Nir Eyal's Blog, page 35

All-Stars of Product Design and User Psychology Coming to Habit Summit

We’ve just announced new speakers and their respective talks for the upcoming Habit Summit taking place on March 25th at Stanford. The line-up is amazing!

We’ll hear from experts like Julie Zhuo (Director of Product Design at Facebook), best-selling authors like Gretchen Rubin (The Happiness Project) and Natasha Dow Schull (Addiction by Design), innovators like Josh Elman (formerly of Twitter and LinkedIn), Jeff Atwood (co-founder of Stack Overflow), a number of VCs, product leads, and other phenomenal speakers.

This event was created for product managers, designers, executives, and marketers: anyone whose product or company would benefit from repeat customer engagement. I’m thrilled to be involved and I can’t wait to hear these speakers.

Tickets to the conference are selling fast and we’re on track to sell out. If you are planning to attend, note that prices of tickets go up on March 10th, so get your ticket soon. More information about the summit is available at: HabitSummit.com

Upcoming Hooked Workshop

I’m teaching my 3.5 hour Hooked Workshop the day after the Habit Summit. The workshop is for people working on products they’d like to make more habit-forming and is a hands-on version of my book. Information about the workshop is available here: hookedzurb.eventbrite.com

Finally, blog readers can use the code “NirAndFarFriends” for a $50 discount on either or both events.

I hope to see you there!

How To Cope with Your Insane Jealousy Of The WhatsApp Deal

Wednesday was my birthday. It should have been a great day. My wife and daughter had prepared a delicious breakfast, I had lunch with close friends, and I finished up some writing and client work. At the end of the day I headed to San Francisco to enjoy a swanky scotch tasting at a friend’s house.

Then I heard the news. WhatsApp had been purchased by Facebook for $19 billion. When I read about the deal I blurted out the words, “Holy Crap!” so loudly that a stranger nearby gave me a disapproving look.

I was having a fantastic day just minutes before but suddenly I felt crummy, like something unjust had happened. The malaise lingered as my mind began to rationalize the news. Was the deal justified? Why had Facebook paid so much? What did the deal mean for the future of the tech industry?

However, the question that most disturbed me was why hadn’t I built WhatsApp? The simplicity of the app made it look easy. Perhaps, I thought, I should get back to starting companies instead of writing books about them.

Then I remembered one of my favorite monkey studies. A bit of primate psychology helped me regain my sanity.

Frans de Waal, a primatologist at Emory University, wanted to know if capuchin monkeys felt jealousy in the same way humans do. His study began by training two monkeys with identical cucumber slices. Whenever they completed a task, in this case retrieving a rock and handing it to a researcher, they each received a slice of cucumber. When both monkeys were offered the same reward, they completed the task as prescribed.

Then things got interesting — as they often do when researchers start messing with monkeys. De Waal knew his capuchin monkeys adored grapes, almost as much as we entrepreneurs lust for “liquidity events.” This time the researcher gives one monkey a grape while giving the other a slice of cucumber.

After giving his rock to the researcher, the stiffed monkey glances over at his lucky comrade, who by this time is wolfing down the juicy grape. He then looks down into his little monkey paws where only a measly pale green cucumber slice awaits him.

Seconds earlier, this monkey was perfectly content with his reward but now it’s clear he isn’t happy. The cucumber pieces had suited him fine as long as the other monkey got the same. However, now that the other monkey got something much better, monkey hell breaks loose. The monkey stages an emotionally charged protest. He shrieks, throws his cucumber at the researcher, bares his teeth, thrashes in his cage, and slaps the table.

Clearly, we aren’t the only primates who value the ideal of equal pay for equal work. As a two-time entrepreneur who never got close to a billion dollar buy-out, I empathize with that raging monkey. My team and I had worked hard for our reward and did just fine, and yet, we’d never had a WhatsApp-sized payday. It’s hard not to ask, “Where’s my grape?”

And that’s the source of the problem. I loved being an entrepreneur and I love what I do today, just as the capuchin monkey enjoyed his cucumber before the other monkey got something better. It is only when we become cognizant that others have more that we feel unsatisfied with what we have.

As another example, think sex. Researchers have known for some time that, “frequency of sexual activity is shown to be positively associated with happiness,” — no big surprise there. However, what is less well understood is how our happiness is affected by the amount of sex we think other people are having. According to a study at the University of Colorado at Boulder, believing that other people are having more sex than you makes you less happy, even if you are having plenty of it.

It appears we are hardwired for jealousy. Perhaps there is an evolutionary benefit to the dissatisfaction that comes from wanting what others have. However, unlike lower primates, we humans have the ability to consciously self-reflect. Perhaps we can’t help feeling like the monkey in De Waal’s experiment when we see others getting more. However, our tendency to compare ourselves to others does not have to make us unhappy. We have a choice.

When I arrived at the scotch tasting the night of my birthday, my friend Andrew Warner proposed a toast. “On Nir’s birthday, I want to share something that has stuck with me from the first time I met him.” Andrew held up his glass of whiskey, “We were sitting around a dinner table a few years ago when someone brought up the topic of how to relate to wildly successful people.” I vaguely recalled the conversation and I wasn’t sure what Andrew would say next. “That’s when Nir said that once you find the thing you love doing, nothing else matters. You just can’t ask for anything more than that.” We clinked glasses and I was thankful for the timely reminder of our conversation.

Image by Flickr user Carsten Schertzer under a CC BY 2.0 license

Note: I will be speaking at the upcoming Habit Summit at Stanford. Blog readers get $50 off when using this link: https://habitsummit.eventbrite.com/?discount=NirAndFarFriends

Why Do Fads Fade? The Inevitable Death Of Flappy Bird

Nir’s Note:  Parts of this article are adapted from Hooked: A Guide to Building Habit-Forming Products.

On February 8, 2014, an app called Flappy Bird held the coveted No. 1 spot in the Apple App Store. The app’s 29-year-old creator, Dong Nguyen, reported earning $50,000 a day from the game.

Then, the Vietnamese developer sent a shocking message. In a tweet many dismissed as a publicity stunt, Nguyen wrote, “I am sorry ‘Flappy Bird‘ users, 22 hours from now, I will take ‘Flappy Bird‘ down. I cannot take this anymore.” And as promised, the game disappeared the next day.

This is not the way success typically ends.

Flappy Bird was downloaded over 50 million times and unleashed a digital tsunami of players and pundits dissecting what turned into a global fixation. Players’ only goal in the game was to pilot a pixelated bird through gaps of pipe. Yet the app seemed to have a mysteriously seductive power. In a TechCrunch article titled Confessions Of A Flappy Bird Addict, Josh Constine wrote, “It humiliates me, but I like it. It’s the dominatrix of mobile games.”

What is at the heart of today’s digital juggernauts and why do they seem to disappear as quickly as they rise? What is it about the things that capture our attention in a mental vice grip, only to be ridiculed as faddish whims later?

Given the meteoric success and subsequent decline of other games like Candy Crush Saga, Angry Birds, and FarmVille, perhaps the death of Flappy Bird was more than a rash decision. Perhaps it was a mercy killing?

Why We Get Hooked

In 2008, a television series called Breaking Bad began receiving unprecedented critical and popular acclaim. The show followed the life of Walter White, a high school chemistry teacher who transforms himself into a crystal meth-cooking drug lord. As the body count on the show piled up season after season, so did its viewership. The first episode of the final season in 2013 attracted 5.9 million viewers and by the end of the series Guinness World Records dubbed it the highest-rated TV series of all time. Though Breaking Bad owes a great deal of its success to its talented cast and crew, fundamentally the program utilized a simple formula to keep people tuning in.

At the heart of every episode — and also across each season’s narrative arc — is a problem the characters must resolve. For example, during an episode in the first season, Walter White must find a way to dispose of the bodies of two rival drug dealers. Next, challenges prevent the resolution of the conflict and suspense is created as the audience waits to find out how the storyline ends. In this particular episode, White discovers one of the drug dealers is still alive and is faced with the dilemma of having to kill someone he thought was already dead.

Invariably, each episode’s central conflict is resolved near the end of the show, at which time a new challenge arises to pique the viewer’s curiosity. By design, the only way to know how Walter gets out of the mess he is in at the end of the latest episode is to watch the next episode.

The cycle of conflict, mystery and resolution is as old as storytelling itself, and at the heart of every good tale is uncertainty. The unknown is fascinating, and strong stories hold our attention by waiting to reveal what happens next. In a phenomenon called “experience-taking,” researchers have shown that people who read a story about a character actually feel what the protagonist is feeling. As we step into the character’s shoes we experience his or her motivations. We empathize with characters because they are driven by the same things that drive us.

But if the search to resolve uncertainty is such a powerful tool of engagement, why do we eventually lose interest in the things that once riveted us? Many people have experienced the intense focus of being hooked on a TV series, a great book, a new video game or even the latest gadget. Yet, most of us lose interest in a few days or weeks. Why does the power of these variable rewards seem to fade away?

The Finite and Infinite

Perhaps no company in recent memory epitomizes the mercurial nature of variable rewards quite like Zynga, makers of the hit Facebook game FarmVille. In 2009, FarmVille became an unmissable part of the global zeitgeist. The game smashed records as it quickly reached 83.8 million monthly active users by leveraging the Facebook platform to acquire new players. In 2010, as “farmers” tended their digital crops — while paying real money for virtual goods and levels — the company generated more than $36 million in revenue.

The company seemed invincible and set a course for growth by cloning its FarmVille success into a franchise. Zynga soon released CityVille, ChefVille, FrontierVille, and several more “-Ville” titles using familiar game mechanics in the hope that people would enjoy them as voraciously as they had FarmVille. By March 2012, Zynga’s stock was flying high and the company was valued at over $10 billion.

But by November of that same year, the stock was down over 80 percent. It turned out that Zynga’s new games were not really new at all. The company had simply re-skinned FarmVille, and soon players lost interest and investors followed suit. What was once novel and intriguing became rote and boring. The “Villes” had lost their variability, and with it, their viability. As the Zynga story demonstrates, an element of mystery is an important component of continued user interest.

Online games like FarmVille suffer from what I call “finite variability” — an experience that becomes predictable with use. While Breaking Bad built suspense over time as the audience wondered how the series would end, eventually interest in the show  waned when it finally concluded. The series enthralled viewers with each new episode, but now that it is all over, how many people who saw it once will watch it again? With the plot lines known and the central mysteries revealed, the show just wouldn’t seem as interesting the second time around. Perhaps the show might resurrect interest with a new episode in the future, but viewership for old episodes people have already seen will never peak as it did when they were new. 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. It is no coincidence that both Hollywood and the video gaming industry operate under what is called the “studio model,” whereby a deep-pocketed company provides backing and distribution to a portfolio of movies or games, uncertain which one will become the next mega-hit.

This is in contrast with companies making products exhibiting “infinite variability” — experiences, which maintain user interest by sustaining variability with use. For example, games played to completion offer finite variability while those played with others people have higher degrees of infinite variability, because the players themselves alter the game-play throughout. World of Warcraft, the world’s most popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game, still captured the attention of more than 10 million active users eight years after its first release. While FarmVille is played mostly in solitude, World of Warcraft is played with teams and it is the hard-to-predict behavior of other people that keeps the game interesting.

While content consumption, like watching a TV show, is an example of finite variability, content creation is infinitely variable. Platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter all leverage user-generated content to provide visitors with a never-ending stream of newness.

Of course, even sites utilizing infinite variability are not guaranteed to hold onto users attention forever. Eventually — to borrow from Michael Lewis’s book title — the “new, new thing” comes along and consumers migrate to it. However, products utilizing infinite variability stand a better chance of holding onto the user’s attention, while those with finite variability must constantly reinvent themselves just to keep pace.

Gone Forever

Dong Nguyen, the Flappy Bird creator, has largely avoided media attention related to the spectacular success of his game. However, Nguyen told Forbes he decided to take down the game because it had become, “an addictive product.” While smoking several cigarettes during the interview, Nguyen told the reporter, “I think it has become a problem. To solve that problem, it’s best to take down Flappy Bird. It’s gone forever.”

So far, Nguyen’s goal of curing players’ of their bad habit seems to have fallen short. Phones with the app installed were listed for sale on eBay within hours of the game’s demise. In Flappy Bird’s absence, a wave of clones appeared, hoping to siphon-off Nguyen’s success.

However, as inevitably as the world discarded the fads that came before it, the finite variability of a game where a bird flies through gaps of pipe will soon be forgotten — nostalgia of a time when a young man in Vietnam could get rich quick and become Internet famous. Had Nguyen wanted to see Flappy Bird go away, all he had to do was wait.

Note: I  will be speaking at the upcoming Habit Summit at Stanford on March 25th. Readers get $50 off when using this link.

You’d Be Surprised By What Really Motivates Users

Nir’s Note:  This article is adapted from Hooked: A Guide to Building Habit-Forming Products, a book I wrote with Ryan Hoover and originally appeared on TechCrunch.

Earlier this month, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone unveiled his mysterious startup Jelly. The question-and-answer app was met with a mix of criticism and head scratching. Tech-watchers asked if the world really needed another Q&A service. Skeptics questioned how it would compete with existing solutions and pointed to the rocky history of previous products like Mahalo Answers, Formspring, and Aardvark.

In an interview, Biz articulated his goal to, “make the world a more empathetic place.” Sounds great but one wonders if Biz is being overly optimistic. Aren’t we all busy enough? Control for our attention is in a constant tug-of-war as we struggle to keep-up with all the demands for our time. Can Jelly realistically help people help one another? For that matter, how does any technology stand a chance of motivating users to do things outside their normal routines?

We hope a few insights gleaned from user psychology may help the Jelly makers improve their jam and provide some tips for anyone building an online community.

Lesson 1 – The Right Reward

In May 2007, entrepreneur and Internet celebrity Jason Calacanis launched a site called Mahalo. A flagship feature of the new site was a Q&A forum known as Mahalo Answers. Unlike previous Q&A sites, Mahalo utilized a special incentive to get users to ask and answer questions.

People who submitted a question would offer a bounty in the form of a virtual currency known as “Mahalo Dollars.” Then, other users would contribute answers to the question and the best response would receive the bounty, which could be exchanged for real money. By providing a monetary reward, the Mahalo founders believed they could drive user engagement and form new habits.

At first, Mahalo garnered significant attention and traffic. At its high point, 14.1 million users worldwide visited the site monthly. But over time, usage stalled.

Calacanis blamed Google’s algorithm update for having a major negative impact but said Mahalo was, “growing very slowly” even before the change. As Mahalo struggled to retain users, another Q&A site began to boom. Quora, launched in 2010 by two former Facebook employees, quickly grew in popularity. Unlike Mahalo, Quora did not offer a single cent to anyone answering questions. Why then, have users stayed engaged with Quora but not with Mahalo, despite its monetary rewards?

In Mahalo’s case, executives assumed that paying users would drive repeat engagement with the site. After all, people like money, right?

However, Quora demonstrated that social rewards and the variable reinforcement of recognition from peers proved to be a much more salient motivator. Quora instituted an upvoting system that reports user satisfaction with answers and provides a steady stream of social feedback. Quora’s rewards have proven more attractive than Mahalo’s because the incentive to answer a question is driven by the anticipation of social, not financial, reward. When it comes to online communities, the need to connect and contribute turns out to be a more powerful motivator than collecting cash.

Lesson 2 – Frequency Matters

Think of the products and services you would identify as “habit-forming.” Odds are most of these services are used daily, if not multiple times per day. For instance, in December of 2013, a remarkable 61.5 percent of Facebook’s 1.23 billion monthly active users returned to the site at least once per day. A survey conducted by IDC revealed Americans checked Facebook an average of 14 times per day.

When it comes to forming habits, frequency matters and studies have demonstrated that how often a behavior occurs is a key factor in the likelihood of creating a new routine.

On Mahalo, only one person was awarded the monetary bounty, often days after submitting their answer. If payouts were meant to take the form of a game, then the rewards came too infrequently to matter. The same can be said for those asking questions. Relative to the results delivered by Google, Mahalo Answers took an eternity. Services that can deliver quick rewards encourage higher frequency of use and have an easier time forming new habits.

Though still not as fast as a Google search, Jelly provides feedback relatively quickly. It is not surprising given his Twitter pedigree that Biz Stone understands the power of frequent interactions. On Twitter, the feedback is fast and often furious — a single tweet can generate favorites, retweets, and replies within seconds. For Jelly to succeed, users must receive frequent reinforcement.

Within 60 seconds of submitting the question, “Why do you use Jelly?” four people responded, pulling me back to the app before my grip left my iPhone. When asking a question on Jelly, friends and friends-of-friends receive a push notification, prompting the recipients to help.

Unfortunately, to get the notifications, users need to have the app. As one would expect of a fledgling service, Jelly has not yet reached the critical mass of people needed to provide the quick Twitter-like feedback users crave. For the reward to come fast enough, not only does Jelly need enough users, but it must also build the right kind of community.

Lesson 3 – A Community of People Whose Opinions We Care About

We are a species that depends on each other. 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. Many of our institutions and industries are built around this need for social reinforcement. From civic and religious groups to spectator sports and “water cooler” television shows, the need to feel social connectedness informs our values and drives much of how we spend our time.

Sites that leverage these kinds of rewards benefit from what psychologist Albert Bandura called “social learning theory.” Bandura studied the power of modeling and ascribed special powers to our ability to learn from others. In particular, Bandura showed that people who observe someone being rewarded for a particular behavior are more likely to alter their own beliefs and subsequent actions.

However, social rewards are not as meaningful if they come from just anyone. Notably, Bandura showed that when people observe the behavior of people most like themselves, or those who are slightly more experienced, social learning worked particularly well. This is exactly the kind of targeted demographic and interest-level segmentation that industry-specific sites such as Stack Overflow apply.

Stack Overflow, the world’s largest Q&A site for software developers, generates a staggering 5,000 answers to member questions daily. Many of these responses provide detailed, highly technical and time-consuming answers. Users invest effort into what others may see as the burdensome task of writing technical documentation.

Like Quora users, Stack Overflow users are not rewarded with money, but recognition within the community. Each time a user submits an answer, other members have the opportunity to vote the response up or down. The best responses percolate upwards, accumulating points for their authors. When they reach certain point levels, members earn badges, which endow special status and privileges.

Stack Overflow works because, like all of us, software engineers find satisfaction in contributing to a community they care about; turning a seemingly mundane task into an engaging, game-like experience. But on Stack Overflow, points are not just an empty game mechanic, they confer special value by representing how much someone has contributed to their tribe. Users enjoy the feeling of helping their fellow programmers and earning the respect of people whose opinions they value.

Jelly: Sweet or Sour?

Will Jelly succeed where other Q&A services failed? It is always hard to predict the success or failure of new still evolving products. We hope Jelly and other community-oriented sites will take lessons from the examples above to provide frequent, meaningful rewards from a community that users care about. By looking to insights from psychology, product designers can increases their odds of forming new user habits.

Note: I’ll be speaking at the Habit Summit. Use the discount code “NirAndFarFriends” for $50 off.

Image via Shutterstock

Nostalgia: A Product Designer’s Secret Weapon

Nir’s Note: In this guest post, Ryan Hoover, contributing writer of my book Hooked, describes how nostalgia is used to drive attention and build an engaging product. Follow @rrhoover or visit his blog to read more about startups and product design.

Remember pogs?

Remember Tubthumping?

Remember Nickelodeon GUTS?

Now pause…

How do you feel right now? Did reading those words stimulate any emotional reaction? Did it bring back memories? Excite you? Make you smile?

Nostalgia is powerful. Simply mentioning the names of childhood toys, old TV shows, classic video games, and other pastime activities often instigate an emotional response, reminiscence. But why? Why is nostalgia so compelling and how can product creators use this to build more engaging products?

The Influence of Nostalgia

The term nostalgia was coined by 17th century physician, Johannes Hofer, based off the Greek words nostos (return) and algos (pain). He prescribed nostalgia as a mental illness, attributing it to Swiss soldiers’ symptoms of anxiety, homesickness, insomnia, and anorexia. Hofer believed “continuous vibration of animal spirits through those fibers of the middle brain in which impressed traces of ideas of the Fatherland still cling,” was the cause of these ailments.

Since then, we’ve acquired a better understanding of nostalgia, now defined in the Oxford Dictionary as “a sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations.” Nostalgia generally instills positive emotions of happiness, social connectedness, confidence, and optimism of the future. When feeling down, people seek nostalgia to raise their spirits. Dr. Clay Routledge, a Professor of Psychology at North Dakota State University, posits that “nostalgia increases positive mood, perceptions of meaning, and a sense of connectedness to others. Thus, people may naturally turn to nostalgia if positive mood is threatened, a sense of meaning in life is undermined, or feelings of social connectedness are compromised.”

Negative emotions are powerful triggers, influencing our behavior. Feelings of loneliness, boredom, or insignificance prompt people to browse their Facebook feed, search for a match on OkCupid, or send a photo to a friend on Snapchat. People turn to these services, often subconsciously, to improve their mood. In one study Dr. Routledge examined the effects of music-induced nostalgia, playing popular songs and providing lyrics to participants. Those exposed to the music were more likely to report that they felt “loved” and that “life is worth living” than a control group.

Routledge further explains, “[Nostalgia] is a psychological resource that people employ to counter negative emotions and feelings of vulnerability. Nostalgia allows people to use experiences from the past to help cope with challenges in the present.” Smart product designers and marketers recognize the influence of nostalgia, integrating it into apps and services we use every day. Here are a few products that use nostalgia to spark engagement and build compelling experiences.

Timehop

Nostalgia is a core component of Timehop’s design. Each day the service revives past status updates and photos shared exactly one or more years ago. Instantly, memories resurface as these shared moments encourage people reminisce with friends and family.

The other day Timehop resurfaced this photo:

This was from an incredibly fun 80′s KOFY TV Dance Party, two years ago. Instantly, I shared this with my friends to reminisce.

Heyday

Heyday uses a similar approach, reminding users of the past. But it adds another dimension: location. Last month when I visited my hometown, I received a delightful push notification from Heyday, prompting me to “Look back at your photos shared in Eugene, OR.”

Using the location data stored within the photo, Heyday generates a historical map of one’s travels to surface delightful, contextual memories from the thousands of pictures stored on my iPhone.

A pic from last August near Robert Mondavi Winery (via @heyday) pic.twitter.com/XDoVflxL3l

— Ryan Hoover (@rrhoover) August 18, 2013

Facebook Year in Review

Facebook amused the world toward the end of 2012 with a special year in review, surfacing the 20 most popular posts in one’s timeline. People enjoyed the digital scrapbook, reviewing and sharing memories of the past year. Facebook repeated the successful campaign again at the end of 2013.

Visit your 2013 year in review and observe your emotions and behaviors. Does it make you smile? Are you compelled to comment on these memories? This nostalgic look-back also helps communicate the value of Facebook as a destination to store and relive memories the following year.

Mindie

As Dr. Routledge’s research shows, music has remarkable nostalgia-inducing powers. Mindie, a mobile app to watch and create 7-second music videos, leverages this potent power to quickly deliver an aha! moment, hooking users on day one. Browse the feed of user-created videos to listen to the classics or create your own, selecting your favorite song from yesteryear, surfacing memories and nostalgia.

Polar

Polar, a mobile app of visual polls, covers a wide range of topics from current day politics to modern memes. But many of its most engaging polls, as found in its feed of top submissions, are based on old pop culture references and childhood activities like:

Who’s cooler? Marty Mcfly or Ferris Bueller.
Favorite Pokemon Tourney: Round XY-Finals? Dedenne or Mega Absol.
What game did you play? Hide and Seek or Tag.

Boya

Boya, a new product from the folks at Monkey Inferno, thrives off of nostalgia. After registering any account, users are prompted to describe themselves, entering things they’ve done.

These shared experiences ignite conversation as community members ask users about their experiences, further digging into the archives of the brain.

Foursquare Timemachine

In the summer of 2013, Foursquare Timemachine, hit the internet, igniting a wave of attention in the press and social media.

People loved the data-rich, interactive map of their check-in history. My memories moving from Portland to San Francisco was most notable for me, marking a new chapter in my life. Others reminisced of past vacations as the map traveled across the world.

Glimpse

Glimpse, a dating app that uses Instagram photos to express oneself, creatively uses nostalgia in its on-boarding process. When first signing up, it prompts users to login with Instagram and select nine photos to express one’s personality.

Browsing years of beautiful photos from the past is delightful and although it’s not core to the product, the experience is fun and engages users when they’re most susceptible to churn, before they’ve recognized the value of the app.

Be it a one-time marketing tactic like Foursquare’s Time Machine or core part of the product design like Timehop, nostalgia is a powerful tool to re-engage users and create compelling experiences. Consider how you can use nostalgia to:

Promote your product and provide interesting content people want to share
Deliver an aha! moment on day one, encouraging users to return
Build sustainable value and delightful experiences by making people feel good

Ryan Hoover is the co-creator of Product Hunt, a daily leaderboard for new products. Visit his blog for more writing on product design and follow him on Twitter at @rrhoover.

Announcing The Habit Summit

I’m thrilled to announce I’m co-chairing the first Habit Summit!

On March 25th at Stanford University, a gathering of experts, entrepreneurs, and industry insiders will share their hard-won insights on how to build habits. This event is for designers, executives, visionaries, and marketers: anyone whose product or company would benefit from repeat customer engagement.

We’ll hear from best-selling authors like Gretchen Rubin (The Happiness Project) and Gary Taubes (Why We Get Fat). Technology innovators like Josh Elman (formerly of Twitter and Facebook) and Jeff Atwood (co-founder of Stack Overflow) will also be there. Several more phenomenal speakers will be announced soon but in the meantime I wanted to offer my readers special pricing for the event.

Until February 1st, you can use the code “NirAndFarFriends” for $50 off the early-bird pricing. Prices will go up as the event nears so get your tickets here: habitsummit.eventbrite.com

More information about the summit is available here: HabitSummit.com

See you there!

How You Can Help Users Change Habits

Nir’s Note: This guest post comes from Stephen Wendel, Principal Scientist at HelloWallet and the author of Designing for Behavior Change. Steve’s new book is about how to apply behavioral economics to product development. Follow him on twitter @sawendel.

It can be extraordinarily difficult to stop habits head-on. Brain damage, surgery, even Alzheimer’s disease and dementia sometimes fail to stop them. But why are they so difficult to change? First, it’s because habits are automatic, and not conscious. The conscious part of our minds, the part that would seek to remove habits, is only vaguely aware of their execution; we often don’t notice habits when they occur and we don’t remember doing them afterwards. Across dozens of studies on behavior change interventions, researchers have found that the conscious mind’s sincere, concerted intention to change behavior has little relationship to actual change in behavior.

Second, it’s because habits never truly go away – once a habit is formed (i.e. the brain is rewired to associate the stimulus and response), it doesn’t normally un-form. It can remain latent or unused, but under the right circumstances, that circuitry in the brain can be activated and cause the habitual behavior to reappear.

Another way of thinking of habit cessation is this: if stopping bad habits were easy, we wouldn’t need so many darned books on everything from stopping smoking to dieting. Nevertheless, we can draw lessons from the literature on habit formation and change – which can save product teams needless pain and suffering. Three strategies for handling an existing habit include:

Avoid the cue
Replace the routine
Cleverly use consciousness to interfere

In each case, the person doesn’t just engage in a direct confrontation to suppress the habit. That takes constant willpower, which is finite and unsustainable in most cases.  Instead, the person takes a more subtle, and powerful, route.

Option 1: Help the person avoid the cue

Habits are an automatic reaction to a cue, signaling the mind to undertake a learned routine. One way to stop a habit is to avoid the cue altogether. For example, in addiction counseling, counselors advise addicts to change their environment so that they don’t encounter the things that remind them to act. If you always stop for a drink when you see the bar on the way home, then change your route home so you don’t see the bar anymore.

Designing a product to help people avoid cues is especially tricky. First of all, most cues for bad habits are, by definition, outside of the behavior-change product. People use the product in order to change the habit; the habit  doesn’t have a prior direct connection to the product. The product must help a person avoid the cues themselves by offering guidance and instruction. And the individual must first know what the cues are – and be able to successfully avoid them.

Second, because the routine is outside of the product, the application usually won’t know if the person has engaged in the behavior. It’s up to the user to report falling off the wagon, which is doubly difficult. External monitoring systems are required – like the breathalyzers that alcoholics install in their cars to stop them from driving drunk. While interventions to fight chemical addiction obviously involve other techniques as well, but we can learn from these monitoring efforts as we design products to stop less intractable habits.

While this route is clearly challenging, there are products that have been successful. One example is Covenant Eyes – software that helps people who are struggling with sexual addiction or who want to avoid the temptation before a habit is formed. It helps users avoid cues (by filtering out sites with explicit content) and/or automatically monitors web usage to inform accountability partners when the user does access pornography.

Covenant Eyes: an application to stop the habit of viewing sexual material online, via filtering and automatic monitoring.

Option 2: Change the habit into something else

Another strategy that products can use to change a bad habit is to transition an existing cue and reward to a different (more beneficial) behavior. Charles Duhigg, in The Power of Habit, describes two elements that are needed: routine replacement, and a real belief that the habit can change.

Routine replacement works by hijacking the cue and the reward, and inserting a different routine between them. He uses the example of taking a snack break when you’re not really hungry. The cue may be that you’re having a down moment at work or watching a commercial on TV. The reward would be the relief of (momentary) boredom and the pleasant crunching sensation of the snack. To hijack this process, one needs to:

Identify the trigger, and the reward (when appropriate);
Consciously do a different routine when the trigger occurs, that provides the same reward (like doing a crossword puzzle when bored during commercials);
Continue that conscious switching of routines until the new habit is instilled.

The process of consciously replacing routines is also known as “competing response training”. It is used in the treatment of people with Tourette’s syndrome (involuntary tics), and has shown dramatic results in experimental testing.

How does routine replacement work in practice? One of two ways. First, you can ensure that the product itself is present at the moment when the cue normally occurs. At that moment, it would remind or entice the user to do the new routine instead of the old one. After, the routine is done, it would reward the user – or encourage them to reward themselves.

The other route is trickier, and is needed when the product isn’t present when the user encounters the cue. As with avoiding the cue (previous section), the product must advise and prepare the individual for the moment of temptation, and find some way of tracking what action the person took. ChangeTech.no has an intensive program of support and tracking that accomplishes this, with over 400 points of contact with individuals during their smoking cession program. And, their method has shown positive results in randomized control trials.

An example of in-the-moment hijacking of habits that we’re all familiar with is shopping in brick and mortar stores with a smartphone:

Cue: see a camera, computer, etc. you like.
Old Routine: pick it up, go to the cash register, buy it.
New Routine: look it up on the phone, compare price (usually lower), and buy it.
Reward: feel great about saving money, receive item, imagine yourself using the cool camera, etc.

This habit hijack is killing brick and mortar stores. It’s not a “beneficial behavior change”, but it’s the same underlying process.

Option 3: Use conscious interference

Our big brains are really good at blocking our own autopilot; properly deployed they can interfere with habits in progress without requiring direct willpower to overcome the action. Thinking = bad, for a habit at least. In sports, masters of their game sometimes “choke” because they consciously cut into a process that normally runs on autopilot, and this happens in any field of mastery. To interfere with a habit: think about it. Look especially for what triggers it. Then closely examine the routine that’s normally automatic – just by thinking about it (consciously) we can interfere with its smooth execution.

Products that do this should be present at the time of action, and can grab the user’s conscious attention to their behavior. The Prius is well known functioning this way. The car’s consumption monitor provides ongoing, immediate, feedback about the car’s gasoline consumption. This in-the-moment feedback that can break people out of their existing driving habits by making them consciously aware of what’s going on, and causing them to use less gasoline: aka “the Prius Effect”.

In order for this approach to work, like all habit-intervention (and habit formation), approaches, it must be voluntary. If people don’t care about their mileage, or find the car’s consumption monitor annoying, they won’t listen to it. It starts with the conscious choice to act.

 

On a Napkin: Changing Habits

When breaking habits, cleverly attack the habit’s structure to hinder it from occurring. Don’t ask users to forcibly overcome their habit with willpower alone.
Tactic 1: Help users avoid whatever cues them to start the habit — like the sight of the liquor store that triggers cues to them buy alcohol.
Tactic 2: Routine replacement – keep the cue, but associate it a new routine. Amazon successfully taught shoppers that when see something they like in a store (cue), to search Amazon for it on their phones (new routine) instead of immediately picking it up and buying it (old routine).
Tactic 3: Interfere with the habit by asking users to think about it as it occurs. For example, the “Prius Effect” entails bringing conscious awareness to a normally non-conscious process (how you drive), with constant feedback about speed and energy usage.

 Note: This guest essay was written by Stephen Wendel.

Image Credit: Hey Paul Studios

 Eldridge, Laura L., Donna Masterman, and Barbara J. Knowlton. 2002. “Intact Implicit Habit Learning in Alzheimer’s Disease.” Behavioral Neuroscience 116 (4): 722.

 Dean, Jeremy. 2013. Making Habits, Breaking Habits: Why We Do Things, Why We Don’t, and How to Make Any Change Stick. Boston, MA: Da Capo Press.

 Webb, Thomas L., and Paschal Sheeran. 2006. “Does Changing Behavioral Intentions Engender Behavior Change? A Meta-analysis of the Experimental Evidence.” Psychological Bulletin 132 (2): 249–268.

 Wood, Wendy, Leona Tam, and Melissa Guerrero Witt. 2005. “Changing Circumstances, Disrupting Habits.”Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 88 (6): 918.

 Piacentini, John, Douglas Woods, Lawrence Scahill, Sabine Wilhelm, Alan Peterson, Susanna Chang, and Ginsburg Golda. 2010. “Behavior Therapy for Children with Tourette Disorder: A Randomized Controlled Trial.”JAMA 303 (19) (May 19): 1929–1937.  Dean, Jeremy. 2013. Making Habits, Breaking Habits: Why We Do Things, Why We Don’t, and How to Make Any Change Stick. Boston, MA: Da Capo Press.

 Brendryen, Håvar, and Pål Kraft. 2008. “Happy Ending: a Randomized Controlled Trial of a Digital Multi-media Smoking Cessation Intervention.” Addiction 103 (3): 478–484.

 Baumeister, Roy F. 1984. “Choking Under Pressure: Self-consciousness and Paradoxical Effects of Incentives on Skillful Performance.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 46 (3): 610–620.  Gallwey, W. Timothy. 1997. The Inner Game of Tennis: The Classic Guide to the Mental Side of Peak Performance. Rev Sub. New York, NY: Random House.

Is “Lean Startup” Right for Your Idea?

Nir’s Note: Lyle McKeany is an entrepreneur writing and working on an early-stage startup. In this essay, he shares his experience using lean methodologies with my Hook Model at the Lean Startup Machine conference. This article also appears today on Pando Daily. Follow Lyle on Twitter @lylemckeany.

The conventional view of lean startup ideation methodology is to identify a problem, test your riskiest assumption with a certain success criterion, talk to potential customers before coming up with a solution. Then pivot or persevere until you validate a solution. But it turns out that this conventional view isn’t always the appropriate approach. Here’s how my experience at a Lean Startup Machine(LSM) event in San Francisco earlier this month proves it.

The Lean startup movement is not hurting for attention these days. There are plenty of advocates who write and speak about it almost daily, some of them even make their living doing so. According to Wikipedia,

As of 2012, there are lean startup meetups in over 100 cities and 17 countries as well as an online discussion forum with over 5500 members.

And I’m sure those numbers have grown considerably throughout 2013 since the popularity of Lean Startup certainly hasn’t wained.

My lean startup experience

LSM is a roller coaster of an event. I’ve attended two of them, one in March in Mountain View and one in December in San Francisco. They are three days of long hours, getting out of the building to talk with strangers, and deep thinking about the problem you’re trying to solve.

The event starts with an introductory speech and then attendees can pitch their ideas to the crowd in order to attempt to assemble a team to work on it for the weekend. I pitched my mobile app idea for bands and fans at both LSM events, although the idea was admittedly not very fully formed in my mind at the event in March. The fact that people start by pitching an initial idea is odd considering the emphasis LSM has on not getting hung up on an idea/solution and instead focusing on a problem you think needs solving. More on this in a bit below.

The introductory speaker at the event in December was Trevor Owens. He’s the original founder of LSM, which he started after he saw the value of using lean principles to create a Vespa rental business. In his talk, he spoke about pivoting, the oft-mentioned buzzword these days. He explained,

PayPal, for example, started as mobile payments on a Palm Pilot. Groupon started as an online petition website. YouTube started as an online dating site. Flickr started as an online social game. Odeo pivoted from a podcasting website into Twitter. And Instagram started as a location-based social network that was competing with Foursquare.

All of the examples he provided have one thing in common: not one of them started by using the Lean Startup ideation principles Trevor teaches at LSM. All of them built a potential “solution” right off the bat and some of them raised lots of VC money before they ever made the decision to pivot. Moreover, they all followed the traditional Lean Startup mantra of build-measure-learn, that is build first then measure and learn.

Most technology companies start with an initial idea in mind. That idea oftentimes solves a problem the founders have themselves, a problem they’re passionate about, or a problem they have expertise in. I’m sure every single founder from the examples given by Trevor were passionate about their idea before they even started building it. From that initial idea, they then built what they believed to be a viable solution and thus began the build-measure-learn feedback loop that eventually informed their decision to pivot.

LSM teaches upside validation techniques, meaning they teach entrepreneurs to continually test if it makes sense to continue on their current path or pivot. As Andreas Klinger explained in his thought-provoking blog post Why Lean Startup sucks for startups,

Startups are not about validating you do the right thing. Startups are about validating you are not doing the wrong thing.

It sounds very similar but it is fundamentally different.

Validating every step to get more certainty makes sense for some – eg. people who work in enterprises. But not for normal startups.

After two LSM attempts, I’ve come to the conclusion that my idea is incredibly hard to properly test during the course of a weekend. Since the market is double-sided (bands and their fans) and the product involves network effects, it is difficult to test given the time constraints of LSM and without at least a prototype of the product. On both occasions I compromised on the original idea and went down paths that were less interesting to me, but at least made it possible to go through the exercise.

By Sunday, the final day of LSM, I was starting to feel pretty down about my idea. Maybe it’s not worth pursuing. Maybe I’m crazy to keep working on it. Maybe I should just try something else.

So you’re saying there’s a chance

That’s when Nir Eyal gave a presentation called Hooked and restored my faith in the potential of my idea. I’ve been a reader of Nir’s blog, Nir and Far, for awhile now and have always enjoyed his insights, so I was looking forward to his talk.

He first clarified the difference between a product that is considered a vitamin (nice to have) or a painkiller (addresses a burning need) by asking the audience if they thought Facebook was a vitamin or painkiller. Nearly the whole crowd, myself included, raised their hand when he said vitamin. However, he argued that Facebook is a painkiller that addresses the burning need to not feel alone.

He then went on to outline a framework he calls the “Hook Model” for creating habit-forming technology products. It has helped me think through the experience as a potential user of the app I seek to build.

The phases of the Hook Model are easily remembered with a clever acronym, ATARI:

A hook contains contains four parts:

Trigger

Action

Reward

Investment

Triggers can be both external (FB, Twitter, WOM) and internal (bored, lonely, unsure). Actions are the actions a user takes to interact with the product (scrolling on Pinterest, searching on Google, playing a video on YouTube). Rewards scratch the itches initiated by the triggers and come in three forms: tribe (search for social rewards), hunt (search for resources), and self (search for self-achievement). And finally, investments load the next trigger of the hook and improve the product with use (followers and following on Twitter, reputation on Airbnb, data in Mint). Products that drive users through all four phases, and with high frequency, stand a better chance of becoming a habit and successful business.

In the end, I don’t feel either LSM event validated or invalidated my idea. However, I learned a ton and had a great time putting myself out there and meeting new people. On a side note, I was shocked that throughout both events only one stranger in San Francisco didn’t stop to answer my questions; I learned people are more than willing to take a few moments out of their day to talk.

Even though it didn’t work exactly like I hoped it would, I still recommend attending LSM since it forces you to think hard about the problem you’re trying to solve. There’s no doubt that Lean Startup principles are valuable and have become popular for good reason. My fear is that when used during ideation the techniques taught at LSM and echoed by Lean Startup advocates are steering some entrepreneurs away from ideas that might have the potential to lead them on a path to building the next great company of our time.

Note: This guest post was written by Lyle McKeany

Photo Credit: mdanys

Where to Get “Hooked”

The launch of my new book, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, has been quite a whirlwind. The book is currently a bestseller in several categories on Amazon and I’m thrilled the reviews have been so positive.

Below are a few updates and special offers for my blog readers:

Workshops

I have two Hooked workshops next week.

San Francisco, CA – Monday, January 13 – This is a full-day course based on the class I teach with Dr. Steph Habif. This will be a small group session and only 5 tickets are left.

Brooklyn, NY – Wednesday, January 15 – This is a 3-hour workshop.

Blog subscribers get 50% off either workshop by using the code “NirAndFarFriends.”

Online Course

I’ve recently published an online course based on the book. Blog subscribers get 50% off the course using the code “NirBlogSub.” The discount is available for people who register for the course by January 17th. The course is available on Udemy here.

Amazon Reviews

Several reader have asked how they can leave a review for Hooked on Amazon. In my opinion, the button is far too hard to find.

Please leave a review by going to the book page on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00HJ4A43S/

Then, scroll down to the bottom of the reviews but before the “More About the Author” section. There you will find the “Write a customer review” button. Thanks!

 

“Hooked” Book is Available for Download (and $0 for the next 5 days)

It’s finally here. My book, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, is now available. 

Over a year ago, I promised my blog subscribers I’d make them a little e-book summarizing my research — I thought it would be 20 pages or so.

However, as the project evolved, it turned into something bigger. Fortunately, I met Ryan Hoover, who helped me push the book to completion. I also received the generous help of hundreds of blog subscribers who contributed to the book.

Today, I’m proud to bring you the finished product!

Hooked will go on sale soon in print ($29.95) and ebook format ($9.95). However, as I promised, blog subscribers get it for free.

But there’s a catch!

Amazon will only let me give the book away for $0 for five days.

To get your download, go to this link from December 27 to December 31.

One more thing

The book is yours free just for reading my blog, however, I need your help.

When you’re ready, please take a minute to write a review on Amazon and GoodReads. If you read an early version of the book, please leave a review now.

Early reviews are critical and your help is very much appreciated. Thank you!

Of course, feel free to email me with any edits or suggestions.

I hope you enjoy Hooked.