Introduction
- Concept Definition: Aha moment is when someone discovers a new value, connection, or insight that he had not realized before. It describes a short moment a sudden realization, similar to the eureka interjection.
- Concept Founder: The modern usage of the word “Aha moment” was proposed by Chamath Palihapitiya when expanding Facebook’s user base with the strategy “7 friends in 10 days“.
- Concept Benefit: A designer of a storybook, explainer video, or video game should measure how long the audience needs to wait to get to the aha moment of that book, video, or game. The earlier the aha moment appears the more likely the audience will stick with the current content.
1. How To Demonstrate It?
- When Facebook was still in its early phase, the team wanted more people to join the platform faster.
- The team was convinced that if people saw all the exciting things on Facebook, they would also create an account. So the user's aha moment would be to realize that he can easily meet his friends and hang out with them on Facebook. Hence, most people are not on Facebook because they have never experienced Facebook before.
- To let everybody understand the value of Facebook faster, they exposed some of Facebook content even to outsiders without a Facebook account.
- For example, one can search and find a person on Facebook without a Facebook account.
- But if one wants to see more details about a person or even talk to him, then the website will ask you to log in or register first.
- By doing this, the team is trying to minimize the required time for anyone to get to their first "Aha Moment" which in this case is to see the content on Facebook produced by their friends.
- Once the "Aha moment" step of the user journey is reached, the user will likely stay active on Facebook.
- In addition, the team was trying to build more features to allow users to have multiple Aha moments during their user journey.
2. Where Can It Be Applied?
- For Content Creation: Unlike writing an essay in an old-school way, most article writers on the internet provide the summary as the first part of the entire article. This phenomenon follows the principle of putting the most valuable information to the audience first to minimize the required time to get to the Aha moment. Most people are searching for an answer on the internet. It is much quicker if the reader gets a straight response at the top of the article. If the user wants more details about the article, he can continue reading. If the summary is sufficient, the audience can skip the rest of the paper and save time going through the article details. In the copywriting community, this method is also called the inverted pyramid writing technique, where one puts the summary first and then starts to expand the summary into details.
- For Interviews: It is important to not waste the attention of the audience during an interview. Keep them hooked by providing interesting insight about you, your experience, or other facts early. Skip the boring part (such as self-introduction) and come to interesting opinions quickly to demonstrate your value to the audience by explaining how and why things are like they are.
- For Entertainment: The aha moment creates emotions and well atmosphere during a conversation at dinner or parties. It can be in form of a funny joke or a revealing story. People tend to remember surprising things better than average things. This helps your story to stand out during social gathering moments.
3. Why Does It Exist?
- Last Piece of a Puzzle: An "Aha moment" could occurs usually when people already had all information they need, except the last piece of information you just gave them. The last piece gives a person the full picture of the matter and allows him to connect all previous puzzle pieces together to fully see the whole picture.
- Suprise provides higher value: Aha moment has high value to people because it encodes a high degree of surprise. The more surprising the information, the more value it has. For example, telling your friend that you won the lottery is way more surprising than telling them you ate breakfast today. In addition, telling them how you won and why you bought that number will provide an even bigger “Aha Moment“. Rare events are less frequent and more surprising. The same applies to less popular but still important knowledge. Once the value is delivered to the audience, they will experience an Aha Moment.
4. How Do I Benefit From It?
- Do: Focus on providing “how“ and “why“ answers when creating content. Aha Moments are insights that people oversee. Providing “how“ and “why“ will help people to see behind the things. Leverage and remember stories, concepts, facts , or conclusions that will cause the Aha effect.
- Don’t: Do not keep too long waiting for the interesting part of your content or product. Minimize the time to let them receive the Aha Moment earlier.