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add some variability to the mix—suppose a different treat magically appears in your fridge every time you open it—and voilà, intrigue is created.
Variable rewards are one of the most powerful tools companies implement to hook users;
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,”
A classic paper by John Gourville, a professor of marketing at Harvard Business School, stipulates that “many innovations fail because consumers irrationally overvalue the old while companies irrationally overvalue the new.”8
The fact is that successfully changing long-term user habits is exceptionally rare.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
Punch cards are often used by retailers to encourage repeat business. With each purchase customers get closer to receiving a free product or service. These cards are typically awarded empty; in effect customers start at 0 percent complete. What would happen if retailers handed customers punch cards with punches already given? Would people be more likely to take action if they had already made some progress? An experiment sought to answer this very question.11 Two groups of customers were given punch cards awarding a free car wash once the cards were fully punched. One group was given a blank
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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.
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.
Investments in a product create preferences because of our tendency to overvalue our work, be consistent with past behaviors, and avoid cognitive dissonance.
Effective hooks transition users from relying upon external triggers to cueing mental associations with internal triggers.
When technologies are new, people are often skeptical. Old habits die hard and few people have the foresight to see how new innovations will eventually change their routines. However, by looking to early adopters who have already developed nascent behaviors, entrepreneurs and designers can identify niche use cases, which can be taken mainstream.
