Applying the UX Design process to internet subculture
Is it possible to reliably make something ‘go viral’?
Common sense would say no.
But a UX Designer would say… maybe.
I was recently asked to do this for a job application. An odd
request for a UX role, so I decided to turn it on its head and
retool it as a UX Design project.
It was an interesting exercise.
“If a double diamond can be drawn, a task can be tackled.”
— I think Oscar Wilde said that.
Here’s a Double Diamond, a diagram that encapsulates the entire UX process.
“If I had only one hour to solve a problem, I would spend up to two-thirds of that hour in attempting to define what the problem is.”
- Matthew Wakeman, UX Research - Practical Techniques for Designing Better Products
This bird isn’t going to fly without some thought. Or luck. Or a lot
of famous friends.
Seeing as I have no famous friends and prefer not to rely on the
whims of the cosmos, it looks like we’re going to have to think
about this carefully. It’s more useful in this case to think about
social dynamics, how humans react to novelty, and wonder why memes
might be reliably reproduced.
Work out who you are designing for, and you'll have
a better chance of
making something the user will like.
Build it and they will come. You can't force people
to look at something they don't like.
If we have a limited amount of time to complete the task, YouTube is
probably out. Filming, editing and uploading are time-consuming
processes, people browsing YouTube consume fewer ‘items’ of media
(because it takes longer to watch a video than view some images) and
YouTube’s algorithms are notoriously biased against small YouTubers.
Facebook is just a horrible way to spend your time, let alone share
media, so that’s out too.
It’s interesting that Twitter and Reddit keep swapping places for
3rd and 4th, as they accomplish many of the same things.
Twitter and Reddit are ideal for pushing what we now think of as
‘memes’ — slightly bizarre images with a small amount of text that
go on to appear EVERYWHERE. The format capitalises on short
attention span, high-volume consumption, and appreciative niche
communities — which will be key to this enterprise.
Firstly, Reddit is now a primary source for mainstream journalists
to
plagiarise find inspiration.
Secondly, Reddit is a meme powerhouse.
Funny, pics and gifs about sums it up. Here are the top links from Reddit posts:
Notice quickmeme.com’s dominance after YouTube.
Reddit thus represents a perfect marketplace for memes to be
discovered, shared and replicated. This seems like a good bet to
start our viral mission.
69% Of U.S. Reddit Users Are Male
58% Of Reddit Users Are Between The Ages Of 18–29
15 Minutes Is The Average Duration Of A Reddit Website Visit
Interestingly, among the top 10 most visited websites in the world users stay on Reddit far longer than any of the other 9 sites. Visitors view an average of 10.4 pages per Reddit visit, meaning there’s a good chance the post will be seen.
If you spend any time on Reddit, you’ll eventually become aware of a subreddit called me_irl, originally intended as a place where users could humorously reflect on their situations and tag them “me, in real life”. At some point it just became memes and things got weird. Really weird. This is where memes are created and nurtured, mutated and destroyed. Any majorly successful meme probably began life — or at least got a leg-up — in the hot fires of r/me_irl.
Even mainstream media was covering these phenomena in 2017, when
individual variants on the formula were reaching 100s of 1000s of
impressions.
Think of it as the centre of a Matryoshka doll.
Mainstream>Twitter>Reddit>me_irl.
One user made a 90-page presentation covering the subreddit (!),
subtitled ‘A lengthy history of the memes that define us.’ It’s a
dive down a very deep rabbit hole.
Here, in no particular order, are the
top 10 most favourited memes
from the me_irl twitter feed during January 2018 (you’ve been
warned)…
All of these tweets received over 200 thousand favourites!
Once I’d got this, I was primarily looking for reproducible
themes and templates.
After speaking to users (five men in their 20s) and looking at
hundreds of successful memes I mapped out all the concepts at
play.
Interview responses included a request for “More Nicolas Cage memes
to break the monotony of memes that are not Nicolas Cage.”
My research notes included such pseudo-academic phrases as
“streets/sheets dichotomy”.
We’re now at the crux of the Double Diamond: defining the product.
The most important thing to learn is that Meta is extremely
important.
Take a look at the popular examples below.
The denizens of me_irl have attempted to formalise the appeal of irony and subversion. Interesting research could be done to rate memes on the table below and graph the frequency of their popularity.
I predict that if variants of a new ‘pre-ironic meme’ start appearing frequently, ‘ironic memes’ will follow. A committed meme scientist could try to launch memes of different categories at appropriate times. However, regardless of the overall market moves, there should be a fairly steady demand for meta-ironic memes. These rely on the popularity of existing, well-known, memes.
The focus of this project was to show how the UX research process
can apply to almost anything, but I might as well put what I’ve
learned into practice.
By combining several of the most popular meme formats into something
surreal, the post ought to gain enough upvotes to start gaining
traction. This should be easier and more effective than trying to
create something brand new.
It’s hard to predict anything with certainty, but this seems like a
reliable strategy, and potentially one that could be repeated.
So I gathered some images, fired up Photoshop, and created the
following monstrosity.
I was more interested in the process than in “forcing a meme”, so the majority of my effort went into the research and creation of the above. As a proof of concept, however, I did still post it to me_irl. Over the next day, it got around 470 points (96% upvoted), which placed it in the top 20 posts in 24 hours. Not bad, especially considering I gave it no ‘marketing’ push whatsoever and posted to no social media and asked no friends to vote for it. I consider this a successful test run.
Link to original reddit post:The comments were particularly fun:
This is a cursed image.
how
Thank you for this monstrosity
Is this boss?
Could this be god himself?
is this legal?
I’ve seen this raw power just once before