Hooked

Non-transferable value discourage switching product, ex: twitter followers or gmail mails

4 step cycle: trigger, action, variable reward, investment

Trigger

A habit is when not doing an action causes a bit of discomfort.

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?

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.

A study found that depressed people use the internet more than non-depressed people. People use technology to find relief from their negative feelings.

Products that successfully create habits soothe the user’s pain by laying claim to a particular feeling.

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.

Evan Williams, co-founder of Blogger, Twitter, Medium says that the internet is “a giant machine designed to give people what they want.”. “We often think the Internet enables you to do new things … But people just want to do the same things they’ve always done.”

People's declared preferences differ from revealed preferences.

Jack Dorsey, cofounder of Twitter and Square: “[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.”

“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.”

Tools: customer development, usability studies, and empathy maps

Taichi Ohno (Toyota Production System) => 5 Whys technique. Using this technique leads to emotions (internal triggers) as root cause.

Who is your product’s user? What is the user doing right before your intended habit? 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).” 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?

Action

3 keys according to Dr. BJ Fogg (Stanford University Director of Persuasive Reseaches): trigger, ability, and motivation.

1. Have sufficient motivation
2. Be able to perform the action
3. A trigger must be present to activate the behavior

He states that humans have 3 key motivators: seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, seeking hope and avoiding fear, seeking social acceptance while avoiding social rejection.

He has 6 elements of simplicity:

1. time,
2. money,
3. physical effort,
4. brain cycles
5. social deviance (how accepted by others the behaviour is)
6. non-routine (how much it deviates from routine).

3 steps to build product:

1. understand the reason people use your product,
2. Lay out the steps the user must take to get the job done,
3. Remove steps until you reach the simplest possible process. (Denis J. Hauptly)

Evan Williams: “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.”

Examples of making user's life easier: Google reduces mental effort (no ads, empty screen), Pinterest reduces effort (infinite scroll)

Endowed progress effect: people who believe they are already closer to a goal are more likely to persist in the face of setbacks. => experiment with 2 groups of customer, one with 2 stamps, one with no stamps. The group with 2 stamps is more likely to complete the card even if they have the same amount to complete.

Variable reward

A 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.

Predictable rewards are less exciting than unpredictable ones. ex: slot machine, twitter/Pinterest feed, email, news, etc.

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. In fact, a recent study found social factors were the most important reasons people used the service and recommended it to others.

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.

Games with finite variability have less retention than infinite variability.

When our autonomy is threatened, we feel constrained by our lack of choices and often rebel against doing a behavior. Psychologists refer to this as reactance. Maintaining a sense of user autonomy and trust is a requirement for sustained engagement.

Ask users: Are there any moments of delight or surprise? Is there anything they find particularly satisfying about using the product? What outcome (reward) alleviates the user’s pain? Is the reward fulfilling, yet leaves the user wanting more?

3 reward types:

1. Reward of the tribe: social rewards, ex: likes, followers, etc.
2. Reward of the hunt: search for resources, ex: search for information, etc.
3. Reward of the self: mastery, competency, completion, ex: level up, etc.

Investment

The IKEA effect: people value more what they have built.

Reputation makes users, both buyers and sellers, more likely to stick with whichever service they have invested their efforts in to maintain a high-quality score

Progressively prompt for user investment.

Users want to avoid cognitive dissonance. Ex: I'm better than my friend => purchase pay 2 win (ex: hearthstone cards).

Misc

• What do users really want?
• What pain is your product relieving? (Internal trigger)
• What brings users to your service? (External trigger)
• What is the simplest action users take in anticipation of reward, and how can you simplify your product to make this action easier? (Action)
• Are users fulfilled by the reward yet left wanting more? (Variable reward)
• What “bit of work” do users invest in your product?
• Does it load the next trigger and store value to improve the product with use? (Investment)

When pressed they admit they would not actually use their own creations. Their holier-than-thou products often try to “gamify” some task no one really wants to do by inserting run-of-the-mill incentives such as badges or points that don’t actually hold value for their users.

Their so-called reality distortion fields keep them from asking the critical question, “Would I actually find this useful?” => nearly always "no"