How to keep users Hooked ?
Feel a tad bored and instantly open Twitter
Pang of loneliness scrolling through their Facebook feeds
A question comes. They query Google.
The first-to-mind solution wins.
A trigger is the actuator of behavior—the spark plug in the engine. Triggers come in two types: external and internal.
Habit-forming products start by alerting users with external triggers like an e-mail, a website link, or the app icon on a phone.
Following the trigger comes the action: the behavior done in anticipation of a reward
Companies leverage two basic pulleys of human behavior to increase the likelihood of an action occurring: the ease of performing an action and the psychological motivation to do it.
Variable Reward. ability to create a craving.intrigue is created.
What distinguishes the Hooked Model from a plain vanilla feedback loop is the Hook’s ability to create a craving.
Variable rewards are one of the most powerful tools companies implement to hook users;
Investment. The last phase of the Hooked Model is where the user does a bit of work. The investment phase isn’t about users opening up their wallets and moving on with their day. Rather, the investment implies an action that improves the service for the next go-around. Inviting friends, stating preferences, building virtual assets, and learning to use new features are all investments users make to improve their experience.
These commitments can be leveraged to make the trigger more engaging, the action easier, and the reward more exciting with every pass through the Hooked Model.
Choice architecture, a concept described by famed scholars Thaler, Sunstein, and Balz in their same-titled scholarly paper, offers techniques to influence people’s decisions and affect behavioral outcomes.
The Hooked Model has four phases: trigger, action, variable reward, and investment.
Like nail biting, many of our daily decisions are made simply because that was the way we have found resolution in the past. The brain automatically deduces that if the decision was a good one yesterday, then it is a safe bet again today and the action becomes a routine.
If our programmed behaviors are so influential in guiding our everyday actions, surely harnessing the same power of habits can be a boon for industry. Indeed, for those able to shape them in an effective way, habits can be very good for the bottom line.
While the viability of some products depends on habit-formation to thrive, that is not always the case. For example, companies selling infrequently bought or used products or services do not require habitual users—at least, not in the sense of everyday engagement.
Life insurance companies, for instance, leverage salespeople, advertising, and word-of-mouth referrals and recommendations to prompt consumers to buy policies. Once the policy is bought, there is nothing more the customer.
Some products have a very high CLTV. For example, credit card customers tend to stay loyal for a very long time and are worth a bundle. Hence, credit card companies are willing to spend a considerable amount of money acquiring new customers.
Buffett and his partner, Charlie Munger, realized that as customers form routines around a product, they come to depend upon it and become less sensitive to price.
In the free-to-play video game business, it is standard practice for game developers to delay asking users to pay money until they have played consistently and habitually. Once the compulsion to play is in place and the desire to progress in the game increases, converting users into paying customers is much easier
Viral Cycle Time is the amount of time it takes a user to invite another user, and it can have a massive impact. “For example, after 20 days with a cycle time of two days, you will have 20,470 users,” Skok writes. “But if you halved that cycle time to one day, you would have over 20 million users! It is logical that it would be better to have more cycles occur, but it is less obvious just how much better.”
Many entrepreneurs fall into the trap of building products that are only marginally better than existing solutions, hoping their innovation will be good enough to woo customers away from existing products.
Old habits die hard and new products or services need to offer dramatic improvements to shake users out of old routines.
Products that require a high degree of behavior change are doomed to fail even if the benefits of using the new product are clear and substantial.
Users also increase their dependency on habit-forming products by storing value in them—further reducing the likelihood of switching to an alternative. For example, every e-mail sent and received using Google’s Gmail is stored indefinitely, providing users with a lasting repository of past conversations.
Memories and experiences captured on Instagram are added to one’s digital scrapbook. Switching to a new e- mail service, social network, or photo-sharing app becomes more difficult the more people use them. The nontransferable value created and stored inside these services discourages users from leaving.
The nontransferable value created and stored inside these services discourages users from leaving. To borrow a term from accounting, behaviors are LIFO—“last in, first out.” In other words, the habits you’ve most recently acquired are also the ones most likely to go soonest.
Altering behavior requires not only an understanding of how to persuade people to act—for example, the first time they land on a web page—but also necessitates getting them to repeat behaviors for long periods, ideally for the rest of their lives
The enemy of forming new habits is past behaviors, and research suggests that old habits die hard. Even when we change our routines, neural pathways remain etched in our brains, ready to be reactivated when we lose focus. For new behaviors to really take hold, they must occur often.
Habits keep users loyal. If a user is familiar with the Google interface, switching to Bing requires cognitive effort.
Although many aspects of Bing are similar to Google, even a slight change in pixel placement forces the would- be user to learn a new way of interacting with the site.
For an infrequent action to become a habit, the user must perceive a high degree of utility, either from gaining pleasure or avoiding pain.
Amazon is so confident in its ability to form user habits that it sells and runs ads for directly competitive products on its site.Customers often see the item they are about to buy listed at a cheaper price and can click away to transact elsewhere. Not only does Amazon make money from the ads it runs from competing businesses, it also utilizes other companies’ marketing dollars to form a habit in the shopper’s mind. Amazon seeks to become the solution to a frequently occurring pain point—the customer’s desire to find the items they want. By allowing users to comparison shop from within the site, Amazon provides tremendous perceived utility to its customers.
A company can begin to determine its product’s habit-forming potential by plotting two factors: frequency (how often the behavior occurs) and perceived utility (how useful and rewarding the behavior is in the user’s mind over alternative solutions).
Some behaviors never become habits because they do not occur frequently enough. No matter how much utility is involved, infrequent behaviors remain conscious actions and never create the automatic response that is characteristic of habits.
Remember, the Hooked Model does not get people to do things they don’t want to do. Your product must ultimately be useful.
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. What are they selling—vitamins or painkillers? Most people would guess vitamins, thinking users aren’t doing much of anything important other than perhaps seeking a quick boost of social validation.
Before making up your mind on the vitamin versus painkiller debate for some of the world’s most successful tech companies, consider this idea: A habit is when not doing an action causes a bit of discomfort. The sensation is similar to an itch, a feeling that manifests within the mind until it is satisfied. The habit-forming products we use are simply there to provide some sort of relief.
My answer to the vitamin versus painkiller question: Habit-forming technologies are both. These services seem at first to be offering nice-to-have vitamins, but once the habit is established, they provide an ongoing pain remedy.
It is worth noting that although some people use the terms interchangeably, habits are not the same things as addictions. The latter describes persistent, compulsive dependencies on a behavior or substance that harms the user. Addictions, by definition, are self-destructive.
When successful, forming strong user habits can have several business benefits including: higher customer lifetime value (CLTV), greater pricing flexibility, supercharged growth, and a sharper competitive edge.
Habit-forming products often start as nice-to-haves (vitamins) but once the habit is formed, they become musthaves (painkillers). Habit-forming products alleviate users’ discomfort by relieving a pronounced itch.
If you are building a habit-forming product, write down the answers to these questions: What habits does your business model require? What problem are users turning to your product to solve? How do users currently solve that problem and why does it need a solution? How frequently do you expect users to engage with your product once they are habituated? What user behavior do you want to make into a habit?
The chain reaction that forms a habit always starts with a trigger. Habits are not created, they are built upon.
New habits need a foundation upon which to build. Triggers provide the basis for sustained behavior change.
Triggers take the form of obvious cues like the morning alarm clock but also come as more subtle, sometimes subconscious signals that just as effectively influence our daily behavior
Triggers come in two types: external and internal
External Triggers Habit-forming technologies start changing behavior by first cueing users with a call to action.
External triggers are embedded with information, which tells the user what to do next. Online, an external trigger may take the form of a prominent button, such as the large “Log in to Mint'' prompt in the email from Mint.com
More choices require the user to evaluate multiple options. Too many choices or irrelevant options can cause hesitation, confusion, or worse—abandonment.Reducing the thinking required to take the next action increases the likelihood of the desired behavior occurring with little thought.
Types of External Triggers. Companies can utilize four types of external triggers to move users to complete desired actions.
Paid Triggers. Advertising, search engine marketing, and other paid channels are commonly used to get users’ attention.Habit-forming companies tend not to rely on paid triggers
Companies generally use paid triggers to acquire new users and then leverage other triggers to bring them back.
Earned Triggers. Earned triggers are free in that they cannot be bought directly, but they often require investment in the form of time spent on public and media relations. For earned triggers to drive ongoing user acquisition, companies must keep their products in the limelight—a difficult and unpredictable task.
Relationship Triggers. One person telling others about a product or service can be a highly effective external trigger for action. Whether through an electronic invitation, a Facebook “like,” or old fashioned word of mouth, product referrals from friends and family are often a key component of technology diffusion.
Sometimes relationship triggers drive growth because people love to tell one another about a wonderful offer.
When designers intentionally trick users into inviting friends or blasting a message to their social networks, they may see some initial growth, but it comes at the expense of users’ goodwill and trust.
Proper use of relationship triggers requires building an engaged user base that is enthusiastic about sharing the benefits of the product with others.
Owned Triggers. Owned triggers consume a piece of real estate in the user’s environment. They consistently show up in daily life and it is ultimately up to the user to opt in to allowing these triggers to appear.
Owned triggers are only set after users sign up for an account, submit their email address, install an app, opt in to newsletters, or otherwise indicate they want to continue receiving communications. While paid, earned, and relationship triggers drive new user acquisition, owned triggers prompt repeat engagement until a habit is formed.
When users form habits, they are cued by a different kind of trigger: internal ones.Internal triggers manifest automatically in your mind. Connecting internal triggers with a product is the brass ring of habit-forming technology.
Emotions, particularly negative ones, are powerful internal triggers and greatly influence our daily routines. Feelings of boredom, loneliness, frustration, confusion, and indecisiveness often instigate a slight pain or irritation and prompt an almost instantaneous and often mindless action to quell the negative sensation. For instance, Yin often uses Instagram when she fears a special moment will be lost forever. The severity of the Emotions, particularly negative ones, are powerful internal triggers and greatly influence our daily routines.The severity of the discomfort may be relatively minor—perhaps her fear is below the perceptibility of consciousness—but that’s exactly the point.
The desire to be entertained can be thought of as the need to satiate boredom. A need to share good news can also be thought of as an attempt to find and maintain social connections.
Users who find a product that alleviates their pain will form strong, positive associations with the product over time.
Gradually, these bonds cement into a habit as users turn to your product when experiencing certain internal triggers.The study demonstrated that people suffering from symptoms of depression used the Internet more.
The mother of all habit-forming technology, is a go-to solution for many of our daily agitations, from validating our importance (or even our existence) by checking to see if someone needs us
Building for Triggers Products that successfully create habits soothe the user’s pain by laying claim to a particular feeling. To do so, product designers must know their user’s internal triggers—that is, the pain they seek to solve. Finding customers’ internal triggers requires learning more about people than what they can tell you in a survey, though.
The ultimate goal of a habit-forming product is to solve the user’s pain by creating an association so that the user identifies the company’s product or service as the source of relief.
How do you, as a designer, go about uncovering the source of a user’s pain? The best place to start is to learn the drivers behind successful habit-forming products—not to copy them, but to understand how they solve users’ problems. Doing so will give you practice in diving deeper into the mind of the consumer and alert you to common human needs and desires. As We often think the Internet enables you to do new things … But people just want to do the same things they’ve always done.”
We often think the Internet enables you to do new things … But people just want to do the same things they’ve always done.”
Ask yourself what pain these habits solve and what the user might be feeling right before one of these actions.
Spend a lot of time writing what’s called user narratives. “He is in the middle of Chicago and they go to a coffee store ... This is the experience they’re going to have. It reads like a play. It’s really, really beautiful. If you do that story well, then all of the prioritization, all of the product, all of the design and all the coordination that you need to do with these products just falls out naturally because you can edit the story and everyone can relate to the story from all levels of the organization, engineers to operations to support to designers to the business side of the house.”
Dorsey believes a clear description of users—their desires, emotions, the context with which they use the product —is paramount to building the right solution. In addition to Dorsey’s user narratives, tools like customer development,11 usability studies, and empathy maps12 are examples of methods for learning about potential users.
One method is to try asking the question “Why?” as many times as it takes to get to an emotion. Usually, this will happen by the fifth why. This is a technique adapted from the Toyota Production System, described by Taiichi Ohno as the “5 Whys Method.”
Why #1: Why would Julie want to use e-mail? Answer: So she can send and receive messages.
Why #2: Why would she want to do that? Answer: Because she wants to share and receive information quickly.
Why #3: Why does she want to do that? Answer: To know what’s going on in the lives of her coworkers, friends, and family.
Why #4: Why does she need to know that? Answer: To know if someone needs her.
Why #5: Why would she care about that? Answer: She fears being out of the loop. Now we’ve got something! Fear is a powerful internal trigger and we can design our solution to help calm Julie’s fear. It is the fear of losing a special moment that instigates a pang of stress. This negative emotion is the internal trigger that brings Instagram users back to the app to alleviate this pain by capturing a photo.
Instagram also alleviates the increasingly recognizable pain point known as fear of missing out, or FOMO. For Instagram, associations with internal triggers provide a foundation to form new habits.
Refer to the answers you came up with in the last “Do This Now” section to complete the following exercises: Who is your product’s user? What is the user doing right before your intended habit? Come up with three internal triggers that could cue your user to action. Refer to the 5 Whys Method described in this chapter. Which internal trigger does your user experience most frequently? Finish this brief narrative using the most frequent internal trigger and the habit you are designing: “Every time the user (internal trigger), he/she (first action of intended habit).”
Refer back to the question about what the user is doing right before the first action of the habit. What might be places and times to send an external trigger? How can you couple an external trigger as closely as possible to when the user’s internal trigger fires? Think of at least three conventional ways to trigger your user with current technology (e-mails, notifications, text messages, etc.). Then stretch yourself to come up with at least three crazy or currently impossible ideas for ways to trigger your user (wearable computers, biometric sensors, carrier pigeons, etc.). You could find that your crazy ideas spur some new approaches that may not be so nutty after all. In a few years new technologies will create all sorts of currently unimaginable triggering opportunities.
To initiate action, doing must be easier than thinking. Remember, a habit is a behavior done with little or no conscious thought. The more effort—either physical or mental—required to perform the desired action, the less likely it is to occur.
Fogg posits that there are three ingredients required to initiate any and all behaviors: (1) the user must have sufficient motivation; (2) the user must have the ability to complete the desired action; and (3) a trigger must be present to activate the behavior.
While a trigger cues an action, motivation defines the level of desire to take that action.
All humans are motivated to seek pleasure and avoid pain; to seek hope and avoid fear; and finally, to seek social acceptance and avoid rejection.
What motivates some people will not motivate others, a fact that provides all the more reason to understand the needs of your particular target audience.
However, even with the right trigger enabled and motivation running high, product designers often find users still don’t behave the way they want them to. What’s missing in this equation? Usability—or rather, the ability of the user to take action easily.
First, Hauptly states, understand the reason people use a product or service. Next, lay out the steps the customer must take to get the job done. Finally, once the series of tasks from intention to outcome is understood, simply start removing steps until you reach the simplest possible process. “Take a human desire, preferably one that has been around for a really long time ... Identify that desire and use modern technology to take out steps.”
Posting content online is dramatically easier. The result? The percentage of users creating content online, as opposed to simply consuming it, increased.A few keyboard taps and users were sharing.
Six “elements of simplicity”—the factors that influence a task’s difficulty.These are:
Time—how long it takes to complete an action.
Money—the fiscal cost of taking an action.
Physical effort—the amount of labor involved in taking the action.
Brain cycles—the level of mental effort and focus required to take an action.
Social deviance—how accepted the behavior is by others.
Non-routine—according to Fogg, “How much the action matches or disrupts existing routines.”
Twitter helps people share articles, videos, photos, or any other content they find on the web. The company noticed that 25 percent of tweets contained a link.
To ease the way for link sharing, Twitter created an embeddable Tweet button for third-party sites, allowing them to offer visitors a one-click way to tweet directly from their pages
Google’s PageRank algorithm proved to be a much more effective way to index the web. By ranking pages based on how frequently other sites linked to them, Google improved search relevance.
Infinite scroll. whenever the user nears the bottom of a page, more results automatically load. Users never have to pause as they continue scrolling through pins or posts without end
Even though users are often unaware of these influences on their behavior, heuristics can predict their actions.
The Scarcity Effect. The appearance of scarcity affected their perception of value.
The Framing Effect. Context also shapes perception. The mind takes shortcuts informed by our surroundings to make quick and sometimes erroneous judgments. perception can form a personal reality based on how a product is framed, even when there is little relationship with objAbility is influenced by the six factors of time, money, physical effort, brain cycles, social deviance, and nonroutineness. Ability is dependent on users and their context at that moment.ective quality.
The Anchoring Effect. After doing some quick math I discovered that the undershirts not on sale were actually cheaper per shirt than the discounted brand’s package. People often anchor to one piece of information when making a decision.
The Endowed Progress Effect. The study demonstrates the endowed progress effect, a phenomenon that increases motivation as people believe they are nearing a goal. On LinkedIn every user starts with some semblance of progress . The next step is to “Improve Your Profile Strength” by supplying additional information.
Ability is influenced by the six factors of time, money, physical effort, brain cycles, social deviance, and nonroutineness. Ability is dependent on users and their context at that moment.
Walk through the path your users would take to use your product or service, beginning from the time they feel their internal trigger to the point where they receive their expected outcome. How many steps does it take before users obtain the reward they came for? How does this process compare with the simplicity of some of the examples described in this chapter? How does it compare with competing products and services?
Ability is influenced by the six factors of time, money, physical effort, brain cycles, social deviance, and nonroutineness. Ability is dependent on users and their context at that moment.
Users must come to depend on the product as a reliable solution to their problem—the salve for the itch they came to scratch.
Variable reward phase, in which you reward your users by solving a problem, reinforcing their motivation for the action taken in the previous phase
Nucleus accumbens was not activating when the reward (in this case a monetary payout) was received, but rather in anticipation of it.The study revealed that what draws us to act is not the sensation we receive from the reward itself, but the need to alleviate the craving for that reward.
Without variability we are like children in that once we figure out what will happen next, we become less excited by the experience.To hold our attention, products must have an ongoing degree of novelty.
Habits help us conserve our attention for other things while we go about the tasks we perform with little or no conscious thought. However, when something breaks the cause-and-effect pattern we’ve come to expect—when we encounter something outside the norm—we suddenly become aware of it again.4 Novelty sparks our interest, makes us pay attention, and—like a baby encountering a friendly dog for the first time—we seem to love it. Rewards.
Recent experiments reveal that variability increases activity in the nucleus accumbens and spikes levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine, driving our hungry search for rewards.
Variable rewards come in three types: the tribe, the hunt, and the self.
Rewards of the Tribe We are a species that depends on one another. Rewards of the tribe, or social rewards, are driven by our connectedness with other people. Our brains are adapted to seek rewards that make us feel accepted, attractive, important, and included. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and several other sites collectively provide over a billion people with powerful social rewards on a variable schedule. With every post, tweet, or pin, users anticipate social validation. People who observe someone being rewarded for a particular behavior are more likely to alter their own beliefs and subsequent actions. This technique works particularly well when people observe the behavior of people most like themselves or who are slightly more experienced (and therefore, role models).
The uncertainty of what users will find each time they visit the site creates the intrigue needed to pull them back again. “Likes” and comments offer tribal validation for those who shared the content, and provide variable rewards that motivate them to continue posting.
Stack Overflow is the world’s largest question-and-answer site for software developers.
Stack Overflow devotees write responses in anticipation of rewards of the tribe. Each time a user submits an answer, other members have the opportunity to vote the response up or down. The best responses percolate upward, accumulating points for their authors . When they reach certain point levels, members earn badges, which confer special status and privileges. On Stack Overflow, points are not just an empty game mechanic; they confer special value by representing how much someone has contributed to his or her tribe. Users enjoy the feeling of helping their fellow programmers and earning the respect of people whose opinions they value.
The online video game was filled with “trolls”—people who enjoyed bullying other players while being protected by the anonymity the game provides. League of Legends soon earned a nasty reputation for having an “unforgiving—even abusive—community.”To combat the trolls, the game creators designed a reward system leveraging Bandura’s social learning theory, which they called Honor Points (figure 20). The system gave players the ability to award points for particularly sportsmanlike conduct worthy of recognition. These virtual kudos encouraged positive behavior and helped the best and most cooperative players to stand out in the community. The number of points earned was highly variable and could only be conferred by other players. Honor Points soon became a coveted marker of tribe- conferred status and helped weed out trolls by signaling to others which players should be avoided.
Rewards of the Hunt. Early humans killed animals using a technique known as “persistence hunting,” During the chase, the runner is driven by the pursuit itself; this same mental hardwiring also provides clues into the source of our insatiable desires today. The search for resources defines the next type of variable reward—the rewards of the hunt. Slot machines provide a classic example of variable rewards of the hunt.By awarding money in random intervals, games of chance entice players with the prospect of a jackpot.
Twitter. The “feed” has become a social staple of many online products. The stream of limitless information displayed in a scrolling interface makes for a compelling reward of the hunt. The Twitter timeline, for example, is filled with a mix of both mundane and relevant content. This variety creates an enticingly unpredictable user experience.
Pinterest, a company that has grown to reach over 250 million monthly users worldwide, also employs a feed, but with a visual twist.The online pinboarding site is a virtual smorgasbord of objects of desire. The site is curated by its community of users who ensure that a high degree of intriguing content appears on each page. As the user scrolls to the bottom of the page, some images appear to be cut off. Images often appear out of view below the browser fold. However, these images offer a glimpse of what’s ahead, even if just barely visible. To relieve their curiosity, all users have to do is scroll to reveal the full picture
Rewards of the Self Finally, there are the variable rewards we seek for a more personal form of gratification. We are driven to conquer obstacles, even if just for the satisfaction of doing so. The rewards of the self are fueled by “intrinsic motivation” as highlighted by the work of Edward Deci and Richard Ryan. Their self-determination theory espouses that people desire, among other things, to gain.
Video games. Rewards of the self are a defining component in video games, as players seek to master the skills needed to pursue their quest.
The humble e-mail system provides an example of how the search for mastery, completion, and competence moves users to habitual and sometimes mindless actions. Have you ever caught yourself checking your email for no particular reason? Perhaps you unconsciously decided to open it to see what messages might be waiting for you. For many, the number of unread messages represents a sort of goal to be completed. Yet to feel rewarded, the user must have a sense of accomplishment. What happens when in-boxes become flooded with too many messages? Users can give up when they sense the struggle to get their in-boxes under control is hopeless. To combat the problem and give users a sense of progress, Google created “Priority Inbox.”20 Using this feature, Gmail cleverly segments emails into sorted folders to increase the frequency of users achieving “in-box zero”—a near-mystical state of having no unread emails.
Codecademy seeks to make learning to write code more fun and rewarding. The site offers step-by-step instructions for building a web app, animation, and even a browser-based game. The interactive lessons deliver immediate feedback, At Codecademy users can enter a single correct function and the code works or doesn’t, providing instant feedback.
Important Considerations for Designing Reward Systems Variable Rewards Are Not a Free Pass. Why, then, have users remained highly engaged with Quora but not with Mahalo, despite its variable monetary rewards?
Quora demonstrated that social rewards and the variable reinforcement of recognition from peers proved to be much more frequent and salient motivators.Quora instituted an upvoting system that reports user satisfaction with answers and provides a steady stream of social feedback.
Only by understanding what truly matters to users can a company correctly match the right variable reward to their intended behavior. When there is a mismatch between the customer’s problem and the company’s assumed solution, no amount of gamification will help spur engagement. if the user has no ongoing itch at all—say, no need to return repeatedly to a site that lacks any value beyond the initial visit—gamification will fail because of a lack of inherent interest in the product or service offered. Rewards must fit into the narrative of why the product is used and align with the user’s internal triggers and motivations.
Maintain a Sense of Autonomy. the company committed a very public blunder—one that illustrates another important consideration. “Views,” which revealed the real identity of people visiting a particular question or answer. For users, the idea of knowing who was seeing content they added to the site proved very intriguing. Users could now know, for example, when a celebrity or prominent venture capital investor viewed something they created. However, the feature backfired.. In an instant, users lost their treasured anonymity when asking, answering, or simply viewing Quora questions that were personal, awkward, or intimate. For users, the idea of knowing who was seeing content they added to the site proved very intriguing. Users could now know, for example, when a celebrity or prominent venture capital investor viewed something they created. However, the feature backfired. In an instant, users lost their treasured anonymity when asking, answering, or simply viewing
Few words, placed at the end of a request, are a highly effective way to gain compliance, doubling the likelihood. “But you are free to accept or refuse.”The “but you are free” technique demonstrates how we are more likely to be persuaded to give when our ability to choose is reaffirmed.reactance, the hair-trigger response to threats to your autonomy. However, when a request is coupled with an affirmation of the right to choose, reactance is kept at bay. Yet
Keeping a food diary was not part of my daily routine and was not something I came to the app wanting to do.I soon began to feel obligated to confess my mealtime transgressions to my phone. MyFitnessPal became MyFitnessPain.I soon began to feel obligated to confess my mealtime transgressions to my phone.it leverages familiar behaviors users want to do, instead of have to do.
Before my reactance alarm went off, I started receiving kudos from other members of the site after entering my very first run. Curious to know who was sending the virtual encouragement, I logged in, whereupon I immediately saw a question from “mrosplock5,” a woman looking for advice
Fitocracy is first and foremost an online community. The app roped me in by closely mimicking real-world gym jabber among friends. The ritual of connecting with like-minded people existed long before Fitocracy, and the company leverages this behavior by making it easier and more rewarding to share encouragement, exchange advice, and receive praise.
The ritual of connecting with like-minded people existed long before Fitocracy, and the company leverages this behavior by making it easier and more rewarding to share encouragement, exchange advice, and receive praise.
Social acceptance is something we all crave,
To be fair, MyFitnessPal also has social features intended to keep members engaged. However, as opposed to Fitocracy, the benefits of interacting with the community come much later in the user experience, if ever.
The fact remains that the most successful consumer technologies are the ones that nobody makes us use.
Unfortunately, too many companies build their products betting users will do what they make them do instead of letting them do what they want to do
Companies fail to change user behaviors because they do not make their services enjoyable for its own sake, often asking users to learn new, unfamiliar actions instead of making old routines easier.
Companies that successfully change behaviors present users with an implicit choice between their old way of doing things and a new, more convenient way to fulfill existing needs.
Beware of Finite Variability. Companies that successfully change behaviors present users with an implicit choice between their old way of doing things and a new, more convenient way to fulfill existing needs. Experiences with finite variability become less engaging because they eventually become predictable.
Businesses with finite variability are not inferior per se; they just operate under different constraints. They must constantly churn out new content and experiences to cater to their consumers’ insatiable desire for novelty.