This article was taken from the December 2014 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
It's hard enough to persuade consumers to choose your product in the first place, but how do you keep them coming back? Nir Eyal, author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-forming Products (Portfolio), has an MBA from Stanford and lectures on using neuroscience to influence human behaviour. He's founded and sold two tech companies, and is a proponent of the behaviour-engineering movement through nirandfar.com and hookmodel.com. Here are his tips.
Hijacking existing habits The first step is to consider the sort of behaviours we embrace without thinking. Try to catch yourself performing unconscious actions and make a list -- those that appear regularly are the habits we're looking for. Many will have products tailored for them. So identify those that don't and devise a solution to step in.
Spot the shake-up The nature of habits is that once formed, they're hard to shift. Look where habits you've identified are being disrupted. By anticipating that the integration of cameras into smartphones would create a new channel to share our experiences, Instagram got 20 million early users.
Identify underlying emotions Ask a person why they use email and they'll say they want to send and receive messages, -- but this isn't enough motivation to build a product around. You need to ask again -- Eyal suggests five times -- nd they'll say something like they "fear being out of the loop". If you can design a product to satiate this fear, then you have them hooked.
Time your external trigger Next, connect the use of your product with the emotion in the user's mind. "Then you need to send them an external trigger, which hits them just as they feel that itch," Eyal says.
By sending a notification when people you follow tweet about the same topic, Twitter directs you to what other people think.
Making sure using it is automatic Ultimately, you want your users going to your product automatically without prompting by an external trigger, or even the need to think about it at all. If it's a retail site then storing a user's payment details the first time they're entered allows them to order future products with a single click.
Build variable rewards It's not enough for your product to provide an easy emotional pay-off -- it has to keep users coming back for more. "You need to build a variable reward, some mystery around what will happen when they take that key action of opening your app or loading your site," Eyal says.
Collect things that matter Build some opportunities for users to invest in your product, and increase their rewards for doing so. "The more I add data, such as who my friends are, or content, like my music collection, the less likely I am to leave because I've stored value in the product -- it would be a nuisance to migrate,"
Eyal explains.
Identify regular users Once your product is out there, check if you've hooked anyone. Is anyone using it habitually? Are they using it as often as you expect them to? "If it's a product that should be used on a daily basis, at least five per cent of your users should be engaging with it every day," Eyal says.
Find what makes them different Assuming at least five per cent of your users are using your product often, "figure out what steps they took to become habitual," Eyal says. "Are they just different types of people, which tells you that your market is specific?" Twitter found that those who followed ten or more people were more likely to become habitual.
Tweak your product Now you know what elements of your product compel people to start forming a habit, you can set about tweaking the experience to hook more than just five per cent. "Change the sign-up process so that everyone has to take the same steps as the habitual users did," says Eyal.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
