Preface
How to improve user stickiness? This is a problem that the product will face after a certain amount of UV. Most products are trying to actively contact users. For example, e-commerce apps regularly push users various discount promotion messages to attract users back to the app; SNS apps will push users “the people you follow XX have updated their status”, etc. Dynamic; some diary apps will periodically push messages to remind users how many days have not been there, etc. But for users, what kind of contact would they be more willing to accept? The author of this article describes what hook theory is and how we can use this theory to help improve user stickiness.
I first met Joe when he was 35 years old and had two children. Looking at his swimming ring, he decided to lose 20 pounds. He bought the latest sports equipment and the best health management APP to record his diet and exercise. In the first week, he executed the plan firmly and successfully lost a few pounds. In the second week, his enthusiasm weakened a lot. After a month, he completely stopped recording and gained weight again. He is very dissatisfied with his state and blames himself for losing weight.
So why is it so difficult for Joe to change his behavior? Because 45% of our daily decisions are made out of habit and have not thought about it.
Certain cues such as feeling bored/hungry, a certain action, a certain time, and a certain emotion may trigger us to do certain actions. When we complete these designated actions, we will be rewarded materially or emotionally. Frequent completion of such habitual actions makes us a habit.
Let’s look at Joe again, if Joe wants to go to the gym after work.
When he comes home (hinting), he sits in front of the TV (habitual action), and he feels happy and relaxed (reward). Through such a cycle every day, Joe connects going home with watching TV and feeling relaxed. This pattern Write it into his neural circuit and form a fixed habit, which is why it is difficult for Joe to change this habit.
Changing habits is possible, but it requires continuous and repetitive efforts.
How can technology help
Technology can help users to a large extent. As designers, we have the opportunity to influence users, not just to prompt users for new actions. If used properly, technology can promote and strengthen long-term positive habits. Using Nir Eyal’s hook model as a framework, I will deeply analyze how to build products that can help users form good habits. Some of these principles have been applied in existing health apps.
Hook model
Nir Eyal’s hook model focuses on habit formation. It can help us design apps that change user habits and enable users to use apps more.
From the hook model, the user needs to trigger an action to be guided to the habit we want the user to form. When the user performs this action, the APP should give the user a reward for the user to repeat the action.
By repeating this action several times, users begin to invest more in your app. Users continue to repeat the actions on the hook model, which helps them form a good habit and strengthens their frequency of using the APP.
trigger
When a new habit is formed, triggers usually come from the product itself, which may be emails, push messages, SMS notifications, and vibration notifications on the user’s wearable device.
As designers, we usually don’t pay much attention to message reminders. We usually realize this problem after product design. However, triggers are usually the key to increasing the frequency of user use and setting to open the APP.
To be effective, triggers must be timely, fun, and actionable.
Timely: The trigger needs to appear when the user is most likely to perform the action. Reminding users to weigh their weight at three o’clock in the afternoon is far less effective than reminding users when they wake up early. Nike’s FuelBand bracelet reminds you in time to do a good job.
Nike encourages you to exercise more through the “Win this Hour” design. Every hour you will receive a message reminder to remind you to exercise for five minutes to “win” this hour. It encourages you to take immediate action and is an excellent trigger.
Interesting: Users receive a lot of reminders every day, it is difficult to get user attention, and interesting triggers can stand out.
MyfitnessPal, an exercise and diet tracking software, reminds users to take action through repeated pushes. And CarrotFit, which is also an exercise and diet tracking software, uses serious, interesting, and diverse pushes to encourage users to take action.
Operational: This is the most important point. If you can’t directly target the target action, the triggers will have a much smaller effect on habit formation.
At the end of each week, Fitbit will send an email to the user to summarize the performance of the week and compare it with the previous week.
Users do not need to log in to see their status, and mail can activate inactive users. However, the email did not tell the user what to do next. Since there was no clear instruction, Fitbit let the user decide what to do next.
Giving users clear instructions is very helpful to improve user stickiness and action effectiveness. Shapeup uses simple action instructions, such as “stop farther away” and “do not take the elevator up the stairs”, which greatly improves the user’s weight loss effect.
User internal trigger
The most important thing for timely, interesting and actionable triggers is to get the actions taken by the user and create repetitive habits. The triggers come from within the user itself.
Positive emotional reactions (such as a sense of belonging, fullness and boredom) and negative emotional reactions (such as boredom, loneliness, depression, anger) are the most powerful motivating factors for habit formation.
The strong emotional response during each use of the product makes users form a habit. In order to stimulate a strong emotional response, we need to determine which are the pain points of the user and work hard to resolve them.
For doing this, Nir Eyal suggested 5 “why” methods. The general idea is to keep asking why, until you successfully hit the inner pain point.
Let’s take a look at Joe and Jessica, both of whom have purchased wearable devices.
Both Joe and Jessica want to track their whereabouts and practice. However, when we kept asking why, we realized that their motivations for buying wearable devices are different.
When the same trigger is used for users with different intrinsic motivations, the product cannot make users form a habit. If the pain point is not targeted, the trigger cannot be internalized.
By grouping users according to their intrinsic motivation, we can now push personalized messages for different users.
For users who need recognition, messages like “looks good” and “you are doing a great job” can be used. OneDrop, a diabetes management application, uses positive notifications to keep users motivated.
For users who want to be admired, messages such as “how many competitors did you beat today” and “you nailed it” are effective.
Targeted triggers can promote more actions, and through repeated use, the emotions associated with the user can be reflected on the product and become an internal trigger, which can enhance the user’s future interaction and sense of participation with the APP.
action
Triggers alone do not necessarily enable users to take action. We need to understand what the user’s motivation and ability to take action are. Fogg’s Action Model (FBM) shows that whether a user takes action is highly correlated with motivation and ability.
According to FBM, when the user can take action, the trigger may prompt the user to act, but when the user does not have the ability or motivation to act, the trigger has no effect. If the user is injured and does not have much interest in the marathon, then the trigger will not be able to prompt him to run. FBM is committed to keeping users in an activatable state, which can be achieved by enhancing user motivation or ability.
Boost motivation
There are many ways to improve user motivation. People’s motivation mainly comes from three aspects:
1. Increase pleasure/reduce pain
Nike’s Fuelband uses the LED lights on the bracelet to indicate your amount of exercise for the day. Colored prompts give the user a sense of pleasure, prompting the user to light it up and complete the exercise.
“When I am only a few hundred steps away from the goal, I will walk around my apartment an hour before going to bed at night to improve my score.”-Roger Cheng (Fuelband user)
Pactapp requires users to make promises every week. Users will lose a certain amount of money when they fail to fulfill their promises. The loss of money will cause high-level pain in the brain. Pactapp uses this method to improve users’ motivation.
2. Hope/Fear
Another way to improve user motivation is to provide users with hope or ease their fears. When the user anticipates that something good is about to happen, “hope” gives the user greater motivation to act. MyFitnessPal encourages users to take more steps through their hope of accomplishing their goals.
3. Social identification/exclusion
As a social animal, social identification and rejection are powerful weapons to improve motivation. Fitocracy has done a good job in this regard. The community it provides is very strong. When a user completes an action, other users will be prompted and will be driven to take action. This forms a sense of identity, and feeling that you are a member of the community is a powerful motivation for users to act.
What is more effective than social recognition is that people do not want to be excluded from the group. There are the number of people in the group who have completed the goal in the Nike group. This gives users a stronger motivation to complete the goal so that the group goal can be achieved.
improving capability
Improving ability is not achieved by training or increasing resources, but by making the task easier, which can reduce the time required for the task and reduce the physical and mental effort required.
For example, MyfitnessPal displays all the foods previously added by the user, helping users record their diet with one click, without requiring users to search or re-enter information. By simplifying food management, MyfitnessPal improves users’ ability to manage their diet, so users are more willing to use it to control their diet.
How to form a habit
Understand the user’s motivation and abilities, designing the appropriate trigger only accomplishes half of the work. Triggers can help users take actions and increase their frequency of use. But the experience after the user’s action is also the key, which determines whether the user will repeat similar actions.
In order to create products that can help users form habits, we also need to understand how to reward users after specifying actions, how to make users repeat actions and get rewards, and finally form a habit.
