As an operator, how do you understand user anxiety?

When operators take advantage of users’ anxiety, they should be careful to strike a balance. Otherwise, it can easily turn anxiety into panic, causing extreme discomfort to users and negatively impacting the product.

01

I wonder if you have ever noticed this phenomenon:

• Why do customers queue horizontally at Starbucks, but vertically at fast food restaurants like McDonald's and KFC?
• Why do some of our classmates like to sign up for various skill classes? Like learning PS in 30 days, mastering 6,000 English words in 20 days, learning these three tricks to easily increase the number of followers of a public account by 100,000, etc.
• Why do all kinds of inspirational articles emerge in an endless stream, and why do biographies of successful people and celebrities remain bestsellers?
• Why do businesses like to boost product sales through limited-time promotions?
• …

In our lives, there are many examples and phenomena that have become part of our lives and we have become accustomed to them. However, behind these seemingly unrelated examples lies a principle: the use of anxiety.

When we are queuing at Starbucks, the horizontal line allows us to see the busy waiters at the front desk. We would easily think that it would be our turn soon. When we perceive that the waiters are working very hard and seriously, we can control the progress of our cup of coffee, and the dissatisfaction and anxiety caused by queuing will be alleviated.

The vertical queues at McDonald's and KFC are due to the size limitations of the stores and are also conducive to the evacuation of customer flow. Customers leave from the side after picking up a fast food meal, making evacuation more efficient.

However, if the customers in the queue have to wait too long, they will easily complain about why it is so slow or why it is not their turn yet. This is because most of them cannot see the busy state of the store clerks and have no control over the progress due to the long queue. They will naturally feel anxious when the queue is long.

Similarly, many people like to sign up for various skill trainings, hoping to improve their abilities in certain areas and make up for their shortcomings through training; many people also read various motivational books, biographies of successful people, etc.

In fact, anxiety is caused by certain reasons, and people hope to reduce anxiety through these means. Merchants’ limited-time promotions use the urgency of time to create a sense of urgency for customers, making them anxious, thereby speeding up their purchasing decisions.

02

Everyone experiences anxiety, but sometimes we are aware of it and sometimes we are not. Some products and activities provide us with ways to relieve anxiety, while some products and activities first trigger our anxiety and then provide us with solutions to relieve and resolve it.

• The emergence of QQ and WeChat solved people's needs for instant messaging, but in another way of thinking, it also solved people's anxiety about not being able to communicate instantly in certain scenarios;
• The emergence of knowledge payment provides a solution for people who are eager to improve their abilities, allowing them to relieve their anxiety about their own inadequacies during the course.
• The emergence of Uber, Didi, and shared bikes not only solves people’s inconvenient travel needs, but also solves people’s anxiety caused by not being able to get a taxi or find transportation in certain scenarios;
• …

Compared to most products that are created to directly alleviate or even solve users' anxiety, the principle of first triggering and rendering anxiety and then providing solutions is more commonly used in operations and marketing.

30-day English crash course, 7-day course to teach you to write 100,000+ words, courses that students admitted to Peking University and Tsinghua University are taking, etc.; apps used by high-end people, project management books read by Fortune 500 companies, etc., first use the copywriting or slogans that we can intuitively perceive to arouse our anxiety. Others speak English so fluently and have such a large vocabulary, but I can't even pass the CET-4; other people's push articles have 100,000+ words, but mine only has a few hundred views and not even a single comment...

Although we are often aware of our shortcomings in certain aspects and we try to find ways to make up for them, we tend to be content with the status quo, lazy, and even avoid problems. These glaring copywriting and slogans trigger our anxiety and also provide us with ways to solve anxiety. We can easily regard them as a life-saving straw, and the more anxious we are, the more likely we are to adopt these solutions.

In the first half of 2018, an article titled "Behind the Mobike founder's cashing out of 1.5 billion, your peers are abandoning you" became a hot topic, and all kinds of anxious emotions spread in the circle of friends. This title itself is taking advantage of our anxiety. We all have a desire for success, and comparison with our peers is more likely to trigger our anxiety. Many public accounts make a living by creating anxiety.

This is just a grasp of human nature. In an era where traffic is paramount, many teams focus on creating anxiety and selling anxiety to reap traffic dividends, but behind this "anxiety marketing" is actually just emotions that are amplified and fueled.

Behind most Internet operations and marketing methods is actually the understanding, grasp and even manipulation of human nature. Operations are a combination of Tao and Technique. Tao is methodology, and Technique is the specific means of operation. Grasping users' anxiety is a Tao of operation. Under the guidance of this Tao, a variety of Techniques can be derived. What operators need to think about is how to combine the characteristics of products and activities, find places where this Tao can be applied, and use appropriate Techniques to achieve our operational goals.

03

As an operator, when taking advantage of user anxiety, you must pay attention to the degree of control. Otherwise, it will easily turn from causing anxiety to causing panic, causing extreme discomfort to users and bringing negative impact to the product. Just like the Chinese people's rush to buy salt after the Fukushima nuclear power plant explosion in Japan in 2011, there were some factors of media misunderstanding, which caused panic among the people.

No matter how good the chicken soup is, drinking too much of it will make people feel nauseous. Over-consuming users' anxiety can easily cause users to become numb to the product, and will also have adverse effects on users' physical and mental health. Therefore, we cannot frequently take measures that make users anxious, just as most people have developed a resistance to various 7-day crash courses, and e-commerce's limited-time promotions do not always bring better sales.

Users will become more and more rational, and blindly taking advantage of human weaknesses is not a good strategy. The high quality of products and services is the greatest guarantee for maintaining competitiveness. As for operators, the next time when they use anxiety, they can think more about whether to use it, how to use it to maximize efficiency, and how to be more innovative. After all, users have seen too many similar things.

Here I have also summarized several ways to control user anxiety, for reference only:

1. Find out the points that users may be anxious about based on the attributes of the user group .

For example, for office workers, we can use topics such as salary increase, promotion, improving work efficiency, and dealing with interpersonal relationships at work; for women, we can use topics such as becoming more beautiful, whitening, and topics related to husbands; for college students, we can use topics such as job hunting, interviews, and postgraduate entrance exams.

• Mi Meng's Career Improvement Course
• "It turns out that if you follow these five steps in your skin care, you can easily get whiter skin!" 》
• "Strategies for a perfect "self-introduction" in an interview"

2. Use people who have connections with the user to create anxiety . Such as parents, partners, children, etc.

• "If you often say these 4 sentences on WeChat, men will love you more and more"
• "Children are more afraid of their parents doing this than beating or scolding them!" Countless parents fell silent after watching this.

3. By magnifying failures or excellent examples, users are compared with each other. Generally, comparison with peers and the same generation is more likely to cause anxiety . For example, by comparing with post-95 entrepreneurs, celebrities, and writers, you can launch products or activities related to them.

• "Behind the Mobike founder's cashing out of 1.5 billion, your peers are abandoning you"
• "People born in the 2000s are earning 100,000 yuan a month, while those born in the 1990s are still preparing for postgraduate entrance exams"

4. Use time urgency to create anxiety, but the time cannot be too long, otherwise it will not help speed up users’ decision-making . For example, there is a XX discount for one hour only, and the price will return to the original price after three days; the biggest discount in history is only available for XX hours, etc.

Thank you everyone.

Author: Wow, authorized to be published by Qinggua Media.

Source: Wow