Behavior By Design with Nir Eyal

I hope I'll tackle a lot of those questions that you have. Let me start actually by defining who this presentation is for. This presentation is for the frustrated creator. And so if this has ever been you, where you've wanted something to work so badly, and yet for some reason it just doesn't, right? The user just is not clicking where you expect them to click. If that's ever been you, then you are me. I've been fortunate to have started and sold two companies. My last company, adnectar, was acquired in August and everything worked out fine. It was a great ride. But I was at the intersection of these two industries between advertising and social gaming. Starting in about 2007 when Zynga was just starting out and there was thousands of game developers, and we saw these amazing companies being formed right before our eyes that got users to do unbelievable things, right? I mean, the kind of. Not only were they getting users to act, they were also getting users to form habits and these behaviors that were kind of baffling actually at the time. And then along with that, I was at the intersection of advertising, $114 billion global industry that spends all this money on getting users to change behavior. And so I became fascinated with that. And so I started to study that field. And. And while I was in the process of building my own company and using tons of different methodologies, between customer development and business model canvases and lean UX design, I found that there was something missing. While these tools helped a ton, there was something that I needed that was higher order, that was more basic, around basic consumer psychology. And so that's what I wanted to dive into. And so I started to look for patterns. I started to look at what are the reoccurring themes around how companies create user behaviors. And in particular, I was looking at a particular type of company. I call these the OMG businesses. The businesses that we all saw a few years ago. The first time you see the product, you say, okay, it's a nice product, maybe it's a toy. You can see how that's kind of a niche market. It's not that differentiated. And then all of a sudden this product, this toy, becomes a huge multi billion dollar business. Can anybody think of any of these OMG businesses in your life that you've. Don't be embarrassed. Have you ever. Instagram, great example. That comes up all the time. What else? Any other businesses that when you first saw, you're like, okay, it's cute. Pinterest. Pinterest, great. Dropbox. Dropbox, yeah. Anything else? What About Facebook. I mean, admit it, the first time you saw Facebook circa 2007, okay, it was kind of like a better Friendster or MySpace. Was it really going to be a hundred billion dollar business that would make those other businesses leave them in the dust? Zynga, I mean the definition of a toy company, right? I mean it builds games and now it's a multi billion dollar empire dominating the social gaming market. That's what I really wanted to study. And so I started by asking this question that comes up a lot in lean profit product design is are you building a product that's a vitamin or a painkiller? And the question here starts with generally, entrepreneurs and investors want to invest in and build companies that are selling painkillers because painkillers have an obvious need. Stop the pain. It's a quantifiable market. It's easy to monetize. Vitamins, on the other hand, are different. Vitamins are about selling an emotional sell. You don't really know if that vitamin is really doing its job like a painkiller does. It's very binary. Either I have the pain or I don't. Is the product I'm selling curing that pain or it isn't? With vitamins, it's more of an emotional need. It makes me feel better. I feel like I'm doing something. And it's typically an unknown market. So let me ask you, those companies we just talked about, these OMG businesses, what are they selling in their history? What do they start out as? What are they? Are they vitamins or are they painkillers? How many people think that they're selling vitamins? Okay, about half the room. How many people think they're selling painkillers? Let me pause at this thought. That a habit is something that when you don't do the behavior, you cause pain. So if you think about the habits in your life, for example, now everybody close your eyes for a second and imagine you have an SMS notification on your phone or an email notification on your phone, okay? And you can't pick it up. What do you feel right now? Do you feel a little bit of tension? I see a lot of smiles, a lot of nodding heads. There's that bit of tension. There's a bit of physical pain. We're going to actually talk about the neuroscience of why that occurs. But with this in mind, it's actually a trick question. What I asked before about are they selling vitamins or painkillers? Are they actually doing both? So the pattern that I saw emerging from these companies is that they all start with a pleasure seeking behavior. Think about the first time you used Facebook or Twitter. You weren't saying, oh my God, this is what I've been looking for my whole life. You were probably kind of, you heard about it from a friend, you're kind of curious, and you started using it, seeking pleasure. And what these companies do over repeated behavior, over repeated usage, is take us from vitamins to painkillers. They create the need and sell us the antidote. They sell us the solution. Let me tell you why I'm here. The first reason I'm here is to talk to you as people, not as entrepreneurs or founders, but just as human beings. And I want you to understand more about your own basic behavior. Because I believe that the world is becoming a more addictive place. And Paul Graham wrote a fantastic article about this about a year and a half ago. And I kind of expanded on it and said the reason the world is becoming a more addictive place is because everything that's connected is providing greater access, greater personalized data, and at greater speeds than ever before. So everything that is connected is becoming more addictive. So this is a trend that we have to be aware of as consumers to prevent ourselves from being manipulated. Because what I'm about to share with you, behavior engineering is a superpower. And if you think about your days as a kid when you watch superheroes, superpowers can always be used for good or evil. And so with that in mind, I'm here to help you with my second purpose for talking to you today is to help you build awesome products. Because the history of using behavioral engineering, what I'm about to share with you, is not rocket science. It's not secrets that can't be discovered. All this stuff is being used today in the companies that are experts at behavior design. The thing is, they don't often share this stuff. They don't let it leave their four walls. But they have behavioral psychologists on staff, many of these companies, to help them do this stuff. So to this end of building stuff that helps us all, I want to remind you of a quote from Peter Thiel, who said, we wanted flying cars, but Instead we got 140 characters. It's time to do better with habit design. Habit design can help us improve the world. And what I want to do is help people understand how to design habits so that you can create products that help make our lives better. But here's the rule. You have to use this for good. You can't be a schmuck. Your interests have to be aligned with the user's interest. That's the rule. But even if you do that, even if your purposes are good, the fact is it's harder today to reach users than it was before. There are more distractions, it's harder to find new users. And viral channels are dying because in a platform controlled world between Facebook, Google and Apple, there's gatekeepers to these walled gardens. And so the viral channels of reaching millions of users quickly have been tempered as these companies restrict the spamminess of reaching their users. The good news is that I think we're moving into an age where habits matter more than virality. So this is a 2x2 where we compare virality with the habit potential of a product. And we've all seen what happens when a company has a high viral score. These are the leaky bucket businesses of 2007 that got big really fast through apps on Facebook and then kind of cratered. So growth clearly is not enough. If you can't retain users, if you can't engage users, growth is not enough. Of course, if you have a low habit score and a low viral score, well, that's just garbage. Of course there's every decade or so you'll find a rocket ship business that not only grows very fast, but also is a very engaging product, has a high habit score like a Pinterest or Facebook. And then I think the takeaway from this slide though is even without the high growth rates, even without the viral potential, you can still get big slope and you can still build fantastic companies. I call these commitment businesses where the product becomes better the more the user uses it. So these are the Evernotes, the Pandoras, the Amazons. These are huge companies that got big not through virality, but through engagement and retention and habits. And let me show you what that looks like. So has anybody ever seen this graph, by the way, from Evernote? This is the Evernote smile graph. And what I love about this is this is the percent of users returning monthly over time. And what they saw, what typically happens on a customer retention chart is that you see a lot of engagement when a customer signs up and, and then it craters, they don't come back. And that's what a lot of those leaky bucket businesses had. But what Evernote figured out by focusing on user retention, by focusing on habit creation, they saw that over time, the more the user used the product, their usage increased. It became more and more valuable over time. And this is the future. Companies that can build habits into their products will see this. And so the reason I love to talk to entrepreneurs is because I want to help you guys be the next Facebook and not the next Friendster. Because too many companies, unfortunately die on the vine before their time because they don't focus on human behavior. They focus on distractions, frankly. Okay, so let's get started. When we talk about habits, we talk about automaticity. Automaticity is a behavior that occurs with nearly no thought. Okay. It's an instantaneous behavior with nearly no conscious thought. Why do we have that? Why do you think we have behaviors that the brain intentionally doesn't want us to think about? Well, there's a few reasons. One, it helps us to learn. It helps us to save energy and effort of having to reprocess things all the time. It speeds decision making. It keeps us safe. And finally, there's a hypothesis that it helps reduce our head size. That by putting information, by putting behaviors into our basal ganglia, which is this dense part of the brain, it frees up space for the rest of our brain. So this is very good for us. We need the ability to make decisions very, very quickly. So now that we know we need it, how do we create it? There's basically two ways. Number one, the long way is repetition. So if you can get someone to sit down and you drill into them again and again a piece of information or a behavior, that's how we learn a behavior. And we physically change our brain when we learn these behaviors. So this is what school typically looks like. It's not very fun, but through repetition and memorization, we form new behaviors. But here's the shortcut and here's what I'm about to teach you. Desire. So when you think about times in your life when you learned the most, when you were the most engaged, when your life changed the most rapidly, it was when you had this intense periods of desire. And what I'm about to show you is how you can actually create desire. You can manufacture desire and move users from pleasure seeking behaviors to pain alleviating behaviors with what I call the desire engine. So the desire engine is a four step process. And it emerged from the pattern I saw time and again from these companies that form habit forming technology. And they run us through these four basic steps of trigger action, variable reward, and commitment. And we're going to walk through all four of these. But before we do, a very common question I hear is, can anything be turned into a habit? Anything can be. Well, a lot of things can be turned into a habit, but there's a spectrum of what has the highest habit potential. And there's really Two criteria for creating a high habit potential. So fast cycle time and frequent revolutions. So the quicker you can take a user through the four steps of the desire engine and the more desire engines they run through in a short period of time, the stickier the habit. So I had a client call me the other day and they wanted to form a habit around behavior that occurs once every two months. It's hard to do because you just can't if you don't have the user's attention. If you only have their attention once every two months or so, it's very difficult for them to run through the desire engine often enough. So the kind of behaviors that are the most habit forming are daily behaviors or intraday habits. The habits that you're doing all throughout your day. Think about the things that hook you. It's the things you're doing constantly throughout your day and then how quickly you're running through these four steps. So keep that in mind as we walk through. So the first step of the desire engine is the trigger phase. The trigger is a spark plug of the desire engine. It's the cue, it's the thing that happens right before the action. Triggers fall into two examples, and we named several of those just now. External triggers and internal triggers. External triggers we all know, right? These are things in our environment. These are sensory stimuli that occur in the world around us. So that 15 minute notification, a meeting is coming up and there's a sound that's an external trigger. Internal triggers are things that occur within the user's own brain. And this is really where the power of habit creation occurs. When you can get the user to self trigger every time they feel something, they use your product. That's an extremely powerful place to be. That's where the power of habit design occurs. So the reason the desire engine starts with external triggers and ends with internal triggers is that internal triggers are where you want to own, that's the space you want to own. And increasingly it turns out that negative emotions are the most powerful internal triggers. And this makes sense, right? Because we have a desire to alleviate pain. Again, right back to this pain relief idea that I mentioned before. Users want to alleviate pain badly, actually, more than they seek pleasure. So anytime we feel bored, dissatisfied, lost, lonesome, we instantly use these products. And you can probably attach a service in your mind to this negative emotion, right? When you feel bored, there's this instant reaction to pull up Facebook or Twitter or whatever it is that your 15 minutes of silence that's painful for you prompts you to do. So these are internal triggers. Next is the action phase of the desire engine. Action is all about when doing is easier than thinking. This is how you optimize this part of the desire engine. Has anybody seen the BJ Fogg behavior model before? No. Okay, so most of you haven't. So this is an extremely easy way to think about all behavior. And BJ Fogg is a researcher over at Stanford and he posits that for any behavior to occur, you need three things at the same time. You need motivation, ability, and a trigger at the same time. So let's look at each one of these. Motivation is the reason we do something. Ability is how difficult something is to do. If something is very hard to do, it's on the left. If something is very easy to do, it's on the right. And then a trigger. A trigger is a cue that we talked about before. And what this posits is if you have sufficient motivation, something is easy enough, and there is a trigger present, you will get a behavior every single time. That's B equals mat. So let's make this really concrete. A phone rings and you don't pick it up. For whatever reason, you don't pick it up. Why would you not have picked it up? When was the last time a phone rang and you didn't pick it up? Why didn't you pick it up? It wasn't next to you. So it was very difficult to reach. Let's say, right, you were in the shower and it was in the other room. So it was too hard to get to. Your ability was too low, it was too difficult. What's another reason? You were busy with something else and you didn't want to. Right. So maybe that's an ability. Maybe it's also that you thought it was more motivating to do something else. So your motivation was very low. Or maybe you knew it was a telemarketer and you really didn't want to talk to the person. What else? It didn't ring. Didn't ring. Maybe it was on vibrate and you didn't hear it. And so the trigger wasn't present. So this is directly applicable to any time we create single behaviors. Okay. And just to classify these different. These three different things. So ability is about making something easier, Right? Making something easier to do by reducing the cost, the amount of time is required, the physical effort, the brain cycle, social deviance or non routine. So anytime you can make any of these things harder or easier, you can increase or decrease behavior. Motivation. There's also six factors of motivation. It's around seeking or avoiding different motivators, such as seeking pleasure, avoiding pain, seeking hope, avoiding fear, seeking social acceptance, and avoiding social rejection. And so when you look at the world through this lens, you'll start seeing that a lot of the behaviors that you do day in and day out all have these three things present. Let's do another quick example from a UI perspective. This is an email that I get when someone likes my blog. How is Facebook using b mat the behavior they want me to do here? The designer's intended behavior is to get me to click and go over to Facebook. So they've used language that increased my motivation. Right. Andrew Sipkes likes your blog. That's social acceptance ability. You see all this white space? Very low cognitive load. Right. They made it a very clean, simple experience. One of the main reasons I think Facebook ultimately beat MySpace is that it's just a simple, simpler, easier to understand experience. They've reduced cognitive load. And then finally, triggers, Triggers here, all over the place. All these things are triggers. And of course, there's the hero button that tells us exactly what they want me to do, which is to update to create more information to share, but plenty of triggers all taking me to the same place. So here's how behaviors map to actions and map to cross functional teams within your organization. So this is why cross functional teams work so well, because when we can get people who deal with the business of motivation, the marketing people, deal with ability by creating products that are easier to use. And finally, interaction designers that can figure out how to place effective triggers, this is where we get magic. This is where behavior happens. All right, so after we have a trigger, an action, now we come to variable reward. Variable reward, I think, is one of the most exciting parts of the desire engine because it's what's very different from just a traditional feedback loop. Can anybody think of variable rewards? Does anybody have any exposure to what variable rewards are about? What do you think of when you think of intermittent rewards or variable rewards? Slot machines. Slot machines. Classic example, right? So variable rewards are all about reinforcement or rewards given on a variable schedule. And this comes from research that B.F. skinner did back in the 1950s and 60s where he gave lab animals rewards at different schedules. And he saw that if he gave a reward on a consistent schedule, meaning you hit the lever, you get food. The lab animals would click on the lever when they were hungry. But when he would change the order of the frequency or the amplitude of the reward. So every third time, some food would come out, or sometimes they would get a lot of food. And sometimes they would get no food. And the lab animals clicked incessantly. They would increase the number of times that the behavior was manifested. And why does this happen? Where does this come from? It's because we crave predictability. Our brains are wired to try and understand systems. And that's why variable rewards are so powerful. Not bringing order to chaos drives us nuts. We hate it. And it turns out that actually the dopamine system that we're hardwired to seek out an understanding of these type of rewards. In fact, dopamine used to be. A few years ago, we thought that dopamine was all about reward, that it was the chemical that made us feel good. It's in fact not. It's a chemical that keeps us searching. And that's what's so important about when you're thinking about designing your products and you look at why products are addictive. They all have a component of searching and searching and never finding that's critical. The dopamine system does not reward us for satisfaction. Satisfaction has no evolutionary purpose. The dopamine system rewards us for searching more and more and more. And why does this happen? Is because a species think back to our ancestors, A species that keeps hunting, that keeps searching, survived better. A species that was satiated. Well, those aren't our ancestors. Satisfaction. Mick Jagger was right. We can't get no satisfaction because our brains are hardwired that way. So how does this relate to the products that we're building? Well, there's three types of rewards. And remember, variable rewards are about the search. The constant, never satiated search for rewards. And they fall into three different categories. The search for rewards of the tribe, the search for rewards of the hunt, and the search for rewards of the self. So, so let's talk about each one real quick. So the search for social rewards are about acceptance, sex, and power. These are things that we feel rewards from other people. The search for or the hunt is about the search for resources. This all stems from our primal need for food. Food gets turned into money, and money is now morphized into information. So anytime you see this search for information, it's about the hunt. And then finally, the search for sensation. I call that the search around the self. This is about mastery, consistency, competency, and purpose. So if you look at as soon as we're born, we're constantly touching objects, we're putting them in our mouth. We're trying to understand how to gain control over them, how to understand why sensation occurs. So the reason that you find yourself pained by not being able to check your email is because there's a need to finish. Right. If you notice with the dynamic around email, there's this pain, there's this urge to finish the unopened messages but not to answer. Right. We want to check, we want that notification to be gone because we can master it. But then after that, it's not that fun anymore. Gaming plays into this. Gaming plays into this. A lot of game dynamics are around this. Right. The same reason that it's painful to not check your email is the same reason why people want to finish levels in a game. The reasons that World of Warcraft works so well. It's about these missions, about accomplishments, it's about completion, it's about mastery. But let's take a quick pop quiz. Gambling. What variable rewards are at play here? Tribe, hunt or self? It's a billion dollar a day. Business people put $1 billion a day into slot machines. What's at work here? What variable reward system? The hunt. Right. Because of resources. Right. What else? All three. Exactly. Where do we see self? Where do we see sensation? Where do we see mastery and control? What about all these lights? Like, why are casinos so sensory? Right. Like we have music and we have girls that are scantily clad and we have lights and we have all this sensory feedback. Right. And then the tribe as well. Many people, you know, play poker together. It's a social activity. What about spectator sports? Huge, huge industry. What's the variable reward around spectator sports? Any idea? Tribe. Tribe Huge. Right. Why do people put on their team colors and their die hards for life with a particular team? So there's tribe. What else? Self. How come it's the perfect expressive purpose of you winning with your team? Yeah, exactly. There's a sense that if you watch the game and you wear your colors, you can affect the outcome. Right. There's that cognitive experience. And then with hunt as well, I would submit that there's something around hunt as well about that you're winning something, you've accomplished something. It's the hunt for success of the game. Email we're going to get to in a minute. But the short answer is all three. So you've got our social rewards here from the tribe, you've got the hunt. Because this is where we now receive information. This is where we receive physical. If we get a business deal, we hear about it through email. Something good happens. If something bad happens, it all comes through email. And there's this self component of wanting to complete, wanting to finish, wanting to master our email box. Okay. What about the news feed? Or in this case, Twitter in particular? Where do we see it? Where do we see a variable reward system? What's at play? We get a lot of social rewards by knowing, by getting feedback of. Oh, I've retweeted. I favorited your post. Hunt is about information and self, right? There's this mastery of wanting to complete, to know that we've checked everything that we have to check. In fact, there's a reason that in every social product we see a news feed because this is a masterful variable reward system, right? It's about scrolling and scrolling and searching and searching and never done searching. So it's. This is not interesting. This is not interesting. Oh, dopamine hit, right, interesting. Searching and searching and constantly searching. In fact, Pinterest is all about this. A ton of visually displayed information, a lot of it crap. But once in a while there's a variable reward of something very interesting. And it's an endless scroll, right? They did this endless scroll. They were one of the first to do that of searching and searching. And so there's this comic on a board, on a Pinterest board called Pinterest Addicts where there's a little guy, he's scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. He pauses and he says, ha ha. Scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. And that's exactly it. That is the brilliance of the Pinterest variable reward system. It's scrolling, scrolling and scrolling and searching and searching and never finding. And that's part of why it becomes addictive. So when you think about variable rewards, there's three things you can do to increase the power of variable rewards. You can change the type of reward between those three. I mentioned tribe, hunt and self. You can play with the frequency so how often the reward is experienced and the amplitude. So there's such a thing as negative rewards as well, right? You can have punitive rewards as well as how big of a positive reward you can apply as well. And then finally, commitment. So commitment is the last phase of the desire engine. And from a business perspective, it's the most important. The commitment phase is where the work happens. It's where the user, after they have received a reward, is asked to do something. And this is a very often confused phase. Many times inappropriately sites and products will ask you to do work before you've given a reward. And I think that's a mistake. It's the most common mistake I see. First we want to give you some kind of reward, then we want to ask you to do work. So this is where the User pays with money, social capital, time or data. And the important thing to remember about the commitment phase is that the commitment phase is what makes the next cycle, the next action through the loop more likely. So to demonstrate how this works, I'll share with you a quick study that was done a long time ago actually here in Palo Alto. A group of researchers from Stanford went to residents of Palo Alto homeowners and said, look, we want you to put a big sign. It didn't look exactly like this, but it was a big sign that covered a huge part of their front lawn that says drive carefully. And they went to two different groups. The first group, 83% said, no way, get off my property. The other group, 76% accepted. So what was the difference? What do they do? Turns out with group two. Two weeks prior the same researchers came by and said this was before they knew about the big sign. They came by two weeks prior and said, would you, Mr. And Mrs. Homeowner, would you mind putting a three inch sign that says drive carefully in your front lawn? 3 inch sign. Nearly 100% of the homeowners said, fine, no problem. Almost everybody did it. And once they did that tiny commitment, when they came back two weeks later and said, okay, well now we know that you're a supporter of drive carefully of this message because you obviously have this sign on your lawn. 76% accepted putting this big honkin sign on their lawn. That's the power of commitment. And when we can get the user to take tiny steps, tiny commitments, what we're doing is beginning to change self image. The commitment phase is about changing who we believe we are. Because what we're doing is creating cognitive dissonance to not make that choice again. We start identifying ourselves as a user of the product as we talked about before. So let's run through the desire engine with email. So the external trigger is where the desire engine starts. The external trigger is about some kind of stimulus. In this case it's an icon on your phone. And by the way, if you don't use email much, then think about sms. The action is to open the unread message. The variable reward, as we discussed before, is all three. And products that use all three variable rewards types tend to have a much more habit forming potential. And then the commitment phase, what is it? It's to write back every time you use the system, you commit to it. Because replying to an email is not about immediate rewards, it's about the anticipation of future rewards. And now the cycle begins again. And so now it's more than just the external. Now it's not about the icon on the phone anymore. Now you're checking email when you want to procrastinate, when you're feeling anxious, when you're thinking about others. Now you have internal triggers that you're taking out your phone to check email just because. And now it's a painkiller. We can do the same desire engine very quickly for spectator sports, right? The triggers are everywhere. They're just too numerous to name about why sports are all around us, by the way. There's no judgment about what's good and what's bad. I believe habits can be used for good reasons and bad reasons. As we mentioned before, it's a superpower. So there's nothing necessarily wrong with any of these, but we have to be aware about their habit forming potential. So the trigger is external stimulus. The actions are just to watch the variable rewards. We've got outcome, that's rewards the self. We've got belonging, we've got the tribe, we've got capturing the wind. That's about the hunt. And then the commitment phase, it's about identifying yourself as a fan. Every time you buy something with a team identity, every time you attend an event, every time you have a memory about, this is what I connect with, you're committing to that experience. And so next time when you're at work and you're bored, anxious, you have some kind of pain, you're on espn and this is how we form habits around spectator sports. Let's look at shopping again. Triggers everywhere. Shopping is all around us. The action that's designed for us is to make it easy for us to browse. Right? This isn't about buying yet, it's just about browsing. The variable rewards are about hunting for the object. Right? There's a very analogous experience to finding something that you're shopping for as there is to being on the plains of a savannah looking for food, shopping with friends, that's a social behavior. And then capturing the deal, like actually owning it. I think a big part of Pinterest is about hoarding and collecting and capturing. That's a mastery behavior. And then the commitment phase is about buying, branding yourself, and anchoring based on price. So every time you buy a particular brand, for example, or a particular product, you become a Coke drinker, you become a Gucci wearer, and you become somebody who buys $10 shirts versus $150 shirts. So you start committing to a certain behavior which leads to future behavior. And of course there's all kind of research around the pain alleviating nature of shopping for some people where when they want to feel in control, when they want to feel more powerful, when they want to ease anxiety, they go to shop. So now that we know all this, my plea to you is to use this for good. Create products that help create a better planet for us all. And so this canvas is available to you, I'm available to you, and what I hope you can do is take this canvas and spend a few minutes filling it out for your product and figure out how could we craft our experience before we start messing with UI and all those the nitty gritty of this before we start doing any code. How do we create a product that can be used every day or multiple times per day? So here's how we use As a summary, here's how we use the Desire engine. The first thing is to start with the internal trigger. That's the first place to start. What's the behavior, the internal behavior you want to own before someone else does. What's the emotion or the internal trigger that you want to own? Then think of the external trigger. So eventually you're going to end up with the internal trigger. But your first step is to figure how are you going to reach users in the first place. This is your distribution channel. Then you prompt the user to action. Make sure that action is extremely simple. Think of b mat with every action. Then think of variable rewards. Mix the type, frequency and amplitude of different variable rewards and finally look for the commitment. Look for things that can make the user more likely to go through the desire engine again next time to increase automaticity, to increase habit forming behavior, we increase the speed through each engine and then we increase the number of engines in the flow as well. And then finally we also have to keep the engine novel. We have to change variable rewards mechanisms because users adapt.