What if the web was your friend?
Welcome to the latest installment of Story Is Everything, our monthly newsletter. Ambitious storytelling can rally people to a sense of purpose. Connect us with one another. Inspire audiences to think and feel and believe. Our team of journalists, designers, and strategists partner with organizations to build story-driven brands. Each month we share insights here on what we’ve learned and draw back the curtain on some of our current work.
In this issue, Scott Dasse, chief design officer at GDP partner studio Upstatement, talks about the importance of trust when it comes to content-driven communities, and how that trust can be designed into digital platforms. Scott has led design for clients such as MIT, Tito’s Handmade Vodka, Vogue, the Emerson Collective, and Nike. Scott believes the best design comes from rigorous experimentation and open collaboration.
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By Scott Dasse, chief design officer at GDP partner studio Upstatement.
It’s hard to trust an algorithm or a bot. Social platforms alter your feed without asking you. They might serve up content you don’t want instead of the accounts you actually follow, or they might deliver content that’s so targeted to you that it feels invasive and creepy. And they give you no meaningful control over it. Search engines pile on experimental features, making you wade through iffy AI summaries instead of kindly passing you through to the original source. (Query “how to make cheese adhere better to your homemade pizza” and you are advised to add glue to your recipe.)
The incentives are working against you as a user: These platforms are built to monetize you, using any tactic that can programmatically hold your attention for a few more seconds to serve one more ad. Content creators game the system by making junk that might go viral or win clicks. All you want is something real, but all you get is noise.
In the last issue of the GDP newsletter, Paula Chowles talked about the necessity of building trust into the creative process. I think a lot about trust too, especially how to design it into digital platforms that enable human connection. We’re lucky enough to work with both new media start-ups and the world’s largest media companies, and we’ve found that the same ideas apply to any business that wants to build community around content. At this wild internet moment, I want to walk it back to some basic principles that make digital worlds more friendly—and more profitable too.
1. Capitalize on community.
There’s nothing more impersonal than generated text, link farms, or high ad density. In contrast, one of the bravest examples of building a community around being real is the MIT Admissions student blog. We designed the current version a few years back as part of our deep MIT portfolio, but we won’t take credit for the idea. The school has been paying students to write honest, heartbreaking, hilarious content for decades. Students write about their classes, they post step-by-steps of their creative process, they write about pi and pirates. Getting personal in order to build community through the web is the core tenet of their marketing strategy, and it works. When we did a round of ethnographic research with undergraduates, they all told us that this content and the people who wrote it were a main factor in their decision to apply—driving a complex conversion. We’ve designed a lot for higher ed. There’s nothing like this in the world.
Enabling the one-on-one connection works for publishers too. The byline matters. Just look at the rise of Substack. A direct relationship with readers can lead to loyal followings. Move away from disruptive ads and be someone who’s making something worth paying for. Email newsletters also work better when they come from a person the user trusts. The one-on-one connection works, and it’s an old model. It’s a blog and an email. This back-to-basics ecosystem is also applicable to big media and to enterprise. It encourages content creators to invite personal relationships instead of institutional ones.
2a. Rare expertise is internet gold…
Early in my career, I made learning software for Harvard; it was a place for doctors to share best practices on all kinds of things—how to read a fetal heart monitoring strip, for example. It was funded by Harvard’s insurance company to prevent lawsuits, and the top doctors in their fields are still there sharing their expertise, not in the form of checklists so much as real-world examples and stories and choices they might make in this or that situation. That was some really essential peer-to-peer information sharing.
Doctors sharing expertise might be a familiar example, but we did something similar for Tulip, a supply chain/manufacturing logistics platform. The digital experience we developed for them highlights the company’s technical capabilities and products, but it also brings people who work in that field together as a community to learn and share expertise. It’s a high-trust, high-expertise, rare-expertise, human-to-human connection, facilitated by a website. These folks know stuff that no one else does, and if you can help them integrate with one another so they can connect the dots on how to work better and smarter, that’s a really powerful network of highly specific professional “friends” who can share stories in ways that are extremely powerful.
2b. …and it’s okay for haters to be haters together.
I’m not saying that communities should be toxic or horrible. But it’s just a fact of being human that people like to get together and complain. Being critical around culture is what friends do together and what a good product enables. A good community product isn’t all about sunshine; you have to let in whatever vibes people want to get into. You see it on Reddit all the time: people get hyperspecific in their critiques. I’m really into electric motorcycles, and Reddit is a great place to go deep on that subject—how you mod them, how you fix them. You don’t get that hyperspecificity and rare knowledge if you don’t allow some trash talk. Same thing goes for retailers who publish user reviews—complaints about products are more meaningful to buyers than the seller’s description.
3. The friend of your friend is also your friend.
I have a friend who always recommends obscure books to me. And somehow they always delight. Whenever I pass the recommendation on to somebody else, they love it and I look smarter than I am. The recommendations of friends are often easily transposed to the next node in the social graph, and that friend-of-a-friend theory is how digital communities are built. Unlike social media that exploits the social graph to maximize attention to serve you one more ad, to serve you associative content, this is serendipitous content that’s just more interesting because it comes from a known source you already trust.
Marathon, an app my colleague Josh Pensky created, lets you watch TV with friends. It fills a gap in the app ecosystem, letting you track every series you’re watching so you can talk about them with people who are also watching. You can also see what all of your friends are watching and where they are in the series. It’s a really nice example of friends of friends connecting with each other over a shared, very specific interest.
Ultimately, I don’t want to pick a fight with new technology. I just want to design it to act like my friend. And that doesn’t mean it’s algorithmically designed for me to like everything it serves up. It can challenge me, it can speak directly to me, it can follow me down into my obscure interests, and it can broaden my horizons. These communities can be built and nurtured—companies just have to be open to taking a few risks.
Hear more about it
Want to learn more about why trust is so important to every carefully crafted experience? Listen to this interview with two-time James Beard Award nominee Chef Keith Corbin on Riveted, GDP’s original podcast that demystifies the art of great storytelling. “One of the things that I always tell my team is that people are trusting us to put something in their body. And I do not take that trust lightly,” Corbin says.
Case studies: behind the scenes of our work
Mission: Helping to formulate an ambitious vision of the future of AI
Client: Microsoft 365
What we created: GDP and Upstatement worked with the tech giant Microsoft to tell the story of Copilot, the AI assistant that was being added to its suite of productivity applications. We did it on WorkLab, a Microsoft thought-leadership publication. We helped the company craft a manifesto on AI’s potential to transform work, and we used animation, artwork, video, and a retrofit of the WorkLab digital presence to express every facet of the message.
What we learned: Intuitive tools can help facilitate great storytelling. Upstatement engineered a content management setup that added agility and modularity to the WorkLab digital presence. This effectively reshaped the whole editorial process. “Everyone on this project could work like members of a seasoned digital newsroom team on everything from the product to the platform to the message, right up to the moment of launch,” Scott Dasse says.
What we can help you make: Whether it’s a site redesign, a new UX, a rebranding exercise, a narrative strategy, a campaign, a documentary film, or a storytelling workshop, we know just how much goes into earning the trust required to help you get to the story that will resonate with your audience. If you’re interested in exploring what your company’s best story could be, please reach out to us.
Read the full Copilot case study on our website.