Behavior by Design Part 2

The action. Every single time. In every action you do motivation, ability, and trigger at the same time. So let's look at a quick example. This is an email I get from Facebook that says, hey, someone likes your blog. So how is motivation, ability and trigger present in this message? So Facebook knows they're motivating me, right? They're saying, hey, someone likes your blog. That's very motivating. That's social acceptance. And they're giving me a call to action to see all notifications. Wow. Even more social acceptance is right behind this click the ability. They made it super easy, right? Look how many. Look how easy they've made it. They put four buttons which all go to the same place, and these are all triggers. So they've made it extremely easy. Look, there's lots of white space. There's no cognitive load. It tells me exactly what they want me to do. And they put plenty of triggers in the way to get me to act the way they want me to act. And here's how that framework splits up amongst your organization. So motivation is really the role of marketing, trying to figure out what motivates people, what they want the product for.4 abilities about product design. Making the product easier to use. Specifically in our space, it's around cognitively making the product simple and easy to understand. And finally, trigger. So triggers are about user experience. How do we make it very clear where the customer should act and what we intend them to do? Any questions on this so far? This makes sense. Is this useful? Great, Great. So this is something that we can use all the time in product design. How can we make the product easier? Because a lot of times we cram in features into product, really considering what's the path, where do we want the user to go? And then clearing away all the other crap that's in the user's way. So action is very critical. After action comes variable reward. So we all know what reward is, right? Reward is the reason we do something, right. It's the expectation of reinforcement. What's a variable reward? Does anybody know examples of variable rewards? Anybody have examples in your life or things you've seen around that are variable rewards? Casino. Casino. Great. That's a classic example. Variable rewards are in a casino of gambling. It's a game of chance, whether you get rewarded or not. Turns out that variable rewards are an incredible motivator, and it's one that's just recently become something that you can use in product design. And if you look at those companies I showed you before, you can see variable rewards in every Single one of them to a great extent. So let's talk about where variable rewards come from. So this concept of variable rewards came from research that B.F. skinner did in the 1950s and 60s. And what he did was very simple. Basically, he put animals inside a Skinner box and he let them have different rewards on different schedules. So when he gave them a predictable reward, when he said, hey, here's a lever, the rat would push the lever and get a reward every time. That was called a fixed schedule. And so what did the lab rat do? Ate when he was hungry. But when the lab rat would push on the lever and sometimes the reward would come and sometimes it wouldn't, sometimes he would get a big reward, sometimes he would get a little reward, the rat went nuts and would click on the lever incessantly. He was figuring out how to create desire, create addiction. So why does this work? Where does this come from? So it turns out that we have this innate need to bring order where there's chaos, to figure out how things work. And in fact, the dopamine system in our brains is hardwired not to satiate us, not to give us reward, not to give us satisfaction, but to keep us searching. Constantly searching, searching and never finding. In fact, that's the root of curiosity. Mick Jagger was right when he said he can't get no satisfaction. The brain has no reason for satisfaction. As a species, satisfaction is not beneficial, it's not advantageous. What's advantageous is searching, curiosity, figure out how things work. That's how we're hardwired. Searching and searching and never finding. The search for rewards comes in three different flavors. It's about the search for rewards of the tribe, the search for rewards of the hunt, and the search for rewards of the self. And we can talk about all three. So let's talk about rewards of the tribe. We constantly search for affirmation from those around us. And so these. The search for rewards of the tribe is around acceptance, sex, power. These are social rewards. Next is the search for resources. So we constantly have this desire to look stems from food, right? Stems from sustenance. Food gets transformed into money, and money is now transformed into information. And so we can see those same processes taking shape. The reason people are incessantly looking on Twitter and looking for just the next bit of news and constantly checking stats and scores is because of this search for information, the hunt. And finally, sensation. We seek rewards around sensation. And when a baby is first born, they start putting things in their mouth, they start touching objects. They want to figure out the Cause and effect, about sensation. It's about mastery, it's about learning the world around us. Purpose and competency, these are all things that are rewards of the self. It's things we do for ourselves. It's very much why gaming by yourself is very addicting. Right. We seek to master, to check boxes, to gain control over them. In fact, quests and levels and achievements or finishing the emails in your inbox, these are all rewards of the self. So let's take a quick quiz. We talked about gambling. It's a $1 billion a day business just in the United States. Huge business. What's going on here? What are the variable rewards here? Tribe, hunt or self? What do we. Money. Money. Okay, so that's rewards of the hunt. Money, material resources. Anything else? What else? What about all those flashing lights? How come when you go in a casino you see all these flashing lights and all this sensory stuff? And why does the machine make noise when you play it? Those are about sensations, those are about stimulus of sensation. And then social aspects. Right. People many times gamble together. There's a reason that poker is played with other people. Social games are organized sports or spectator sports. What's going on here? Tribe? Tribe, obviously. Right. Why are all these people dressed in team colors and associating with people they never knew, from towns that they never lived in, coming all over the world to play for their team? And that's the tribe they're a part of. Right. What else? Are there any other rewards here? How about for the hunt? Is there a hunt here for any kind of. Yeah, I'm going to mug it. Okay. So you can have that as well. Right? So you can have gambling over sports. But I would say that there's a hunt for the win. Right? There's like this. There's this feeling that if I put on my team colors that I'll somehow have an effect on the team. Has anybody ever seen that or maybe been that before? There's a belief that I can affect the outcome. How about email? I think email is actually. Or sms. I kind of put them in the same category. If you use email. Some people, it's funny, I show this presentation to them and they say, well, I don't use email at all, so it's not addictive. Okay. If you've given up on email because you have too many emails in your inbox, this doesn't work for you. Or think about sms. When you get that status notification, doesn't it hurt a little bit to not check it, to not like get it? Why it's rewards to self. You have a need to master that inbox to clear that unread message. Right. It's a very powerful technique. Of course social is there, right? This is how we communicate with everybody in our lives today. And then the hunt, right? This is where we hear about good news and bad news about did we get a promotion, did we get a deal, lose a deal. This is where all that information comes from. So the brain has been habituated to know whether these rewards are coming or not. And we want to figure it out. We have to open it to discover notice. By the way, after we read those unread messages, it's not so funny more. Right. Nobody has an addiction to clear email. We have an addiction to open the email because that's where the variability is. Yep. And finally, let's look at Twitter real quick. So here of course we have tribe, right? This is a social application. We have the hunt for information and there's a self, there's a hunt for rewards, the self here that many people don't realize. The scroll. Why is this news feed scroll thing so popular? Because this in fact is a variable reward system. This scrolling and scrolling. Okay, interesting, interesting. Not interesting, you know, boring, boring. Oh, interesting. This is a variable rewards mechanism. It's searching and searching and never being done searching. In fact, it's why Pinterest is so popular and I think highly addictive because they put a lot of information in a little bit of space and they created this mechanism for searching and searching and never finding. In fact, this is a cartoon I found on Pinterest where it's a guy on a computer and says scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll. And then he says here, scroll, scroll, scroll. That's the behavior, right? It's searching and searching and never finding. That's at the heart of these variable rewards mechanisms. So what do we do with variable rewards? How do we use variable rewards to create a more habit forming product? There's three things we can vary. The type so the hunt, the self and the tribe. The frequency, how often the rewards come or don't come and then the amplitude. Right. So are we giving a big reward or sometimes even a punishment that has to do with amplitude? Make sense? Okay. Now commitment. Commitment is the last phase of the desire engine. I think it's the most critical. Commitment is the phase where the user is asked to do some work. And this is the phase that I think I see most often the biggest mistakes or where this comes too early, where users are asked to do some kind of work for the site before they know the reward, it needs to come after the reward. The action is a very simple, the action phase is a very simple thing they do. Then the reward, then the commitment. The commitment is where the user pays with time, money, social capital or data. And it has to come after the reward. And the reason is that the commitment needs to make the next action, the next cycle through the desire engine more likely. And to show you why commitment is such a powerful influencer, let me share with you an experiment that was done a long time ago, actually, 1966, here in Palo Alto. They went to residents of Palo Alto and they showed them this huge sign that said drive carefully. And it was humongous, it was, you know, bigger, it would cover up their front door. And they went to two different groups of people and they said, please put this in front of your house. It's an important message. We'd like you to volunteer to put this on your lawn. The first group, 83% refused, said, no way, I don't want that on my lawn. The other group, 76% accepted and said, sure, go ahead. What was the difference two weeks earlier to this group? Two, they asked those people to put a three inch sign that said drive carefully on their lawn, three inches. Nearly 100% of people said, sure, whatever, it's three inches, put it on your lawn. Two weeks later when they went back and said, okay, now will you please put this huge sign? 76% accepted. Why? Because they had committed. They started to change their self image about what they believe and what they care about. And once you start changing self image, you start creating commitment. And as human beings, we hate being inconsistent. Think about politics. One of the worst things that a politician can call another politician is a flip flopper. We hate people who change their minds and we hate it when we change our minds because being inconsistent causes cognitive dissonance. And so we constantly seek to be consistent with our behaviors. In product design, doing simple behaviors that get the user to commit little payments, little invitations, spending more time giving more data increases the commitment of the user when done at the right time. Okay, so let's look at a few examples to make this concrete. So we all know Zynga. Has anybody played farmville here? Or any Zynga games you have? Has anybody gotten hooked to any of these? Don't be shy. Yeah. Alright, great. YouTube. Awesome. So let's walk through this. Okay. Why is a game like farmville so addictive? Well, the external trigger is a Facebook feed message, perhaps an email. Right, we've seen those. The next step Is something very simple. They just get you to play. Just play something. You don't have to pay, you don't have to do much. Just play. After we get you to play, we give you some rewards, right? We give you some variable rewards. Here's how the point system works. Here's how you get some personalized virtual goods, which are rewards of the self, right? They're interesting to play with. They dazzle us, so they start giving us rewards. Next, they start asking for commitment, you start spending time. And I've condensed several desire engines into one here, but you start building a farm, you start inviting others, and you start paying money, right? So you're starting to commit to the product. I stop there, you stop there. What they do, if you. Sure. What you see typically is there's two types of users. There's free users and there's paid users. And the paying users are only about 5% of the audience. But the free users spend time where the paying users spend money. And so even if they play casually a little bit. A little bit. And the way they get you to come back, the way they create internal triggers is by triggering you when you're bored, when you're feeling lonesome. And they do something else that's very powerful. They trigger you by not wanting to lose what you've built. So they engage this commitment. They say, hey, you know your farm, your crops will rot unless you come back. And so they're pulling on the heartstrings of commitment. The fact that you've started to invest, don't lose it. Come back, okay? And so now they're selling, of course, now you know they're selling the painkiller. Let's do email real quick. So email is an icon on your phone. You have a status notification that you have an email or text message waiting. The action. Oops. The action is to open the unread message. Very simple. Just open the message. Variable rewards, we talked about earlier, it's tribe, hunt, and self. We get all three, which makes it incredibly powerful. And what's the commitment? Remember, the commitment is about the expectation of future rewards. It's about making the next cycle more likely. So every time you use email to respond, you're committing to the system because you're expecting a response back. You do this enough times and you become habituated. And now every time you want to procrastinate, every time you're feeling a little anxious, every time you're thinking about others, you have this habitual response. I'm betting half of you right now would love to check email, just me mentioning it. Yep, I knew. And now again, emails becomes a painkiller because you feel if I told you you all have unread messages or unread SMSs, you probably feel a little ting of pain in your gut that tells you I want to open it. I can see heads nodding. I love it. So use this for good. So you have the knowledge these are the patterns of habit forming products. I want you guys to use this information to create products that benefit us all. And what you can do is take this canvas, I'm available. I love it when people use this canvas and map their product to how they use the desire engine for their product. And spending 15, 20 minutes thinking, okay, how do we have these four elements? How do we make these elements very clear in our product? I think can benefit you a great deal. So here's, you'll all see, you'll get this presentation, but here's the step. First thing you do is think about the internal trigger. The end goal of your product is not okay. Every time someone sees an email, that's not good enough. That can't be the external trigger. It needs to be about the internal trigger. What's the feeling they feel right before they use your product? What's the thing they're doing right before they use your product? That's the first step. Then the second step is to think about the external trigger. How do you reach that user the first time before they know how to use your product? How do you create that external trigger? Next, it's about the action. Make it extremely simple. Make it something that is crystal clear. Use B mat to figure out how to get the user to do that behavior. Think about adding variable rewards as the next stage. You can mix the different types of variable rewards and play with frequency and amplitude. And then finally ask for commitment and think what's something they could do at this phase that gets them to that makes them more likely to continue the cycle next time they come back. Okay. And remember to increase automaticity, we want to increase the speed through the engine and the number of times the user flow. Okay. And then finally we do have to keep the variable rewards novel. So many times people ask, well, you know, Zynga games were fun, but then why do they constantly have to create new games? Because users figure out the meta rewards. They figure out, okay, this is what the game is about, big picture and now they need new rewards. So you constantly have to keep the product, the reward's novel, they constantly have to change. And then of course the flip side if you want to break a habit, and this is kind of how you can use it in your own life. I mean, I've used the desire engine to lose weight and to live my life better. You do this in reverse. You break the desire engine. You create steps between the steps of the desire engine so you go through it more slowly or you rid yourself of the desire engine altogether. Okay, so now the next step. Everybody take out their phones, please. If you have, okay, pull up your camera or your web browser and zap this QR code or go to this URL, if you would, please. I have a quick, short, five question survey which I love feedback. I love hearing what you think about the presentation. It's only five questions and if you take this quick survey for me and leave your email address, you will be in a sweepstakes to win a book, as I understand variable rewards. So if you leave your email address, by the way, you don't become more likely or less likely to get the prize. If you leave bad feedback, you know, negative feedback is important. I want to hear what you think could be better about the presentation. So I really value, you know, critical feedback. So please, you know, please be honest. Okay, thank you very much. All right, Any questions or thoughts? Oh, my God. What's your impressions? I think you're absolutely right. Good methodology and something to think about.

I think I'm out of business.

Out of business? Yeah.

Well, this is like software for like social networks and this kind of stuff. We work with encryption and encrypting files for companies and that's what there are some things here.

Like.

That'S not final software, like it's not a software network.

I see.

So triggers on. But there are some really good stuff here.

So I will say that I think this is more applicable to some businesses than others. If you have users, this is applicable. If you don't have users, this is not applicable. So if nobody ever sees your technology, like if you're selling a product that nobody ever interacts with.