Tag Archives: Nir Eyal

Temptation

Tech, Technology,

Temptation

Editor’s Note: Nir Eyal writes about the intersection of psychology, technology, and business at NirAndFar.com. Follow him @nireyal.

How do products tempt us? What makes them so alluring? It is easy to assume we crave delicious food or impulsively check email because we find pleasure in the activity. But pleasure is just half the story.

Temptation is more than just the promise of reward. Recent advances in neuroscience allow us to peer into the brain, providing a greater understanding of what makes us want.

In 2011, Sriram Chellappan, an assistant professor of computer science at Missouri University of Science and Technology, gained unheard of access to sensitive information about the way undergraduates were using the Internet. His study tracked students on campus as they browsed the web. Chellappan was looking for patterns, which not only revealed what students were doing online, but provided clues about who they were.

“We believe that your pattern of Internet use says something about you,” Chellappan wrote in the New York Times. “Specifically, our research suggests it can offer clues to your mental well-being.” Chellappan concluded that there was, in fact, predictive power in the data. He found students with early signs of clinical depression used the Internet differently and he could identify students most likely to face mental health issues simply by looking at how they clicked.

“We identified several features of Internet usage that correlated with depression,” wrote Chellappan. “For example, participants with depressive symptoms tended to engage in very high e-mail usage.”

Chellappan developed the technology in hopes of creating an early-warning system to identify struggling students. But his study raised another question, why do people with depression check email more?

Alleviating Pain

The answer may provide clues about why all of us use the products and services we do in our everyday lives. Psychologists believe people with depression feel negative emotions, like anxiety, more frequently than other people do. There is evidence that the depressed students in Chellappan’s study were using the Internet more because they experience negative mental states more often. To try and feel better, they turned to the web to boost their mood.

Finding ways to make ourselves feel better is not something only depressives do. We all seek relief from feeling bad and the brain is primed to help us learn where we can find escape. Just as we might take a Tylenol to relieve a headache, we turn to products to relieve emotional pain. In fact, these two biological processes are so closely linked that taking a Tylenol has been shown to ease both physical and emotional pain. The drug is effective in treating headache and heartache.

Having a pain to cure is a necessary prerequisite to using products. Recent neuroscience reveals the brain even adds pain to things that were previously pleasurable to push us to get what our bodies want. When temptation is activated in the brain, it induces a biological process that not only turns on the pleasure response, but also the body’s physiological stress response.

Consider a 2005 study which looked at the physiological response of women exposed to images of chocolate. Researchers observed that the women experienced a subconscious reaction of alarm similar to seeing a threatening animal in the wild. The women, who had identified themselves as “chocolate cravers,” described feeling not only pleasure at the thought of consuming the chocolate, but also agitation, angst, and a feeling of a loss of control in the face of their desire. For these women’s brains, temptation was stressful.

Since the 1950s, researchers have explored how the brain’s reward system compels behavior. Our understanding of the complex circuitry shows that pleasure and pain work together. Once the brain learns something good is about to happen, it induces a craving we feel as stress. The fastest relief from this discomfort is to get what we want.

Exaggeration and Fear

Companies, of course, are masters of temptation. If marketing is defined as, “the process of communicating the value of a product or service to customers,” then implicit in this practice is accentuating the positive aspects of what being sold. This technique is used not only in hawking goods, but is also found in nature. Animals have been tricking each other by accentuating desirable traits for millennia. The process is called “super-normal stimuli” and it is a key to enticing action by creating the stress of desire.

Another way products induce intense desire is through a certain kind of fear, particularly our innate need to have as much as the next person. The phenomenon is exhibited with a simple experiment conducted by Frans de Waal, a primatologist at Emory University.

In the study, de Waal rewarded two capuchin monkeys with a cucumber when they completed a simple task, in this case, handing a rock to the researcher. When both monkeys were given the same reward, they completed the task as prescribed.

But when the researcher gave one monkey a grape while offering the other the standard cucumber, the results were very different. The stiffed monkey, who was perfectly content just seconds before with his cucumber, began shrieking, baring his teeth, thrashing in his cage, and pounding on the table to show his anger. Known in the vernacular as FOMO, or “fear of missing out”, marketers utilize this inborn trigger to incite pain akin to what the capuchin monkey felt in de Waals cage.

Marketers tasked with increasing consumption of their company’s products have a difficult job; they are often charged with manufacturing desire. To do that, they need to find the customer’s problem, their pain, in order to alleviate it. Without the biological basis spurring our desire, there would be no sales. So marketers must at least accentuate, if not induce, a level of discomfort to make us crave their wares.

Like in the undergraduates in Chellappan’s study exhibiting signs of depression, we all seek to escape feeling bad. The products and services that provide immediate relief are those we come to depend upon most.

Photo Credit: Orofacial

This Will Be The Last Article You Read

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HAL 9000

Editor’s Note: Nir Eyal writes about the intersection of psychology, technology, and business at NirAndFar.com. He is the author of the forthcoming book “Hooked: How to Drive Engagement by Creating User Habits”. Follow him on Twitter @nireyal.

If the Internet had a voice, I am fairly certain it would sound like the HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey. 

“Hello, Nir,” it said to me in its low, monotone voice. “Glad to see you again.”

“Internet, I just need a few quick things for an article I’m writing,” I’d reply. “Then it’s back to work. No distractions this time.”

“Of course, Nir, but while you are here, won’t you look at what Paul Graham just wrote?”

“No, Internet,” I’d resist. “I’m just here to find some specific information. I can’t be distracted.”

“Of course, Nir,” the Internet would say. “But this article about LOLCats addiction is related to your work. Give it a click, won’t you?”

“Interesting.” I’d say hesitantly. “Just a quick read and then it’s back to work.”

Three hours later I would realize the time I’d wasted clicking and curse the Internet for sucking me into its mind vortex yet again.

Ironically, I research and write about seductive technology and yet I struggle to resist its temptations. Much of my work is written for entrepreneurs and designers looking for ways to boost user engagement with their products. The rest of my writing is intended to increase awareness of the habit-forming potential, and at times, unintended consequences, of an increasingly connected world.

But just as having an understanding of how illicit drugs work does not necessarily prevent addiction, I find myself just as susceptible to the illusive pull of the Web. I’ve written about methods for preventing unwanted tech intrusions in the boardroom and even the bedroom, but I found myself struggling with distractions at the desktop, making it difficult to achieve the concentration I needed to work. Indeed, research suggests even small interruptions increase mistakes and degrade performance.

For knowledge workers like me, our work and play display on the same screens. Computers and phones allow us to do our jobs, but also give us instantaneous access to boredom-relieving entertainment. In fact, most of the top 25 websites in America sell escape from our daily drudgery.

Online content is habit-forming because it follows what I call the “hook framework,” a four-step user flow composed of a trigger, action, reward, and investment. To end my own bad habit of spending too much time wandering the Web, I had to break the hook, ensuring I didn’t pass through its four alluring steps.

The No-Read Rule

Fortunately, I found my antidote in the venom. Ironically, the sites that syndicate my essays — perhaps where you are reading this right now — depend on you not doing what I did, hoping you’ll continue clicking from article to article, racking-up their ad revenue. But to end my own habit, I strung together several technologies to end the behavior pattern that kept me chasing intriguing headlines.

The first thing I did was set a new rule for how I consume content. My rule is to never read online. Of course, I still need to read things I find on the Web, I’ve just time-shifted how I do it.

I signed up for Pocket and installed their browser extension. When clicked, Pocket scrubs the text of what I’d like to read and saves it for later. I made sure the Pocket button is conspicuously visible on my web browser to act as a reminder of my “never read online” rule.

I replaced my old action of reading essays with the new action of saving them for later. Thus, my temptation to digest the content wasn’t thwarted, it was satisfied knowing it was safe and sound, waiting for me until later.

Content As Reward

Next, I used the Pocket Android app to provide access to the content at just the right time. But here’s the kicker: I do not do the reading. I let the app read it to me.

The app’s text-to-speech capabilities are astounding and the HAL 9000 voice of the Internet has been replaced by a British chap with a cheery disposition. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, the Apple iOS version does not have text-to-speech but on my Android the audio plays commercial-free while I’m working out or driving. Listening this way also has some surprising benefits.

Pocket’s Android app with text-to-speech (TTS) capabilities

I’ve discovered that checking off articles from my cue is decidedly satisfying, similar to the tiny pleasure of clearing unread messages from my email inbox. Getting through my list of articles acts as a small reward encouraging me to hit the gym more often and saving me the time and temptation of reading at my desk.

The IFTTT Stitch

However, reading at my desk had perks which at first I found lacking in Pocket. For example, I often saved articles to Evernote or shared to social networks like Twitter, but doing so at the gym required too many time-wasting steps. To solve this dilemma, I recruited another brilliant technology. IFTTT (If This Then That) stitches together dozens of apps to communicate easily together. For example, every time I mark an article as a “favorite” in Pocket, it instantly saves to my Evernote account. The IFTTT recipe is available here. When I’d like to share an article I’ve just listened to with any number of social networks, all I do is send it to Buffer, which concurrently fires off another IFTTT recipe.

De-Triggered

This simple solution involved no coding and I’m sure you can think of ways to customize these tools for your own needs. My hack is just one method for conquering the seductive draw of reading “just one more thing.” On the Web, where distractions and temptations are boundless, we need new tools to help us do our best work. By replacing my previous actions with a more thoughtful behavior, I’ve increased my productivity and kept HAL’s seductive call at bay.

Disclosures: As of the time of publication, I have no financial or personal interests in any of the companies mentioned.

Image credit: NirAndFar.com and Apple Ad

Getting Your Product Into the Habit Zone

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zone

Editor’s Note: Nir Eyal is a Lecturer in Marketing at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the author of the forthcoming book “Hooked: How to Drive Engagement by Creating User Habits.” Nir blogs about the intersection of psychology, technology, and business at NirAndFar.com.

As the web becomes an increasingly crowded place, users are desperate for solutions to sort through the online clutter. The Internet has become a giant hairball of choice-inhibiting noise and the need to make sense of it all has never been more acute.

Just ask high-flying sites like Pinterest, Reddit, and Tumblr. These curated web portals connect millions of people to information they never knew they were looking for. Some have started monetizing this tremendous flow of traffic and though it’s too early to call winners and losers, their strategy of driving user engagement by creating daily habits is clear. These companies are following a plan implemented by web titans like Amazon and Google and are hoping to yield similar results.

Creating user habits leverages two critical factors that should be considered by every company attempting to build high-engagement products.

Action Without Cognition

Habits are one of the ways the brain learns complex behaviors. In order to allow us to focus our attention on obtaining new insights, neuroscientists believe habitual behaviors are moved to the basal ganglia, an area of the brain associated with actions requiring little or no cognition. Habits form when the brain takes a shortcut and stops actively deliberating about the decision being made.

The brain quickly learns to codify behaviors that provide a solution to whatever problem it encounters. For example, nail biting is a common behavior, which occurs with little or no thought, typically triggered by the unpleasant feeling of stress. The biter associates the satisfaction of nail chomping with the temporary relief it provides. As any habitual nail bitter knows, the conditioned response is extremely difficult to break.

Like nail biting, many of the decisions we make in our daily lives are made simply because that’s the way we’ve found satisfaction in the past. The brain automatically deduces that if the decision was a good one yesterday, then it’s a safe bet again today.

The Mind Monopoly

In a recent study at the University College London, researchers followed participants as they attempted to form a habit of flossing their teeth. As one of its findings, the study concluded that the more frequently the new behavior occurred, the stronger the habit. Like flossing, frequent engagement with a web site or app increases the likelihood of forming new habits.

Google search provides an example of a service built upon a frequent behavior creating users habits. If you’re skeptical that Google is habit-forming, just try using Bing. In a head-to-head comparison of the efficacy of an incognito search, the products are nearly identical. Even if the geniuses at Google have in fact perfected a faster algorithm, the time saved is imperceptible to everyone but robots and Mister Spock. Milliseconds matter, but they don’t hook users.

Instead, habits are what keep users loyal. If a user is familiar with the Google interface, switching to Bing requires cognitive effort. Though many aspects or Bing are identical to Google, even a slight change in pixel placement forces the would-be convert to learn something new. Adapting to the differences in the Bing interface is what actually slows the user down and makes Bing feel inferior.

Internet searches occur so frequently that Google is able to cement its tool as the one and only solution in the habitual users’ mind. Users no longer need to think about whether or not to use Google, they just do. Furthermore, whenever the company can identify the user, it improves search results based on past behaviors. The more the product is used, the better the algorithm gets and thus, the more it is used. The result is a virtuous cycle of habit-driven behavior resulting in total market domination.

Habits as Strategy

But sometimes a behavior does not occur as frequently as flossing or Googling, and yet becomes a habit. For an infrequent action to become a habit, the user must perceive a high degree of utility, either from gaining pleasure or avoiding pain.

Take Amazon as an example; the e-tailer has its sights set on becoming the world’s one-stop shop. Amazon is so confident in its ability to form user habits that it runs ads for directly competitive products on its site. Customers often see the item they are about to buy listed at a cheaper price and regularly click away to transact elsewhere. To some, this sounds like a formula for financial suicide. But to Amazon, it’s a shrewd business strategy.

Not only does Amazon make money from the ads it runs from competing businesses, but it also utilizes other people’s marketing dollars to form a habit in the shopper’s mind. Amazon seeks to become the solution to a frequently occurring pain point: the customer’s needs to find the item they’re looking for at the best possible price. By addressing the shopper’s price concerns, Amazon earns loyalty even if it doesn’t make the sale.

The tactic is backed by a 2003 study by Trifts and Hubl, which demonstrated that consumer’s preference for an online retailer increases when they are offered competitive price information. The technique has also been used by Progressive to drive over $15 billion of annual insurance sales, up from just $3.4 billion before the tactic was implemented.

By allowing users to comparison shop from within the site, Amazon provides tremendous perceived utility to its customers. Though shopping on Amazon may not occur as frequently as searching on Google, the company solidifies its place as the default solution to customers’ purchasing needs with each successful transaction.

In the Zone

Companies can begin to determine their product’s potential for forming a habitual behavior by plotting two factors: frequency (how often the behavior occurs) and perceived utility (how rewarding the behavior is in the eyes of the user). “The Habit Zone,” as I call it, is where an action occurs with enough frequency and perceived utility for it to become the default behavior.

Established companies like Google and Amazon, along with new entrants like Pinterest and Reddit, succeed by creating user habits. They help people find what they are looking for amid the ever-increasing online clutter. In return, users reward them with engagement and loyalty, turning to them as their go-to solutions in their respective categories. When a habit is formed, the script for what to do next is written, making the behavior more likely to occur in the future. These companies leverage habits to earn their places in users’ lives and minds.

Disclaimer: With each article I write on the topic of habit formation, I inevitably receive comments about the moral implications of this field. Please consider reading my previous article, “The Morality of Manipulation” on the topic.

Disclosure: The author owns shares of Amazon.com, Inc.

Thanks to Max Ogles and Jess Bachman for reading previous versions of this article.

Image credit: gustaffo89 and NirAndFar.com

– Follow Nir on Twitter @nireyal

Where Have The Users Gone?

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Where are the users?

Editor’s Note: Nir Eyal writes about the intersection of psychology, technology, and business at NirAndFar.com. He is the author of the forthcoming book “Hooked: How to Drive Engagement by Creating User Habits”.

Step 1: Build an app. Step 2: Get users hooked to it. Step 3: Profit. It sounds simple and, given our umbilical ties to cell phones, social media, and email inboxes, it may even sound plausible. Recently, tech entrepreneurs and investors have started to look to psychology for ways to strike it rich by altering user behavior. Perhaps you’ve read essays on how to create habit-forming technology and figured you’d give it a shot?

Well hold your dogs Pavlov! Though I’m an advocate for understanding user behavior to build high-engagement products, the reality is that successfully creating long-term habits is exceptionally rare. Changing behavior requires not only an understanding of how to persuade users to act — for example, the first time they land on a webpage — but also necessitates getting them to behave differently for long periods of time, ideally for the rest of their lives.

The good news is that that companies that accomplish this rare feat are the ones associated with game-changing, wildly successful innovation. Google, Apple, Twitter, and Android come to mind. As we enter a world where, according to Paul Graham, everything is becoming more addictive, the companies that successfully form and control habits in the future will come to dominate the industries of tomorrow.

Habits or Hype?

But claiming that habits are the keys to success is a tall order. If people like me provide ready-made formulas and guidebooks on how to create habits, why isn’t every company that alters user behavior succeeding?

Zynga, an enterprise whose business model depends on hooking millions of people to its games, is hemorrhaging users, employees and investors. What makes some habits stick while others die like virtual cows on their way to slaughter?

Turns out that like any discipline, habit design has rules and caveats which explain why some products change lives forever while others create fleeting fads.

Habits are LIFO

New behaviors have a short half-life as our minds tend to revert back to our old ways. Experiments show that lab animals habituated to new behaviors tend to regress to their first learned behaviors over time.

This helps explain the overwhelming evidence that people rarely change. Research shows that nearly everyone who tries to lose weight gains back the pounds within 2 years. Two-thirds of alcoholics who enter a rehabilitation program will pick-up the bottle and their old habits within a year’s time.

Old ways die hard and new habits smother easily. To borrow a term from accounting, behaviors are LIFO — last in, first out. This presents an especially difficult challenge for product designers trying to create businesses based on new behaviors.

Keep ’em Guessing

If long-term habits are so hard to create and new behaviors are the ones most likely to be abandoned, how do product designers stand a chance of becoming part of users’ daily lives? The answer lies in the reason users start using the product in the first place: rewards.

In nature, things are relatively predictable — fire is always hot — so our brains drive us to figure out how things work. Thus, habits are just a way for the brain to improve reaction time by not thinking as much. “Hmm, last time I touched the fire, it hurt. I won’t do that again.” In fact, much of what we do every day is habit, requiring little or no conscious awareness.

We’re fine flying on cognitive autopilot. That is, until we encounter something new. When the unknown threatens our safety, we feel fear. But when we know we’re ok, this temporary uncertainty is experienced as novelty, and our brains can’t get enough of it.

For example, watch a baby’s first encounter with a dog. Not only is it incredibly cute, it is a demonstration of the mental wiring which makes us inherently curious. “What is this hairy monster in my house?” the baby must think. “Will it hurt me? What will it do next?” The child is filled with questions, uncertain if this creature will cause it pain or bring pleasure. When it’s certain the dog isn’t a threat, the baby experiences delight, exploding in a burst of infectious giggles.

Until one day, the kid learns enough about the pup to predict its behavior. Suddenly, the doggy is no longer entertaining and the child’s attention moves on. Now he is occupied with dump trucks, fire engines, bicycles and candy — things that stimulate the senses in new ways. Poor Rover is left all alone.

To keep our attention, products must have a degree of novelty. Without variability, users figure out the patterns and tire of the experience. As Tadhg Kelly wrote about Zynga users, “Their play brains start to realize that they are seeing the same frames again and again, with the same actions and the same constraints. So [the games] become instantly boring.” Though the Zynga “-Ville” franchise was novel, even addictive at first, once players figured out the larger game mechanics, they moved on.

Machines vs. People

But not all habits have the fleeting life span of FarmVille-style games. In fact, many products do form long-term behaviors. What differentiates World of Warcraft or Facebook — products that retain engaged users for years — from bygone fads like Pac Man or Tamagotchi, which hooked users for a while, but quickly lost their grip?

A distinction can be drawn between rewards that are infinitely variable versus those which have finite variability. Products with finite rewards are built to be experienced the same way. Even an addictive video game always operates under the same rules. Of course, the maker can alter the dynamics of the game, changing aspects of play based on the users’ actions, but the fundamental rules, the mechanics, remain the same.

The game is a constructed system, a machine, and if it is a single-player game, it will be enjoyed, completed, and discarded. Even bestselling books, movies, and music follow the same usage pattern. Once these products are made, they don’t change and become nearly worthless after their mysteries are revealed. Their variability is exhausted when the game is completed, the last page of the book is turned, or the lights come up in the theater.

Nearly all of us have played a slot machine, but ultimately, we figure out the rules and patterns and come to understand that the game is designed to take our money, so we move on. Addicts however, those who form uncontrollable and often detrimental obsessions, are the exception rather than the rule. And while businesses should never try and encourage addiction, the fact is that like slots, technology products with finite variability do not form long-term habits in most users.

However, some products are built to be infinitely variable. These products involve rewards users find novel for long periods of time. For example, few things are more fascinating to people than other people; we always want to know more. Whether communicating with loved-ones or keeping up with celebrity gossip, we love the infinite possibilities endemic to the human experience.

Even World of Warcraft, the legendary multiplayer online role-playing game, is more about collaborating with others than completing the game. Though users can play aspects of the game alone, it requires characters to work together in groups to overcome major challenges. World of Warcraft players spend hours strategizing and socializing, both on and off-line. It’s more than a game; it’s a tribe.

Even a bad experience will not stop people from using products with infinite variability. Early iPhone users cursed AT&T for years, even heckling Steve Jobs on stage to show their displeasure. But few could bear to abandon their “Jesus phones” because compared to rivals, the iPhone and its accompanying app ecosystem was a panacea of limitless possibilities.

Facebook users revolted multiple times when the company made changes to its interface. But they never left in any significant numbers, helping push the social network to over a billion users. Of course today, Facebook has lost some of its luster as it grapples to control user behaviors migrating to mobile, a massive disruption to its business model.

No Guarantees

No business can ensure customers use its products forever. Our consumption habits today will inevitably be replaced with new behaviors in the future. But it is important to recognize that products, which leverage infinite variability tend to be pushed out by disruptive innovations whereas finite variability business fizzle out by themselves.

Habits do not ensure perpetual users, but short of a disruptive change, they provide an opportunity to form a sustainable competitive advantage. The products that become a facet of users’ everyday lives will remake the web. By understanding the kinds of rewards systems that create long-term habits and the rules of habit design, companies can improve lives while building lasting businesses.

— Follow Nir on Twitter @nireyal.

Thank you to Maurits Kaptein of Science Rockstars and Max Ogles for reading versions of this essay.

Photo Credit: Mustafa Khayat


This Is Your Brain On Boarding: How To Turn Visitors Into Users

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Screen Shot 2012-07-24 at 11.40.31 PM

Editor’s Note: Nir Eyal is a Lecturer in Marketing at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He is the founder of two startups and blogs about the intersection of psychology, technology, and business at NirAndFar.com. Follow him on Twitter @nireyal.

Before you can change the world, before your company can IPO, before getting millions of loyal users to wonder how they ever lived without your service, people need to on-board. Building the on-ramp to using your product is critical in every industry, but few more so than in the ADD world of web and mobile apps. Distractions are everywhere, vying for user mindshare and threatening to pull them off the road to using your products like the donut shops and strip clubs at a trucker’s rest stop.

However, done correctly, the on-boarding process can be the first step in creating strong user habits. Products that create repeat behaviors tend to follow a consistent design pattern of a trigger, action, reward, and investment, which I’ve described as the Desire Engine. This pattern is effective when used to craft behaviors that the designer intends to be repeated regularly. The on-boarding process can be the first of several passes through the Desire Engine.

Pulling the Trigger

The first step is bringing users in. But a successful trigger is much more than just a way to drive traffic, it’s an opportunity to start imprinting new routines. Josh Elman, an early product manager at a string of successful companies, including LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, describes this as the point of “inception”– yes, like the movie. “Inception is about implanting an idea about why and when the product is useful for someone.” Since a user’s first awareness of a product depends on an external trigger, such as a call-to-action in an email, a link on a social media site, paid advertising, or a word-of-mouth recommendation, the message must be consistent. “People need to talk about your product the same way, each and every time,” Elman says.

To be most effective, the articulation of what the product is for should connect to when the product should be used. In other words, inception is about attaching your product to a moment in the user’s life.

Instagram does a particularly good job of inception during their on-boarding. Well before registration, Instagrams triggers new users from within the Facebook newsfeed and communicates that the service is for capturing and sharing important moments through better photos.

When new users follow the link to the Instagram homepage, they learn more about what the service is for by seeing how their friends have used it. In just two clicks, the service effectively brings users in and teaches them what the product is for.

Of course, not all triggers are created equal. The best triggers are those that attach to frequent behaviors. Attaching a new action to a current behavior is much easier than attempting to create a new set of actions from thin air. Habits are like the layers of a pearl. The grain of sand at the center is the pre-existing behavior, which provides the base for new routines to attach to. Through its triggers, Instagram builds upon the existing routine of taking pictures on mobile devices. In the process, they habituate users to choose Instagram instead of the phone’s native camera app.

Prompting The Action

After the trigger has conveyed what the product is for, the next step in the on-boarding process is getting the user to take the intended actions. Research by Dr. BJ Fogg at Stanford’s Persuasive Technology Lab indicates that reducing the effort involved in completing an action increases the likelihood of that behavior. Simplifying the experience is key. However, this is often easier said than done, especially when it’s not clear what users find most valuable about the still nascent product.

Take Twitter, for example. Today, the company is revered for its elegant user interface. But it wasn’t always that way. In 2009, Twitter’s sign-up page was a mess of cognitive distraction. Back then, the homepage communicated that the product was for “staying connected through…answers to one simple question: What are you doing?”

By 2010, the sign-up page shifted to a much simpler design. It became clearer what the company intended vistors to do — either sign-up or search — but unfortunately, this wasn’t quite right either.

Today, after years of iteration, the registration screen is down to its fundamental elements. The design has reduced the friction of getting users to take the intended action, namely logging-in or signing-up.

Gimme The Reward

Next, it’s time to give users some love for using your service. They understand what the service is for and they’ve gone ahead and taken the first step to use it. Now effective on-boarding entices them with goodies to make their dopamine receptors start wanting more.

Research on the importance of reward systems dates back to Waston, Pavlov, and Skinner and remains a pillar of how humans learn. Behavioral Psychology explains how the drive for rewards is motivated by an endless search for stimulus, either external or internally derived.

Among the most powerful methods for increasing the probability of a behavior is providing rewards on a variable ratio. In other words, when the behavior produces varying amounts of benefit, the user increases the action. Variable rewards can be found at the core of all sorts of addictive behaviors. The fact that so many of these behaviors are illegal is a testament to the power of this particular type of reinforcement.

But, used judiciously, variable rewards can be used to keep users engaged, pique their interest, and motivate them to commit further to using the service. Anticipation drives the search for rewards and it is this endless hunt that keeps users engaged.

Companies that can entice users with variable rewards stand a good chance of seeing their users convert into regulars. Interestingly, powerful variable rewards systems used by some of Silicon Valley’s hottest companies don’t fit the mold of what most people think of as a method synonymous with slot machines. Pinterest, for example uses a more subtle, yet powerful variable rewards mechanic in their home page.The eclectic mix of eye-candy stimulates viewers with a smorgasbord of endless cognitive delights. Images of food, kids, half-naked bodies, and artifacts of status entice users to keep scrolling and scrolling, endlessly searching for the next interesting thing sure to await just beyond the fold. It’s when users have fallen in love with the site — and the way the site makes them feel — that they are ready to join Pinterest and become registered users.

Investing for the Future

Many companies are afraid to ask the user to do work. They follow the mantra that good design should get out of the user’s way, but they often take it too far and forget that asking the user to do some work can be a very good thing. In fact, exerting effort makes people value outcomes more highly. A study at Harvard identified the “IKEA effect,” which demonstrated that “labor alone can be sufficient to induce greater liking for the fruits of one’s labor.”

This principle applies to building apps as much as building furniture with unpronounceable Nordic names. Too often, companies miss an opportunity to build the user’s commitment to the product by not asking for a little effort at the right time.

As a case study, take a look at the on-boarding process of two productivity apps, Astrid and Any.do, both designed to help people get stuff done. Astrid guides the user through several screens of bullet navigation. The often-used design pattern employs a nifty cognitive trick to parse out multistep tasks into bite-sized chunks, which users have an easier time completing. In theory, to on-board, the user simply has to flick through the screens.

But perhaps the process is too easy. How much does the user actually retain when the incentive is to quickly swipe through to see what happens next? Users bypass comprehending the tiny text intended to teach them how to use the app. Though I love the service and the company was gracious enough to allow me to use it as a case study, they could do better by strategically asking the user to do some work in the on-boarding process. Doing so would earn commitment with every bit of effort the user invests in the product.

As a counter-point, take a look at how much more effort Any.do demands of its users during its on-boarding. With Any.do, users need to effectively use the app in order to understand how it works. They need to actually do what the tasks tell them to do. “Swipe to the right to complete a task” the app demands to make the default task disappear. This is clearly more work than the Astrid on-boarding, but it’s a better implementation.

On-boarding and Beyond

The four step pattern applied to on-boarding describes one example of how the trigger, action, reward, and investment framework can be used to form user habits. The strength of combining these four stages is best utilized to create behaviors the designer of the app or website expects to see regularly. Clearly, steps in the on-boarding process that are done once and never done again do not benefit from this pattern.

However, for services whose business models depend on consistent usage, effectively applying the Desire Engine can mean the difference between a hit or a flop. Implementing these steps in the on-boarding process takes advantage of a critical point when the user is most motivated and ready to learn how to use the service. The user’s receptive state doesn’t last long, and research suggests that the designer has literally milliseconds to get the user started down the right path. Use the opportunity wisely.

Thanks to Josh Elman, Jules Maltz, and Max Ogles for reading early versions of this essay.

Photo Credit: gbaku

Make Your Users Do the Work

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Editor’s Note: Nir Eyal is a founder of two startups and an advisor to several Bay Area companies and incubators. He is a Lecturer in Marketing at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and blogs about the intersection of psychology, technology, and business at NirAndFar.com. Follow him on Twitter @nireyal.

The belief that products should always be as easy to use as possible is a sacred cow of the tech world. The rise of design thinking, coinciding with beautiful new products like the iPhone, has led some to conclude that creating slick interfaces is a hallmark of great design. But, like all attempts to create absolute rules about how we should interact with technology, the law that design should always decrease the amount of effort users expend doesn’t always hold true. In fact, putting users to work is critical in creating products people love.

Several studies have shown that expending effort on a task seems to commit us to it. For example, when buying a lottery ticket, players are able to either choose their own numbers or play a set of digits generated randomly. Certainly, choosing either option has no effect on the odds of winning. Traditional thinking would predict that the less effortful path would be the one users prefer.

However, the opposite is true. Despite the considerable effort required to pick the lottery numbers, a process reminiscent of filling out multiple choice questions on the S.A.T., players who choose their own numbers play more. This phenomenon isn’t just about a skewed perception of luck. According to a classic study by Ellen Langler, even when players are explicitly told their chances of winning, they choose to trade worse odds for the ability to play the numbers they spent the time and effort picking.

Examples of how escalations of commitment makes our brain do funny things abound. Its power makes some people play video games until they keel over and die. It’s used to influence people to give more to charity. It has even been used to coerce prisoners of war to switch allegiances. Commitment is powerful stuff and it plays an important role in the things we do, the products we buy, and our perception of who we are.

Totally Committed

The last step of the Desire Engine, a framework I developed to help explain a pattern found in habit-forming products, is the investment phase. After a user has been triggered into action and duly rewarded, the investment phase is where the user is asked to do work and starts building commitment. It is here that the user is prompted to put something of value back into the system, typically in the form of time, money, physical effort, social capital, or personal data.

As in any feedback loop, the cue, action, and reward cycle predictably condition a series of behaviors. Whenever users want the reward, the thinking goes, they do the intended action. For example, what prompted you to start reading this article? You were probably feeling a bit bored and were looking for something stimulating to read. You took the cue (boredom), now you’re doing the action (reading), and you’re now anticipating the reward (keep reading, it’s coming).

But this pattern differs slightly in products that truly hook users. The brain has a unique system for keeping us searching for rewards; it adapts. Soon, something that seemed novel and interesting becomes common and dull. To keep pace with the brain’s adaptation to stimulus, habit-forming products improve with repeated use. It is here that the investment phase is critical.

Bits of Work for Future Reward

Unlike actions in the standard feedback loop, investments are about the anticipation of rewards, not immediate gratification. The investment is a bit of work, which makes the user more likely to use the product in the future. In Twitter, for example, the investment comes in the form of a follow. After a few flicks through the stream have primed the user with titillating tweets, the user will find someone new and interesting to invest in. While there is no immediate reward for following someone, doing so makes the service more valuable and more likely to be used next time.

LinkedIn provides another example of a company that understands the power of asking users to make small investments in the site. 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.” Elman continued, “We made you type in your current title and position at sign up and then were able to use that to draw you back in.” The tiny bit of effort associated with providing workplace information created a hook the system could use get users to return.

Commitments as a Strategy

Habit-forming technology creates an internal trigger, an itch to use the product, unprompted by an explicit call to action. The user engages with the service whenever cued by a particular emotion or context. The investment is the string that pulls the user back. The aim is to get the user to return unprompted. To do this, the habit-forming company increases the value of the product with each pass through the Desire Engine. Value is added to the system in two ways.

Stored Value

Every time users input data, they create stored value. Evernote, Salesforce, and Pandora provide examples of products which do not necessarily create burning desires, but create habits by getting users to do bits of work. A habit is a behavior without, or with very little, cognition, and thus these products meet this definition. People use these stored value products as part of their regular routines. The more users invest, the less they think about using them. Evernote’s “smile graph” demonstrates how over time users increased engagement with the service the more they used it over time.

Other stored value technologies, like games, create rabid users by getting them to invest every time they play. Racking up higher scores, advancing to the next level, or earning and tending to virtual goods like a cow on a farm or the clothes on an avatar, are all examples of the power of commitment. These game mechanics disappear if the user stops playing, increasing the need to stay engaged. The stored value of these elements of the game are earned with time spent playing or purchased outright with real money.

Network Value

Products that increase in value as a greater number of people use them have a network effect. Companies which display this characteristic give investors joyful palpitations because of their ability to become industry standards and crowd-out rivals. Ebay, Skype, AirBnB, Pinterest and older technologies, like the fax machine and telephone, get better the more users join the network.

The Killer Combo

Where user investment really becomes valuable is when stored value meets a network effect. Facebook and Pinterest, both services which were useful as stored value products, exploded in use when the power of the network effect took hold. Both are habit-forming products, which bring large numbers of users back unprompted. The combination of stored value and a network effect, along with continual investment from users who regularly add content, has created a strong pull for a large percentage of their users.

Habit-forming technologies take hold when a pattern of trigger, action, reward, and investment, creates desire in the user while providing increasing amounts of value. The more users invest in a way of doing things through tiny bits of work, the more valuable the service becomes in their lives and the less they question its use.

Of course, users don’t stay hooked forever. Though these companies have a good ride, the next big thing inevitably comes along and creates a better way to start building user commitment. While the mantra of making the experience easier to use certainly has its place, the rule must be followed with a strategic purpose in mind — namely increasing the value of the service the more people use it.

Note: If you liked this post, and committed to reading this far, you should follow me on Twitter or signing-up to be the first to receive future essays like this one free via email. It’s a wise investment.

Thanks to Josh Elman, Jules Maltz, and Max Ogles for reading early versions of this essay.

The Art Of Manipulation

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Editor’s Note: Nir Eyal is a founder of two startups and an advisor to several Bay Area companies and incubators. He is a Lecturer in Marketing at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and blogs about the intersection of psychology, technology, and business at NirAndFar.com. Follow him on Twitter@nireyal and see his previous Techcrunch posts here.

Let’s admit it, we in the consumer web industry are in the manipulation business. We build products meant to persuade people to do what we want them to do. We call these people “users” and even if we don’t say it aloud, we secretly wish every one of them would become fiendishly addicted.

Users take our technologies with them to bed. When they wake up, they check for notifications, tweets, and updates before saying “good morning” to their loved ones. Ian Bogost, the famed game creator and professor, calls the wave of habit-forming technologies the “cigarette of this century” and warns of equally addictive and potentially destructive side-effects.

When Is Manipulation Wrong?

Manipulation is a designed experience crafted to change behavior — we all know what it feels like. We’re uncomfortable when we sense someone is trying to make us do something we wouldn’t do otherwise, like when at a car dealership or a timeshare presentation.

Yet, manipulation can’t be all bad. If it were, what explains the numerous multi-billion dollar industries that rely heavily on users willfully submitting to manipulation? If manipulation is a designed experience crafted to change behavior, then Weight Watchers, one of the most successful mass-manipulation products in history, fits the definition.

Much like in the consumer web industry, Weight Watchers customers’ decisions are programed by the designer of the system. Yet few question the morality of Weight Watchers. But what’s the difference? Why is manipulating users through flashy advertising or addictive video games thought to be distasteful while a strict system of food rationing is considered laudable?

A More Addictive World

Unfortunately, our moral compass has not caught-up with what technology now makes possible. Ubiquitous access to the web, transferring greater amounts of personal data at faster speeds than ever before, has created a more addictive world. Addictiveness is accelerating and according to Paul Graham of Y Combinator, we haven’t had time to develop societal “antibodies to addictive new things.” Graham puts responsibility on the user: “Unless we want to be canaries in the coal mine of each new addiction—the people whose sad example becomes a lesson to future generations—we’ll have to figure out for ourselves what to avoid and how.”

But what of the people who make these manipulative experiences? The corporations who unleash these addictive technologies are, after all, made up of human beings with a moral sense of right and wrong. We too have families and kids who are susceptible to addiction and manipulation. What shared responsibilities do we code slingers and behavior designers have to our users, to future generations, and to ourselves?

The Manipulation Matrix

I offer a simple decision support tool for entrepreneurs, employees, and investors to be used long before product is shipped or code is written; even before customer development has begun. The Manipulation Matrix does not try and answer which businesses are moral or which will succeed. Nor does it describe what can and cannot become a habit-forming technology. The matrix seeks to help you answer not, “Can I hook users?” but “Should I attempt to?”

To use the Manipulation Matrix, the maker needs to ask two questions. First, “Will I use the product myself?” and second, “Will the product help users materially improve their lives?”

The Facilitator

When you create something that you will use and believe makes the user’s life better, you’re facilitating a healthful habit. It’s important to note that only you can decide if you would actually use the service and what “materially improving the life of the user” really means.

If you find yourself squirming as you ask yourself those questions or needing to create a preamble starting with, “If I were a…” STOP! You failed. You have to actually want to use the product and believe it materially benefits your life as well as the lives of your users. The one exception is if you would have been a user in your younger years. For example, in the case of an education company, you may not need to use the service right now, but are positive you would have used it in your not so distant past. Note however that the further you are from your former self, the lower your odds of success.

While I don’t know Mark Zuckerberg or the Twitter founders personally, I believe from their well-documented stories that they would see themselves as making products in this quadrant. There is also a long list of companies creating new products to improve lives by facilitating healthful habits. Whether getting users to exercise more, creating a habit of journaling, or improving back posture, these companies are run by authentic entrepreneurs who desperately want their products to exist, firstly to satisfy their own needs.

But what about when an addiction to a well-intended product becomes extreme, even harmful? For a product in this quadrant, I agree with Paul Graham in saying the responsibility falls to the user. In any normal distribution, a small percentage of people will be on the extremes. If the designers make a product that they would use themselves, and they believe it improves the lives of their users, they have fulfilled their moral obligation. To take liberties with Mahatma Gandhi, facilitators “build the change they want to see in the world.”

The Peddler

But heady altruistic ambitions can at times, get ahead of reality. Too often, designers of manipulative technology have a strong motivation to improve the lives of their users, but 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 actually wants to do by inserting hackneyed incentives like badges or points that don’t actually hold value for the user.

Fitness apps, charity websites, and products that claim to suddenly turn hard work into fun often fall in this quadrant. But possibly the most common example is in peddler advertising. Countless companies convince themselves they’re making ad campaigns users will love. They expect their videos to go viral and their branded apps to be used daily. Their reality distortion fields keep them from asking the critical question of, “Would I actually find this useful?” The answer to this uncomfortable question is nearly always “No,” so they bend their brain into the mind of a user they believe might find the ad valuable.

Materially improving users’ lives is a tall order. But attempting to create a persuasive technology which you don’t find valuable enough to use yourself is nearly impossible. There’s nothing immoral about peddling; it’s just the odds of success are depressingly low. You’ll lack the empathy and insights needed to create something users actually want. The peddler’s project tends to end up a time-wasting failure because fundamentally, no one finds it useful or fun. If it were, the peddler would be using it instead of hawking it.

The Entertainer

In fact, sometimes makers just want to have fun. If a creator of a potentially addictive technology makes something that they would use but can’t in good conscience claim improves the lives of their users, they’re making entertainment.

Entertainment is art and is important for its own sake. Art provides joy, helps us see the world differently, and connects us with the human condition. These are all important and age old pursuits. Entertainment, however, has particular attributes which the entrepreneur, employee, and investor should be aware of when using the Manipulation Matrix.

Art is often fleeting; products that form addictions around entertainment tend to fade quickly from users’ lives. A hit song, repeated over and over again in the mind, becomes nostalgia after it is replaced by the next single. A blog article like this one is read, shared, and thought about for a few minutes until the next interesting piece of brain candy comes along. Games like Farmville and Angry Birds engross users for a while, but then are relegated to the gaming dustbin along other hyper-addictive has-beens like Pac Man and Tetris.

Entertainment is a hits-driven business because the brain adapts to stimulus. Art is about creating continuous novelty and building an enterprise on ephemeral desires is a constantly running treadmill. In this quadrant, the sustainable business isn’t the game, the song, or the book — it’s the distribution system for getting those goods to market while they’re still hot.

The Dealer

Creating a product that the designer does not believe improves the user’s life and which the maker would not use is exploitation. In the absence of these two criteria, presumably the only reason you’re hooking users is to make a buck. Certainly there is money to be made addicting users to behaviors that do little more than extract cash; and where there is cash, there will be someone willing to take it.

The question is: Is that someone you? Casinos and drug dealers offer users a good time, but when the addiction takes hold, the fun stops.

In a satirical take on Zynga’s Farmville franchise Ian Bogost created Cow Clicker, a Facebook app where users did nothing but incessantly click on virtual cows to hear a satisfying “moo.” Bogost intended to lampoon Farmville by blatantly implementing the same game mechanics and viral hacks he thought would be laughably obvious to users. But after the app’s usage exploded and some people became frighteningly obsessed with the game, Bogost shut it down, bringing on what he called, “The Cowpocalypse.”

Judging for Yourself

Bogost was right in comparing addictive technology to the cigarette. Certainly, the incessant need for a smoke in what was once the majority of the adult population has been replaced by a nearly equal compulsion to constantly check our devices. But unlike the addiction to nicotine, new technologies offer an opportunity to dramatically improve the lives of users. It’s clear that like all technologies, recent advances in the habit-forming potential of web innovation have both positive and negative effects.

But if the innovator has a clear conscience that the product materially improves people’s lives — first among them, the creator’s — then the only path is to push forward. Users bear ultimate responsibility for their actions and makers should not be blamed for the misuse or overuse of their products.

However, as the march of technology makes the world a more addictive place, innovators need to consider their role. It will be years, perhaps generations, before society develops the antibodies to new addictions. In the meantime, users will have to judge the yet unknown consequences for themselves, while creators will have to live with the moral repercussions of how they spend their professional lives.

My hope is that Manipulation Matrix helps innovators consider the implications of the products they create. Perhaps after reading this, you’ll start a new business. Maybe you’ll join an existing company with a mission you believe in. Or, perhaps after reading this you’ll decide it’s time to quit your job, which you now come to realize no longer agrees with your moral compass.

Thank you to Amy Jo Kim, Jess Bachman, Max Ogles for reading early versions of this essay.

Photo Credit: byJess.net, Sarah G…, and NirAndFar.com

Never Take Your Eyes Off This Hacker Metric

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Editor’s Note: Nir Eyal is the founder of two acquired startups and an advisor to several Bay Area companies and incubators. Nir blogs about the intersection of psychology, technology, and business at NirAndFar.com. Follow him on Twitter @nireyal.

If you’re like me, you’ve had enough of the Facebook IPO story. For tech entrepreneurs struggling to build stuff, the cacophony of recent press is just more noise. That’s why when my friend Andrew Chen posted an insightful analysis of Facebook user data, I was happy to get back to learning from what the company did right instead of debating what its bankers did wrong.

Chen calculated Facebook’s historical ratio of daily active users (DAU) to monthly active users (MAU) and the stats are startling. Since March 2009, when the earliest data is available, approximately 50% of Facebook users logged in daily.

As other technology companies struggle to maintain DAU to MAU ratios of 5% or less, Facebook’s numbers appear stratospherically high in comparison. But what is equally surprising is the consistency of that ratio over time. Despite periodic user revolts in reaction to changes in the site, the ratio remained strangely stable. In fact, the number has risen over the past year and is now hovering at 58% as of March of this year.

It’s as if Zuckerberg has steered the company by this golden ratio. Which begs the question: is there some wisdom here regarding this ratio as a predictor of Internet success? Obviously, there are no guarantees and starting cutting edge tech companies will always be risky business. But, assuming you have a solid business model, there are good reasons to believe that if there is one metric to focus on while building your business, it’s the percentage of users who come back daily as expressed by this ratio.

As I’ve written previously, I believe a mastery of the mechanics of habit design is increasingly deciding startup winners and losers. Not only because habits cement user behavior in an increasingly cluttered digital world, but because a high-engagement product is also a high-growth product. The two are one and the same. A high DAU to MAU ratio is a great indicator of the strength of user habits and, ceteris paribus, I’d bet on a business with the higher ratio over a competitor every time. Here’s why:

More is More

When it comes to web and mobile startups, high DAU to MAU is more important than the size or growth rate of an entrenched competitor. Case in point, Facebook defeated much earlier competitors like MySpace and Friendster, both of which had healthy growth rates and millions of users by the time Facebook got started.

This is because of what I call the “more is more principle.” High user engagement has an exponential effect on user growth. As David Skok points out on his blog, “The most important factor to increasing growth is not the Viral Coefficient, but the Viral Cycle Time.” Viral Cycle time is the amount of time it takes to complete a viral loop and it has massive impact on user growth. “For example, after 20 days with a cycle time of two days, you will have 20,470 users,” Skok writes. “But if you halved that cycle time to one day, you would have over 20 million users! It is logical that it would be better to have more cycles occur, but it is less obvious just how much better.”

Having a greater proportion of DAUs dramatically increases Viral Cycle Time for two reasons. First, daily users initiate loops more often – think tagging a photo on Facebook. Second, more daily active users means more people to respond and react to each invitation. The cycle not only perpetuates; with high DAU to MAU, it accelerates.

One Way to Grow

Those who talk tech split into two dogmatic camps. Some prioritize growth and accept low engagement, while others believe a company needs to nail engagement before focusing on growth. I believe this is a false dichotomy. If you have only one or the other, congratulations, you’ve got squat.

Let’s first take a look at user growth. Distribution, of course, is critically important and no company can survive without a sound customer acquisition strategy. Not only is growth essential but it is something engineer-driven companies love to work on. In fact, the title of “Growth Hacker” has recently become a badge of honor among Silicon Valley digerati. Tweaking viral coefficients and instantly seeing the results is intoxicating. It’s startup feedback at its finest.

But optimizing growth without engagement has its pitfalls. As Peter Thiel recently told his class at Stanford, the effectiveness of distribution channels tends to follow a power law. Just as businesses tend to have only one revenue stream, they also have only one good growth strategy – the effectiveness of which is 10x the results of other distribution channels. The problem with having only one real way to grow is that the method becomes obvious to others and is quickly copied. For example, in its early days, Facebook capitalized on users importing their email contact list to drive growth. But soon thereafter, so did everyone else.

But having competitors copy you is a high-class problem. It means something is working. Worse yet is discovering a fantastic viral loop that drives growth only to see engagement crater when users realize there’s little long-term value in the service. Ringtone businesses, sheep-throwing Facebook games circa 2008, and today’s social video sharing apps using questionable growth tactics, are just a few of the “leaky bucket” businesses that occur when distribution outpaces engagement.

When it comes to building a big business, clearly a good acquisition channel is mandatory, but not sufficient. Given the power law of user growth, you will likely only have one major way of acquiring customers and it won’t be much of a secret. You’ll need some other competitive advantage.

Engagement as Advantage

As opposed to distribution channels, the mechanics driving user engagement do not follow a power law. In fact, it is the nuances of user behavior that make the competition irrelevant, just as it did in the case of Facebook’s early rivals.

Discovering non-obvious user needs and creating accompanying habits is accomplished through deep observation grounded in solid behavioral theory, followed by methodical trial and error. It takes time to create new habits and getting the user to act the way you’d hoped is accomplished by uncovering a thousand tiny insights into the user’s psyche. The process of uncovering latent needs is characterized by understanding more about users than they know about themselves.

The distribution strategy will always be obvious, but the behavioral insights are important secrets that can only be discovered through rigorous testing. Zynga had one obvious way to acquire users, namely Facebook ads. But the company has a cadre of behavioral insights it uses to craft addictive games. It collects terabytes of information daily to alter game dynamics to boost user engagement. Quora primarily drives users to its site through Google search traffic. But the conjecture about all the reasons why the service is so sticky spills over a long question thread. Instagram posted images to Twitter and Facebook to drive user acquisition, placing its growth strategy in plain sight. However, the founders, one of whom studied psychology as a Symbolic Systems major at Stanford, acquired a deep understanding of what makes users tick and click.

But why can’t behavioral design be copied like a distribution strategy? Because competitors are not able to recognize and act upon these kinds of insights. You can know the competition’s product feels better to use, but you won’t know why. Engaging products gain their advantages by leveraging tiny improvements, which together create huge advantage. From the outside, you can’t tell what’s working and what isn’t.

For example, the iPhone is objectively a better designed, more user-friendly, and ultimately more engaging product than the Android experience. But why? Nearly everyone, when given the choice between an Android interface and an iPhone, chooses the iPhone. There are plenty of good reasons to own an Android, but intuitive interface ain’t one. Google knows this and yet they can’t replicate Apple because they don’t know the answer to “why?” You can’t make decisions between seemingly identical interface choices unless you’ve walked the path of user behavior. Without this knowledge, copying the competition becomes a game of throwing darts at features.

Habit design requires a fundamentally different, though complementary skill set to growth hacking. Designing high-engagement products is an art which is increasingly becoming a science. The craft crosses the disciplines of psychology and design – both fields which are hard to learn in a short period of time. Unfortunately, designing habits often falls in the organisational abyss between the founders’ vision and what is technically feasible.

But those companies able to habituate users quickly enjoy massive advantages. Not only does engagement drive growth for the reasons stated above, but users tend to shut out other, sometimes superior, solutions. In fact, business history is peppered with technically inferior products beating competitors because of the fierce loyalty of habituated users (I’m looking at you Apple addicts). Users only have time and brain cycles for a limited number of services. If a high proportion of users are using your service daily, they aren’t using the competition’s.

Can’t Have One Without the Other

But focusing on engagement without growth is also a losing proposition. For one, virality is not something that can be bolted on to a product after it is in the wild. Distribution is not an afterthought and it needs to be built into the core of the experience. Either the company has a viral growth mechanic or it doesn’t. So no matter how engaging your service is, it will remain niche unless there is a way to get it in front of new users en masse.

Creating a company with both high engagement and high growth requires a sound distribution engine fueled by active users. Both engagement and growth are essential to a company’s viability and by adhering to the tao of DAU and MAU, founders have an accurate point of focus to increase their odds of success.

Thank you to David King for reading early versions of this essay
Photo credit: Pink Sherbet Photography