Designed participation

Spoken words only - one hook counted, captions and notes excluded, at 130 wpm.

Hook

• "Getting seen is no longer the challenge. Being remembered is."
• "I've spent 15 years designing the thing that makes you stop scrolling. Here's what I've learned."
• "Soon, the brands you remember won't post content. They'll build places you go."
• "You don't remember what you scrolled past. You remember what you experience."

Body

Think about how the feed actually works. Everybody is shouting, and no one is really listening.

A single piece of content gets about 1.7 seconds of your attention before you scroll on, and most of what you do see is forgotten the same day.

These platforms are built to keep you on the feed, to take in as much as possible. So your brain does the only thing it can. It picks a few things worth keeping, and forgets everything else.

I want to show you a better way. It's called designed participation, and it flips the whole thing. It turns you from a viewer into a participant. Instead of just viewing, you're doing.

You stop being the audience. You click, you choose, you play. Think of Wordle, the word game the whole world was playing at the same time. Or Spotify Wrapped, the time of a year everyone shows off their listening stats. You didn't watch those. You were in them.

So here's where I think this goes. Tech is moving so fast that making content is as easy as a prompt. Soon content won't just be images and video on a feed. It'll be platforms and destinations, places a brand or creator can own.

Stay on the feed fighting for a scroll and you're playing the same game as everyone else. The brands people remember build somewhere to go, somewhere the noisy feed goes quiet. A place to watch, listen, and play.

Because you don't really remember what you scrolled past. You remember what you took part in.

That's the difference between a campaign that gets attention and one that turns attention into action. I'll be breaking this down a lot, in films, in apps, in campaigns, in the everyday things you never realised were designed to pull you in.

Now, I'm not saying don't play the content game. I'm saying create your own game.

Post image text

Wordle and Spotify Wrapped used the same playbook

CTA

Honestly, I want to turn this into a series. So I need your help. Drop a comment with an experience that pulled you in recently, an app, a show, a campaign, anything, and I'll break down how they did it. Call it designed participation, in real time.

Caption

You don't remember what you scrolled past.

You remember what you took part in.

1.7 seconds, then it's forgotten. That's the feed.

Wordle. Spotify Wrapped. You didn't watch those, you played them.

So don't just make more content. Build somewhere for people to go, not just a busy feed.

Comment the last thing that properly pulled you off the feed.