Your App Isn't Funny Enough

??? Imaginate with me for a moment, if you will.

What if, at random times, when you ignored an invitation on LinkedIn it made this sound ?

Maybe, occasionally, when you mark a job recommendation as irrelevant it just flings it across the screen and it explodes when it hits the edge?

Perhaps when you expand a section to see more People You May Know it slide whistles open and closed?

Maybe instead of happening at random unexpected times it's a setting you can turn on? Or mayhap, in a different timeline, it's just standard... and the baseline expectation is that whilst getting important jobs done our products seek to satisfy a fuller range of human emotional need. Imaginating complete! ???

I'll completely understand if you're now unsubscribing to this newsletter. It's two editions in and already relying on fart-with-reverb.WAV to get your attention.

I swear this is going somewhere productive.

I'm hoping to convince you that we (a lot of us anyway) have gotten way, way too serious about product design and development, too serious and mechanical even in our deliberate attempts to not be too serious (delight!). What if instead, we approach the work differently, with an openness and intention to modulate the tone of the product so that different parts of the experience evoke diverse and resonant emotional reactions? Bonds are built from emotional experiences, and there is pretty strong evidence that products benefit tremendously from establishing emotional connections with their users. Loyalty, satisfaction, advocacy –?evidence to date suggests all are improved significantly with emotional connection. Game designers know this, and design accordingly . I think we've somehow lost the plot over here in the other sections of the app store.

I'm focusing on humor as a key missing ingredient because of how powerful it is, though lots of other emotional states deserve our attention too. Humor is subjective, and hard, but it is extremely potent in all sorts of beneficial ways , including building trust. I'm also of the belief that by focusing on what makes us laugh is a way in to open up conversations about a broader range of emotional experience that can and should be incorporated into our work.

It used to be that leaders needed to be revered ... now they need to be understood. And all the while, humor is a particularly potent elixir for trust. And when we laugh with someone ... what happens is our brains release the hormone oxytocin, and we’re essentially cued to form an emotional bond with that person ... from an evolutionary perspective, we benefit from feelings of closeness and trust.

Thanks Stanford GSB !

The benefits, I think, to the business are pretty clear. I think it's also really healthy for the people using our products to laugh with and at them. The psychological impact of digital products is all-too-real . Establishing some distance where they can be interpreted with less gravity, and more appreciation for just how ridiculous they can be in their attempts to model or supplant IRL human interaction is, I believe, essential for us to have a healthy relationship with digital technology moving forward.

Are you bought in that YOLO_explosion.GIF might be a good idea? If you are, how to actually deliver? The range of what people find funny is huge, and it can be easy to steer into territory that doesn't land, or turns people off! Horror movies don't do it for me because I don't find satisfaction in spending time scaring the s??t out of myself. But lots of people do though !

Is it helpful to turn to what the state-of-the-art science says?

Not really, I think, if this deconstruction of a Swedish man v. moose vid is any indication. Theories of what makes things funny strike me as being in about the same place theories of language were about century ago: a bunch of (mostly White and European) men philosophically speculating in what seemed like an authoritative, empirically-grounded way. Back in the day, speaking German determined your pattern of thinking, which is super interesting and cool except for the fact that it's total bulls??t . This idea is called Linguistic Relativity or the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, depending on if you want to dunk on Sapir and Whorf (it's also called Whorfianism which I find hilarious).

Sigmund Freud's Relief Theory of comedy, which posits the laugh when we satisfy an instinct in the face of an obstacle that stands in its way, is a lot like Whorfianism, in terms of its sounds-plausible to actually-works-that-way ratio (approx. million to zero). It feels kinda right that we get a pressure release when we get to talk about poops and farts because those are typically off-limits as conversation topics. Right? But we actually have no idea, really.

Relief Theory comfortably sits alongside Superiority Theory (Plato, Aristotle) and others as something that folks are still putting forward hundreds of years later as an explanation with no idea if they really hold water. This sort of scientific-ish authoritative-sounding philosophizing just has a terrible track record , though the stakes are arguably much lower for getting to the root of what makes us laugh and why.

"A more sweeping theory posits that humor is an evolutionary adaptation that has promoted human survival by rewarding our relatively feeble minds for distinguishing true from false, right from wrong, and harmless from dangerous over countless harrowing and deeply confusing centuries."

Thanks The Atlantic !

It's hard to say whether we're on the right path toward a better understanding, though academic papers with titles like Sex, aggression, and humour: responses to unicycling suggest that at least we are indeed taking the issue seriously . We might be stuck with Potter Stewart-esque definitions and only-partially-helpful guidance to steer us successfully toward funnier apps. Not very helpful! If we still want to do this, though, because of the benefits to business and people using our apps, how to proceed? I think the best bet is just trying to set up an environment where your chances of success are high .

It's time once again to learn the most valuable lessons in life from the Muppets .

Here's my belief: you can't try to deliver funny, or poignant, or 'delight' as an OKR. It can't survive rounds and rounds of reviews or get tracked in separate JIRA tickets. It comes from intention in setting up a culture that, from top-to-bottom, is entirely about maximizing your chances of delivering emotionally resonant product, then trusting that culture to deliver. The Muppets emerged from a beautiful, focused, driven, collaborative, and absolutely mad-cap culture. Both Rainbow Connection and Mahna Mahna emerged from that magical soup.

Jim Henson's company, when he was alive and running it, wasn't without structure or ambition. He was quite focused on commercial success ! But I think he understood that the product he was seeking to create couldn't happen without the right conditions. When they aren't there, the Muppets can lose their magic . When they are, magic does happen, and bonds are formed.

Is the culture of your organization really set up to support the goal of establishing emotional resonance and making people laugh? You might have to ask hard questions and make significant adjustments, letting go of some level of control or assurance in order to make this happen.

I guess what it all comes down to this: if you want to make your app funnier, ask yourself What Would The Muppets Do?

Because of the interesting times we live in, here are my disclaimers for this newsletter:

Take these with whatever seriousness you choose ??

If you wanna learn more about what this newsletter is all about so you can judiciously decide how to spend your valuable attention capital, check out the first edition .