across his blog Remains of the Day recently (very late to the party) but once I did, I was taken by the depth and original thought that goes into his work.
One of his more recent concepts has to do with social media and what keeps users on the platform. He calls this Status as a Service (or StaaS — a clever play on SaaS).
According to him, the proposition of social media platforms lie on a matrix of Utility and Social Capital. And so to be effective, the social capital it provides users needs to be high enough to retain people without the need for too much actual utility.
Basically, a platform cannot survive on one or the other. It needs to be in the top right quadrant to do well.
But, it’s not as simple as that. To start with, here are the two main assumptions that Eugene makes:
- People are status-seeking monkeys
- People seek out the most efficient path to maximizing social capital
To validate these assumptions, we need to ask ourselves — what is “Status”?
I first heard of status from Silicon Valley’s Naval Ravikant (of AngelList fame). In his tweetstorm & blog, he says -
“Status is your ranking in the social hierarchy….(it) is a zero-sum game. It’s a very old game. We’ve been playing it since monkey tribes. It’s hierarchical. Who’s number one? Who’s number two? Who’s number three? And for number three to move to number two, number two has to move out of that slot. So, status is a zero-sum game. Politics is an example of a status game. Even sports is an example of a status game. To be the winner, there must be a loser. I don’t fundamentally love status games. They play an important role in our society, so we can figure out who’s in charge. But fundamentally, you play them because they’re a necessary evil.”
Where did status come from?
Back to Naval —
“…On an evolutionary basis, if you go back thousands of years, status is a much better predictor of survival than wealth is. You couldn’t have wealth before the farming age because you couldn’t store things. Hunter-gatherers carried everything on their backs. So, hunter-gatherers lived in entirely status based societies. Farmers started going to wealth-based societies. And the modern industrial economies are much more heavily wealth-based societies”
Why is status valuable today?
Today, status has taken a new form. Status signaling went from cultural awareness, to who you know, to big houses and cars, to beauty, and now it’s down to our followers. Today the ultimate
But ultimately, even today it comes down to financial status. Even today, influencers trade their status for product promotions and affiliate marketing that ultimately convert into financial status.
UX designers: We wield the pixels
So how do the platforms create an environment that doles out status? Well, it’s us. It’s the design of the platform that does it. Let me show you how.
1. Leverage the Metrics
The human mind has an inkling for numbers. Using that, one of the most important ways social media creates a space to leverage status is by using metrics.
We are all familiar with likes, followers, friends, connections, the works. The way it happens, is by putting the metrics front-and-center. The likes and follows we see are always visible — top of the profile, right under the image.
Recently, though, Instagram has been thinking of removing likes to reduce the negative effects of these status games.
2. Make it easy to create a proof of work
For a platform to pick up as a status machine, it needs to have proof of work. For Twitter, it was funny one-liners, for Instagram it was aesthetic images. It’s something that creators display and that is interesting for the viewers.
(side note — the creator/viewer difference is seen in the 1% rule)
TikTok is the most successful new entrant in this sphere, and they have made the most giant leap in helping creators create their proof of work. Their video creator is a mark of great design and simplicity that helps more and more people start creating content on their website.
Their beautiful UX focused on simplicity, ease of use and speeding up the learning curve is one such example of how to make sure that us as a designer can reduce the barrier for users to start creating their proof of work.
3. Immersive and interesting designs
For social media to suck us in (As we saw in the Social Dilemma) designers have created a situation to make every experience very interesting for the user.
One trick is the dark mode trend. Platforms like Netflix and Itunes have embraced, and almost pioneered this trend that allows for the experience to be immersive and the content — which are pictures and graphics — to be as captivating as possible. It mimics the movie theatre experience in the web format.
One of the most important questions we ask ourselves in UX design is — who are we designing for? Who is the user, and how do we find out more about them?
But I’m going to pose you another question here. Who are we designing for? Is it for good or for evil? And are we doing it to better people’s lives? At the end of the day, it’s the people who want the status and we’re giving them a chance to feel good about themselves. But, it’s a fine line.
Either way, we do what we do, and we do it well. Until then…
