Wednesday, November 02, 2016

Behavioural design discussion on the Second Captains football podcast

I heard an interesting discussion on principles of behavioural design on the Irish Times Second Captains football podcast (link to podcast here, discussion really gets started at around 13.00).

The presenters discuss recent decreases in football TV viewing figures, and argue that this reflects not just the economic cost of watching football on TV (i.e., subscriptions to Sky Sports and BT Sport), but also the difficulty of concentrating on a 90 minutes game of football in our attention-scarce information-overloaded world. The presenters quote from and discuss some of the recent press surrounding B. J. Fogg's Behavioral Design lab at Stamford.

The main takeaway is that even for a dedicated football fan, there are lots of easier ways of digesting football-related content (podcasts, twitter feeds, blogs, video clips) which in some way tap more efficiently into the principles of an addictive/repetitive behavioural design experience.

I guess one main takeaway is that falling viewing figures for football on TV might reflect problems of poor behavioural design, rather than necessarily being a case of consumers approaching their maximum willingness to pay for the football-related content that they actually want.

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