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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.”
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.
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 example, participants with depressive symptoms tended to engage in very high e-mail usage … Other characteristic features of depressive Internet behavior included increased amounts of video watching, gaming, and chatting.”
Why is that? One hypothesis is that those with depression experience negative emotions more frequently than the general population and seek relief by turning to technology to lift their mood.
As Erika Hall, author of Just Enough Research writes, “When the research focuses on what people actually do (watch cat videos) rather than what they wish they did (produce cinema-quality home movies) it actually expands possibilities.”
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.” 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.”
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,
When there is a mismatch between the customer’s problem and the company’s assumed solution, no amount of gamification will help spur engagement.
Likewise, 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.
If you have ever grumbled at your mother when she tells you to put on a coat or felt your blood pressure rise when your boss micromanages you, you have experienced what psychologists term 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.
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.
For example, Google wouldn’t want to add variability to its search results page because searching on the web is inherently variable. Uber wouldn’t want to add variability to your ride because the experience of getting to where you’re going is already plagued with uncertainty—“Will I get to where I’m going on time?”
Our bodies are designed to reject alcohol and capsaicin, the compound that creates the sensation of heat in spicy food. Our innate reaction to these acquired tastes is to reject them, yet we learn to like them through repeated exposure. We see others enjoying them, try a little more, and over time condition ourselves.
