Design: separating consumption from exploration

Almost all of the popular apps today have a way to keep us in the consumption loop. I think a very good way to start getting us out of this loop is by extending the tools that we use and love and make exploration of content a user action, e.g. the user has to initiate the exploration action to discover related content. I find that the act of exploring new content often happens unconsciously whilst consuming other content. Making this action of initiating an exploration session might help counter this.

A few weeks ago I was looking for a way to remove recommendations from Youtube and was not succesful. This could be extended to all popular social media apps:

  • Remove recommendations from Youtube
  • Remove “who to follow” from Twitter
  • Remove pretty much everything from Facebook :wink:

For browsers this could possibly be done with extensions, but obviously for apps this is more difficult.

Nice. Did you see the demetricator projects on: