Make your apps Proactive
- Kill the ask-and-answer model
- Your personal RAM can only hold 5-7 things
- "People don't know what they want until you show it to them"
• Instead of making your users ask for things, you should tell them things. This requires a great deal of personalization, but that's for the next slide.
• Why should you be telling your users things? Because the working memory of the average human can remember 5-7 things at any give time. This includes everything from remembering to buy milk, to finishing things for work, to answering the last text message you received. So remembering that you wanted to use an app to look up something (or remember to use an app at all) might not make the memory-cut.
• And even if people do remember to search for something, there's no guarantee that they'll find what they're looking for. In fact a lot of the time, as Steve Jobs famously said, "people don't know what they want until you show it to them."
• So keep showing your users things because 1.) they might forget to look and 2.) they don't know what to look for.