Becoming a Priority

What determines whether something becomes a priority or just an option?

People are faced with a lot of choices in life and a lot of things competing for their attention. So how do you become a priority? What guides that decision for people?

It doesn't matter whether it's a product, a service, or our selves. We're always competing for the limited attention people are willing and able to give to the world. With the newest, tech-obsessed generation, attention spans are shorter than ever. But it's by necessity: in order to filter out all of the noise of social media and constant information, attention spans have been reduced to an astonishingly short 7 seconds. So how do you distinguish yourself and rise above the noise?

This is a question I tackle in nearly everything I do: Design for America is about getting design its due consideration at a tech-focused school, FingerReader was about making accessible technology that blind people would actually want to use, getting someone's time of day is about competing for the few hours they have remaining between work and sleep. And at the core of all of these challenges is understanding people. It's about finding what makes people excited and what makes them tick. However, there's a few things that more universally encompass what motivates people. This falls into the realm of psychology, but I'll see what my non-expert perspective can offer:

1) Humans are social creatures, and that means we're driven by communities. A group becomes a community when you start feeling comfortable around them. There's no emotional fatigue of putting up facades and no struggle to understand group norms. Once we're part of an in crowd, we become devoted to our new second family. We attend all our sport practices because we don't want to disappoint the teammates we care deeply about; we stay up until 4AM to comfort our best friends because we know they would do the same. We're motivated by our bonds with others, and that's an idea we can use in becoming a priority. Build communities of supporters and users around your products so they feel connected; be genuine in forming relationships so people know you care. But most importantly, prioritize people above all else. This is something I still struggle with, but it's a time-worn truth that will continue to ring true, even if I need reminders.

2) People dig challenges, and that's not just my inner nerd speaking. Goal-setting theory states that one of the most compelling human motivators is having challenging, specific goals to pursue. There's a beautiful truth to that: humans are innately curious, growth-minded beings, and that's super cool. Offer people a chance to grow and they'll come flocking.

3) Give people a good reason to expect high return on their investment of their most valuable resource: time. Despite being social beings, humans are also selfish. They want to maximize benefit: an urge rooted in survival of the fittest. So make yourself a pleasure to be around, make the interactions of your app delightful for the user, and help them feel valued for being the special butterflies they are.

But what other rules can we apply to becoming a priority? It's hard to say when people are all influenced by their unique perceptual worlds, which changes exactly how they're motivated and what they're motivated by. And depending on ever-changing environmental factors - rain, stress, sleepiness - even those supposedly stable motivators can change. 

So it's something of an art. Deciphering each person's unique set of quirks is comparable to deciphering the meaning of art or literature. Design is considered a art for good reason...but not necessarily for the right reasons. Design is usually thought of in the context of aesthetic design: what something looks like, how something fits into your hand, what color something is. These factors were all determined by the careful eye of a designer. But on a broader level, design is about finding patterns among people and their motivations to make some product or service a priority. And of course that would involve the seemingly trivial details typically thought of as design, such as color, font, or form. Humans are nuanced so we need to pay attention to nuances. Sure we have our base set of human motivators, but after that, it's all a finely tuned dance of navigating human complexity one small insight at a time. Guess it's time to learn to dance.