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Variable rewards are one of the most powerful tools companies implement to hook users;
“The most important factor to increasing growth is . . . Viral Cycle Time.”7 Viral Cycle Time is the amount of time it takes a user to invite another user, and it can have a massive impact.
So why haven’t more Google users switched to Bing? 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. Adapting to the differences in the Bing interface is what actually slows down regular Google users and makes Bing feel inferior, not the technology itself.
Users no longer need to think about whether or not to use Google; they just do.
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).
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?
HABITS ARE NOT CREATED, THEY ARE BUILT UPON
Too many choices or irrelevant options can cause hesitation, confusion, or worse—abandonment.4 Reducing the thinking required to take the next action increases the likelihood of the desired behavior occurring with little thought.
For example, it is hard to top PayPal’s viral success of the late 1990s.5 PayPal knew that once account holders started sending other users money online they would realize the tremendous value of the service. The allure that someone just sent you money was a huge incentive to open an account, and PayPal’s growth spread because it was both viral and useful.
Proper use of relationship triggers requires building an engaged user base that is enthusiastic about sharing the benefits of the product with others.
A study at the Missouri University of Science and Technology illustrates how tech solutions can provide frequent psychological relief.
Instead, they rely upon our automatic responses to feelings that precipitate the desired behavior. Products that attach to these internal triggers provide users with quick relief.
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.
These common needs are timeless and universal. Yet talking to users to reveal these wants will likely prove ineffective because they themselves don’t know which emotions motivate them. People just don’t think in these terms. You’ll often find that people’s declared preferences—what they say they want—are far different from their revealed preferences—what they actually do.
What would your users want to achieve by using your solution? Where and when will they use it? What emotions influence their use and will trigger them to action?
Jack Dorsey, cofounder of Twitter and Square, shared how his companies answer these important questions: “[If] you want to build a product that is relevant to folks, you need to put yourself in their shoes and you need to write a story from their side. So, we spend a lot of time writing what’s called user narratives.”
Dorsey goes on to describe how he tries to truly understand his user: “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
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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.
“5 Whys Method.” Ohno wrote that it was “the basis of Toyota’s scientific approach . . . by repeating ‘why?’ five times, the nature of the problem as well as its solution becomes clear.”13
Now we’ve got something! Fear is a powerful internal trigger and we can design our solution to help calm Julie’s fear.
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
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To initiate action, doing must be easier than thinking. Remember, a habit is a behavior done with little or no conscious thought.
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.
The Fogg Behavior Model is represented in the formula B = MAT, which represents that a given behavior will occur when motivation, ability, and a trigger are present at the same time and in sufficient degrees.
Fogg states that 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.
For Hauptly, easier equals better.
Just twenty-five years ago a dial-up Internet connection seemed magical. All users had to do was boot up their computers, hit a few keys on their desktop keyboards, wait for their modems to screech and scream as they established connections, and then, perhaps thirty seconds to a minute later, they were online.
“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.”
Critics first discounted Twitter’s 140-character message limitation as gimmicky and restrictive; little did they realize the constraint actually increased users’ ability to create.
Simply put, Google reduced the amount of time and the cognitive effort required to find what the user was looking for. The company continues to relentlessly improve its search engine by finding new ways to remove whatever might be in the user’s way—no matter how seemingly trivial.
Most strikingly, the page has two very clear calls to action: sign in or sign up.
appearance of scarcity affected their perception of value.
Context also shapes perception. In a social experiment, world-class violinist Joshua Bell decided to play a free impromptu concert in a Washington, D.C., subway station.9 Bell regularly sells out venues such as the Kennedy Center and Carnegie Hall for hundreds of dollars per ticket, but when placed in the context of the D.C. subway, his music fell upon deaf ears. Almost nobody knew they were walking past one of the most talented musicians in the world.
The mind takes shortcuts informed by our surroundings to make quick and sometimes erroneous judgments.
This study demonstrates how perception can form a personal reality based on how a product is framed, even when there is little relationship with objective quality.
People often anchor to one piece of information when making a decision.
The study demonstrates the endowed progress effect, a phenomenon that increases motivation as people believe they are nearing a goal.
Ultimately, all businesses help users achieve an objective.
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.
I propose that variable rewards come in three types: the tribe, the hunt, and the self. Habit-forming products utilize one or more of these variable reward types.
Our brains are adapted to seek rewards that make us feel accepted, attractive, important, and included.
In particular Bandura determined that people who observe someone being rewarded for a particular behavior are more likely to alter their own beliefs and subsequent actions.
The need to acquire physical objects, such as food and other supplies that aid our survival, is part of our brain’s operating system.
variable rewards of the hunt. Gamblers plunk $1 billion per day into slot machines in American casinos, which is a testament
find a particularly interesting piece of news, while other times she won’t. To keep hunting for more information, all that is needed is a flick of the finger or scroll of a mouse.
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 a sense of competency. Adding an element of mystery to this goal makes the pursuit all the more enticing.
Have you ever caught yourself checking your e-mail 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.
In fact, a recent meta-analysis of forty-two studies involving over twenty-two thousand participants concluded that these few words, placed at the end of a request, are a highly effective way to gain compliance, doubling the likelihood of people saying yes.24 The magic words the researchers discovered? The phrase “But you are free to accept or refuse.”
As Josh Elman, an early senior product manager at the company, told me, “If we could get users to enter just a little information, they were much more likely to return.” The tiny bit of effort associated with providing more user data created a powerful hook to bring people back to the service.
In fact, several companies have tried to supplant the popular social network. One of the most notable attempts came from a disgruntled developer who decided to build App.net, an ad-free alternative that many tech industry watchers argue is actually a better product. However, like other attempts to copy the service, App.net failed to take off. Why is this? Collecting people to follow on Twitter, as well as collecting followers, provides tremendous value and is a key driver of what keeps Twitter users hooked (figure 28). From the follower side of the equation, the more Twitter users curate the
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