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Water cooler moment meaning1/22/2024 Zappos uses exceptional customer service to create memorable moments for their customers. To intentionally engineer watercooler moments, Hearthstone’s designers created a number of cards (such as Millhouse Manastorm, shown below) with probabilistic effects that would, on rare occasions, completely change the course of the game in a spectacular way.ĭramatically snatching victory from the jaws of a punishing defeat (or vice versa) is the sort of intensely emotional experience that you can’t help talking about, no matter which side of it you were on. This is the only example I’ve included from gaming, but it’s my favorite due to both the intensity of emotion and the intentionality behind its design. Unconvinced? Just search for “asana narwhal” on Twitter. ![]() An unexpected moment of delight can be enough to get people talking. Case in point: the little blue yeti that occasionally pops his head up after you move a card in Asana. Example: Asana monsterĮmotions don’t necessarily have to be that extreme. So for now, let’s focus on tactics that generate unexpected moments of delight. But while negative ones (outrage, anger, disgust, etc) are exploited to great success by the media, they’re generally not emotions you’d like your product to generate. The more unexpected the event, and the more extreme the emotion, the more powerful the desire is to share it.Īny extreme emotion will get people talking. Unexpected emotions create compelling stories. But since you (a software developer) presumably have no script or characters to rely on, it means your app itself will have to create the story on its own. So creating a compelling story is the first step in creating a water cooler moment. Interesting drama involving interesting participants provides endless fodder for discussions of motivations, ethics, and morality. People retell the story, share the story, interpret the story, discuss and argue its meaning. Watercooler moments turn a one-off event into a communal experience. They are the currency of human connection. Stories help us make sense of the world, share useful information, and reinforce bonds. We have an instinctual desire to tell stories. Watercooler moments transcend the boundaries of their medium, sparking conversations in the real world to become communal experiences. That fact that moments can be planned or scripted doesn’t make the emotions they create any less genuine. The moment, which became the most watched moment in TiVo history, resulted in 540,000 complaints to the FCC, “Janet Jackson” becoming the most searched phrase of 2004, and the phrase “wardrobe malfunction” entering the popular lexicon. The episode was the highest-rated episode of Ellen ever, with 42 million people tuned in to see the event.ĭuring the live broadcast of Super Bowl 38’s halftime show, Janet Jackson’s chest was exposed during a dance routine with Justin Timberlake. And she did, in an award-winning episode in April 1997 that generated enormous publicity and a nationwide conversation. When Ellen DeGeneres came out as gay, there was rampant speculation about whether her character on her sitcom Ellen would come out as well. It was the highest-rated TV episode in US history, with 83 million people tuned in to discover what happened. A session of Turkish Parliament was even suspended so that legislators could get home to see the answer revealed. ![]() Viewers had to wait 8 months to find out the answer. In 1980, CBS used the advertising catchphrase “Who shot J.R.?” to promote the TV series Dallas. Word of mouth virality is driven by watercooler moments – experiences that are so memorable that you can’t wait to talk to your friends about it at the watercooler the next day. Specifically, I want to talk about a tactic that was once prevalent in television that is now beginning to resurface in software: the watercooler moment. This essay is about how to do it in software. Television has been designing and engineering word of mouth virality for years. But it can be designed for and optimized, just like anything else. ![]() Because it’s so hard to measure, people tend not to think of word-of-mouth as a product feature.
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