It seems that in times of connectivity, satisfaction of any wishes might be easy to handle. There are various services and communities which are helping users worldwide to achieve their goals and targets. You can search for anything, and you will find something, which is quite satisfying, obviously. Interestingly, the word for satisfied in the German language is “zufrieden” which literally means something like “towards peace”. This is quite pointing on the structural manner of all our doing. We are trampling and hustling in any way to afterward calm down to something like inner peace.

There are many stakeholders that could deliver satisfaction. Firstly the families. Which mainly belongs to the user’s strong ties. Also, the user’s colleagues, friends, and paragons.

When the Internet which is nowadays also dominated by the social aspect pays also tribute to this underlying manner of our doing and motivation, the average time we spend on a website or a social media platform might drop because of the users in general are satisfied in a shorter period of time and with less expense. This figure collides in a way with the stars, but you as a webmaster can measure it.

Overall, it might be quite different. Especially when it comes to media outlets. It might be not really rewarding to let the viewer leave satisfied and with a well-informed feeling in his/hers gut.

But in my humble opinion, satisfaction is the drive, why we are doing so much of our daily life with motivation and intelligence. And we depend on somebody telling us that we have done well, which is mainly defined as emotional gratification. This might be a conflict ground. Imagine your community (weak tie) gives you a positive response for something which your spouse (strong tie) is really unsatisfied with. Is the community stronger in this case and becomes the strong tie? I think in many ways we as humans face this problem in our daily life nowadays.

In some cases the community becomes stronger even there are only ties to people which stay anonymous. As Hillary Clinton outlines in her book Hard Choices: “When you are in a common boat, cross the river peacefully together.”

So as a webmaster, let your users decide, who is in their common boat and if they even want to cross the river. You only have to make decisions for which actions you want to hand over satisfaction to your users. Becoming well-informed might be one of these. But also being respected, being up-to-date, being seen with the concerns they face in their daily lives. But please don’t tell your users which what they should be satisfied with.

In a world of Open Data, your user should be able to disclose or undisclose depending on his or hers decision. All you can and should do is to choose the technique which in your opinion delivers satisfaction to them.

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Featured image comes from pexels.