Designing User Habits

Who hasn't been to one of these before? Oh, wow. Okay, so a lot of new folks, so excellent. Well, welcome. So the way this typically goes is we'll have the speaker, which tonight is Nir, talking about designing behaviors and addictive products and things like that. Nir is a former entrepreneur and investor, a product Designer, contributor to TechCrunch, Forbes, bunch of different places. So he has some awesome things to share with us tonight. After his talk, I'll do a quick session called Shout Outs, where basically I'll take one of these microphones and give it to anyone that wants to basically talk to people about a certain project or network or whoever's hiring, whoever wants to jump in the cage, match. You can come up and I'll give you the microphone for 15 seconds. So just be ready for that. And then after that, we'll just network and have some more of the pizza and the beer and stuff. So without further ado, I'll turn it over to Nir. Thank you.

Thanks. All right, so can you hear me? Okay? It's working. Yeah, not yet. Still off, huh? Testing any better? Ok, I'll just talk loudly. Can you guys hear me in the back? Okay. No, you can't hear me in the back. Can't hear in the back. Should I use the mic? Check my butt. Okay. All right, well, we'll start going. I'll try and talk really loud. If you can't hear, then just wave at me. Oh, good. Great, great, great, great. Okay, so let me start out by saying that talking to 200 designers is really intimidating. These slides do not look beautiful. I apologize in advance. Beautiful slides are not my specialty. But if you're really annoyed with how ugly these slides are, please help me. I would love your help. So, all right, let's get started. So let me start out by giving you some advice on advice. What kind of advice should you listen to? And the reason I want to start with this is because there is a heck of a lot of advice these days about design. And so I think there's three things that you should look for for good advice. Number one is advice that helps you build something people want. And we've heard this before, but to me, fundamentally, the advice you should listen to and your metric for what kind of advice to not listen to is advice that helps you get through the build, measure, learn, loop the quickest. Right? The sooner you can validate your hypotheses about your business, the better off you're going to be. So that's rule number one. Rule number two, wrong way Rule number two, it has to fit your business model. Every business model is different, Every business is different. And the advice that you listen to needs to be appropriate for your particular business. And rule number three, it needs to fulfill your purpose in life. And this is the most important of the three and the one that we don't talk about enough. Because before we're designers, before we're entrepreneurs, before we're trying to do our day to day jobs, we're human beings and we only have one life on earth to fulfill that purpose. So here's the thing, I'm going to try and do all three. I'm going to give you advice that relates to all three. And that's a super tall order, but I'll try my best. But there's two conditions. Okay? So if, number one, if your business model, that second point depends on regular engagements, then that's good, you can stick around. Because not every business does, right? A lot of businesses, in fact most businesses don't rely on regular engagements, right? Businesses that are driven through SEM aren't necessarily, don't require daily user engagement. They bring a customer, they sell them a product and they never see the customer again. If that's your kind of business. You may want to go see a movie tonight instead of listening to me. But. Oh, the second condition, you can't be evil. The second condition here is you cannot be evil. Because what I'm about to share with you can be used for good or evil. So if you're evil, no harm, no foul, you can go do something else tonight. Okay? Anybody want to leave? No? Oh, okay, good. We have Satan sitting in the second row. Okay. So if you meet these conditions, you have a product that you need customers to use regularly and you're not evil. Stick around. And here's the spoiler. The answer is habits. Maybe you've heard that I talk about this stuff, but I love habit design. That's where I think there's a lot of answers that solve these three elements of advice that I think is worth listening to. All centers around habits. So why do I think this is such a big deal? Well, it turns out that habits are more important than a lot of the other advice that you might be getting these days. So one thing I hear time and time again is about how important virality is, that every investor needs startups to have viral elements in the product. But let's test if that's really true before you start looking at the slide. Follow me along here. If you remove one of the elements, let's say you have a business that's just viral, has a very high viral coefficient but very low habit score. You have a leaky bucket, lots of users in and lots of users out because they're not being retained. So you get spammy Facebook apps, you get ringtone businesses, you get companies that get very big and then fall off. Of course, if you have a low habit score and a low viral coefficient, well that's garbage. It's not worth talking about, right? But here's the takeaway here. You can get big slow by creating user habits. There are lots of fantastic companies like Evernote, Amazon, Pandora that get better by becoming critical to users lives daily habits that users are interacting with their product. The product gets better and better the more the user uses them. Of course, if you have both, that's fantastic. Lucky you. That's a once in a decade type business. So how did I start. Sorry? How did I start studying habit design? And why did I start studying habit design? So I started two companies, the last of which was called Ad Nectar. And we were at the intersection of advertising and gaming. These are two industries that when we're honest about ourselves, they kind of specialize in mind control, right? Advertising is a $27 billion annual business and they don't spend that kind of money for their health. They spend that money because it gets people to do something, gets people to buy products that they wouldn't otherwise buy. And gaming, well, we've all seen these crazy behaviors that social gaming encourages, right? Many of us scratch our heads sometimes when we see the things that people do on games. So I was at the intersection of both of these businesses and I started to ask myself why? What are the secrets around creating these type of behaviors? And at my last company, one thing I think we did, or we could have done better is that we had a penchant for building too soon. And that's kind of counterintuitive, right? Because in the build, measure, loop, why do we always start with build? How many people have seen the build, measure, learn loop? How many people have seen this before? Okay, almost everybody, right? We've seen Lean product development, Lean ux, Lean is very big. Lean is all about reducing waste, right? So the idea is we don't want to waterfall things and project out what they're going to be like years in the future. We want to build, measure, learn as we're building the product. The problem is we always start with building, but building is the most important, is the most expensive phase. Why don't we start with learning? So what I wanted to do was start to learn. If your business model depends on habits, if it depends on daily interactions with your customers, what do you need to learn about those customers? To see if a habit is even possible? To see if that daily interaction is even possible. So I set out to start learning. So when Adnector sold, I had some time on my hands and I started looking for patterns. I started looking for fundamental elements around these businesses that I saw were creating these daily user habits. And particularly I started looking at the habits that I had trouble explaining. So I call these businesses OMG Businesses. And we've all seen them. These are businesses that you see for the first time. They look like a cute little toy. Okay, it's nice, it's cute. Two years later, they're huge. Can anybody name any companies like that? They've, they've judged it first as a toy and then gets huge.

Twitter.

Twitter, what else? Zynga, Instagram. Anybody else?

Second Life.

Second Life. Okay, Second Life maybe didn't get as I guess got bigger than maybe some expected. But these examples of OMG businesses are great. We all saw them, they were okay. And then wow, all of a sudden they got really big and they became habits in users lives daily. And so I started by asking this fundamental question that almost every investor will ask at some point. Are these products vitamins or painkillers? We know that a painkiller. Everybody wants to invest in painkillers. Painkillers are products that address a clear blatant need. Right? Fix the pain. That's what painkillers do. They have quantifiable markets, they're easy to monetize. Every investor wants to invest in a painkiller, a product users really need. Vitamins? Not so much. If you've ever pitched to a vc, probably the most likely reason you've been dinged is, you know, it's a vitamin. You don't really need it. Vitamins get bought because of emotion. You don't have to have a vitamin. They have unknown markets. They make you feel better, but you don't really need them. So here's the paradox. These OMG businesses we just talked about, what are they? Are they vitamins or are they painkillers? How many people think they're vitamins? Raise your hand if you think they're vitamins. How many people think they're painkillers? Wow. Small minority people. Interesting. Before you make up your mind, let me posit this thought. A habit is when not doing something causes you pain. A habit is when not doing something causes you pain. So here's My take on it, it's kind of a trick question. These OMG businesses, habit forming products, start off as vitamins, pleasure seeking behaviors, and they move us to become painkillers. They move us to alleviate pain. They create the need and they sell us the remedy. That's the nature of habit forming products. And you're thinking to yourself, wait a minute, creating pain? I thought this presentation was for people who are not evil. Are we okay with creating pain? Well, it's actually more of an itch. And if you want to feel that itch, let's do a quick experiment. Everybody close your eyes, please. I can see you, so close your eyes and think about the phone that you have in your pocket or in your purse. Think about your phone. And on your phone this very second, wouldn't you know, it's somebody texted you, Somebody sent you an SMS text, okay? Somebody you know is trying to tell you something and you can't reach it. Don't pick. Hey, sir, do not pick up your sms. That guy was trying to pick up his phone. What do you feel right now? Do you feel that itch? Do you feel that bit of stress that need to. I wanna just check and see real quick. Let me see what somebody's doing. Okay, go ahead and open your eyes. That's the itch I'm talking about, okay? That bit of stress that you feel. And it's actually a biological stressor. That itch is stressful. It's a form of pain. Okay? So we're not talking about hurting people. We're just talking about the itch. So this is a bit of manipulation. And let's admit it, a lot of what we do as designers is user manipulation. But I think that there's a time and a place where user manipulation is okay and is actually altruistic. Okay? So what I created. When we're starting, before, we ask ourselves, can we design a habit? Because I think a lot of things can be designed into habits. We should ask ourselves, should we design the habit and the way. So I created a quick matrix that you can use to ask yourself if you're okay with creating a habit. And here's the way I judge it for myself, feel free to use this for yourself. This isn't about judging other people, by the way, only for yourself. If you use the product and you believe it materially improves people's lives, you're a facilitator. I say addict away. It's okay to create habits in that respect because you're the user. You're creating it to improve Your own life, that's the condition. Improves materially improves users lives and you use it. If you fall in this quadrant of creating a product that doesn't really improve users lives, but you use it, you're an entertainer. We had Pac man, we had movies come out. Songs become addictive for a while. We hear them in our heads until we can't get them out and the next song comes in. There's a certain type of trait to an entertainment business and that's that it's hit driven. There's nothing wrong morally about hooking people to an entertainment product, but it has a certain characteristic, it comes and go, right? So we have Pac man, then we had Super Mario Brothers, Farmville. It comes and goes. So that's a characteristic you need to be aware of if you're building these type of products. What I see much more often are peddler businesses. Businesses that people believe materially improve other people's lives but they don't use themselves. Again, there's nothing. This isn't to judge people, this is to judge yourself and how you spend your human capital. But that's an area where you have a high likelihood of failure. So it's not that it's morally reprehensible, it's that your odds of success are very, very low. Why? Because you don't understand the customer. You really have to understand the user enough to build a habit. And if that user is not you, you're going to have a very, very, very difficult time. And then finally, if you're building a product that doesn't improve people's lives and you don't use. Well, I would call that a dealer or an exploiter. So again, this is not for people to judge others, this is to help you allocate your human capital. So the takeaway here is that the best chance of success is where you find founder market fit. We talk about product market fit a lot, but we don't talk about enough. Is founder market fit? Your best chance of success is to build a product for yourself and that it materially improves people's lives. Okay, so one thing that we have an opportunity to do here today is that for the first time, this trifecta of greater access to our users, with greater amounts of personal data and at greater speeds than ever before creates a tremendous opportunity. We've never had this kind of opportunity to create the kind of addictive potential that we have today. Everything, as Paul Graham said, everything that's connected is becoming a more and more addictive. So that presents a tremendous opportunity to do good as long as you're using that facilitator mindset. So let's get into the nuts and bolts. So how do we actually create that itch? How do we create that desire? I created this desire engine to illustrate how a product can take us from pleasure seeking to pain alleviating in a process, through the flow. So if you think about this as a user's first experience with a product to becoming a habit forming product in between, we have a series of desire engines. What differentiates each desire engine is that the action changes what the user does. The behavior changes within each desire engine. And I call it a desire engine because it has like an internal combustion engine, it has four phases. So we're going to look at those four phases. Now there's the trigger, the action, the variable reward and the investment. These are the four phases. Now I create a mnemonic. This is the first time I've used this. So let's see if this works. So who here had an Atari growing up? Ok, good. A lot of you, the way you spell Atari, A, T, A, R, I, that's the mnemonic. When you think about remembering this guy near, from near and far that told you about this desire engine, that's how you remember it. Ok, Atari. So A is a desire engine. I cheated on the first one. T is trigger, action, reward, investment. Okay, Remember Atari? So let's start with the trigger. The trigger is the cue. Just like the spark plug in an internal combustion engine. The trigger gets us to act. And triggers come in two forms, external triggers and internal triggers. An external trigger is defined as something where the context of what to do, what should you do next? The next action is embedded within the product, within the trigger. So if you think of an alarm, advertising calls to actions, emails, stores, they're telling you what to do. When the context of what to do next is embedded, it's an external trigger. Unlike an internal trigger. Internal trigger are when the context of what to do next is in the user's mind. By the way, these slides are going to be available later in case you don't want to be writing feverishly. So when the context of what to do next is in the user's head, it's an internal trigger. So emotions, situations, places, people, these are all examples of internal triggers. What you do next is in the user's mind. Now here's an important thing to recognize. To create a habit, you need that internal trigger. But behaviors don't come out of thin air. They're built upon like the layers of a Pearl. They start with a small behavior, they smart with an existing behavior, and they're built upon layer upon layer upon layer. If you look at the cross section of a pearl, you will see those layers. So what do you do to find that internal trigger? Well, the first thing you need to do is to figure out what you're attaching to because you always need to attach an existing behavior, an existing internal trigger to, to attach a new behavior to. You need to figure out when the user will engage and build a narrative around it. So if you ever heard Jack Dorsey talks about this, he does a beautiful job of talking about the narrative they built at Twitter. They really understood, almost like a play, a real narrative around where they use the product in the user's life. So you need to have that narrative. And here's something that's not often understood is that the most frequent internal triggers are negative emotions. So this is brand new research that a professor that I'm co teaching with in the fall at Stanford just had this research guys by the name of Baba Shiv. His research details about how frequently negative emotions trigger us to action. So what do you do when you're stressed? A smoker would smoke. What do you do when you're bored? Facebook user might use Facebook. It alleviates some kind of small pain so that the user can quickly alleviate that pain with some kind of action. One of the characteristics of a habit forming product, one of those patterns is that habit forming products provide a solution to an internally triggered problem. The more times the brain is in this state of stress, is in a state of pain, and can quickly alleviate that pain, the more time it automatically goes for that solution. A habit is when there's little to no cognition. And the more times the user knows what the solution is to alleviate that pain, that stress, the more time they rely on that particular solution. Okay, so let's talk about the external trigger. So in order to form that internal trigger someday, in order to attach to that, to that emotion, for example, we first need to start with nuts and bolts, right? With an external trigger that has a call to action. What we need here is a consistent call to action. We need it to be embedded with what the product is for. It needs to communicate very clearly when to use the product. So let's do a quick case study. Who here uses Instagram? Okay, a lot of people. Great, love it. What is Instagram's external triggers? I'm giving you some hints. What kind of external triggers does Instagram use to pull users in to get them to start using? Yeah, a Cute baby. Where? Where would you see it? Okay, so that's what you would do to you take a picture of the baby. Okay, so let me back up a second. Does the baby tell you to take a picture of me on Instagram? No, but it's embedded. It's embedded. So that's the user saying, cute baby. That's the internal trigger. Right. I see a moment that is worthy of Instagram. I'm going to capture that moment and take a picture of it through Instagram. I would say that's an internal trigger. What's an external trigger? Something where the call to action is part of the experience.

Yeah.

When would you see that? Like at a party. Okay. At a party. So I think that's also an internal trigger. Right. You're. If somebody else is telling you, oh, if they say, hey, take a picture on Instagram. Yeah, great. Okay. I was just going to say, I.

Don'T want to lose this. Which is like, I guess an internal trigger.

Exactly. That's another internal trigger. Lots of internal triggers. Okay, good. Yeah, There we go. That's what I was hoping for. Right. Most people find an external trigger about Instagram on a Facebook newsfeed. The first time you started using Instagram, you probably heard about it because of a newsfeed post. That's an external trigger. It says here, when you hover over, it says, Instagram is a fast, beautiful, blah, blah, blah. Here's how you use the product. This is what the product is for. That's an external trigger. When you go to the site right after you click on that photo, this is what you see. It also tells you how to use the product. And you also see, just by how others use it what the product is for. It's for capturing these moments in your life. The internal trigger, which lots of people saw, because I can tell there's lots of Instagram users here. You think about the moments in your life when you use it. It's exactly this. It's this fear of losing the moment. So the external triggers all tell you, here's what to do next. Here's how you should use this app. And the internal triggers start with your self trigger to do them. The context of what to do next is within your head. Cue baby capture. That's what they want. That's awesome. They've won the battle if they can get you to do that eventually. After repeated use, the internal triggers expand now every time because they have social elements in the app as well. Every time you're bored, every time you have a few extra minutes you're lonesome, you're curious. Now you're using the app for a whole host. Host of other reasons. So all these triggers are leading us to the next phase, which is the action phase. The action phase is about when doing is easier than thinking. Automaticity habits, repeat behaviors, are all about fast decisions where the brain doesn't have to think. And the best way I know how to express how this happens is Dr. B.J. fogg's behavior model. Has anybody seen this? Oh, good. So most of you haven't. This is pretty cool stuff. So Dr. BJ Fong teaches at the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab, and he poses this simple model for all behavior. So to have a behavior that's B, you need three elements. M, A, and T. Motivation, ability, and trigger occurring at the same time. Motivation, we all know that's easy, right? That's how bad you want to do something. Ability is how difficult something is to do. So if something is very easy, it's over here. Something is very difficult, it's over here. And triggers. We know what triggers are. We just talked about them. Let's give an example to really make this sink in. A phone rings and you don't pick it up. Why didn't you pick it up in real life? Telemarketer. Telemarketer. So what was that? You knew it was a telemarketer. You. Your motivation was very low. Okay, so you're way down here. It didn't cross the threshold to have the behavior. What's another reason? You're busy. You're busy. So if you're too busy, it's too difficult. Right? It's not socially acceptable. You can't reach it. You're doing something else. It's too difficult. You don't pick it up. Even if you really want to pick up the phone, you can't. It's too difficult. What's another reason? Somebody said you can't hear, Right? So if you're super motivated to pick up the call. Right? Very motivated. It's really easy. The phone is right there. But you know what? It was on vibrate. He didn't hear it. It was on silent, not vibrate. No trigger. So you have to. For every behavior, for every action you need the user to take, you need all three motivation, ability, and trigger occurring at the same time. The 3L. What was that? Loss of ability. Big time. You're right. Uh. Oh. Oh. I have no idea what's going on here. Sorry. Let's try that again. Okay. Back in business. So sorry about that. Okay. So let's see this in action here. So Facebook sends me a notification message to tell me somebody likes my blog. The intended action for them is to get me back onto Facebook. So how are they using B mat here? Well, for one, they know my motivation is high, right? There's motivation for social cohesion. There's hope here, right? There's motivation for me to check out the message. They've given me a lot of ability. It's very easy, right? They have lots of white space. They've made it very easy from a cognitive perspective to tell me what to do here. And they've got tons of triggers, they've got four triggers that tell me to go to the exact same place. So they've used B mat very efficiently to get the intended action. Now the reason that we find that cross functional teams are so good together is because you need these three disciplines working in unison to, to effectively create actions. So motivation tends to be the realm of marketing. To really understand what motivates your customer, your user. This is the realm of marketing. To make the product easy to use, to deal with ability. This is the product group. And then in terms of triggers, how to efficiently guide users down a path. This is the interface design. So this is why cross functional teams tend to work so well. So after we've triggered the user, we, we've created the action, next comes the reward. And specifically. So in a lot of times anybody has read about feedback loops or reinforcement loops, you've seen reward before. But there's a special kind of reward that we see in habit forming businesses. Habit forming businesses across the board tend to have a variable reward. Variable rewards were first described by B.F. skinner back in the 1950s and 60s when he would take, in his case it was a pigeon, put him in a Skinner box and he would give them a lever. Every time they would push a lever, they would get some kind of reward. In their case it was a food pellet. When there was a predictable reward, meaning if the pigeon hit the lever, they would get one pellet. The pigeon only ate when they were hungry. But if there was an intermittent reward, if it was variable, meaning every time the pigeon hit the lever, they would get maybe two pellets. Next time they would get no pellet. What would happen is that it would create desire, it would create this insatiable urge to keep pressing. And that's where he recorded the greatest number of presses was when the pigeon was trying to figure out what the cause and effect was. And so this variable reward is the source of curiosity, bringing sense out of chaos. Bringing order to chaos is endemic to our species, actually to lots of species. Species that have this ability to figure out order from chaos do better because we crave predictabilities. So when we don't have predictability, when we can't figure out cause and effect, it drives us nuts. We hit that lever insatiably. But here's the important thing to remember. The brain is not built for satisfaction. The brain is not built to reward us. Mick Jagger was right. You can't get no satisfaction. He's absolutely right. Because satisfaction is not evolutionarily beneficial. What is evolutionary beneficial is the search, the endless search. In fact, recent research, about five years ago, we discovered that dopamine is not about reward at all. Dopamine spikes before the reward in anticipation of the reward. It's not the happy chemical that we get after the reward. It incentivizes us to keep searching and searching and searching. That's what benefits the species. So if it's all about the search, how do we build that into our product? Well, there's three types of searches, right? There's three types of insatiable searches that we humans crave. The search for rewards of the tribe, the search for rewards of the hunt, and the search for rewards of the self. The search for the rewards of the tribe are about social rewards. This is about acceptance, about power, about sex. These are rewards that come from others around us. Then we have the search for resources. So this comes out of our need 200,000 years ago, when our species was looking for food. Today, in modern society, food gets translated into money. In even more modern society, for information workers, information gets translated into money and then food. Finally, the search for sensation. So this is where a lot of game mechanics come from. The search for this insatiable hunt for rewards of the self, our need for mastery, for consistency, for competency, for purpose. The same thing that drives a player on World of Warcraft to complete just another level is the same reason why I bet you can't not open your unread email messages. That itch, you have to just get that one last message that says it's unread. That's the rewards of the self, that sense of completion, mastery to have control over your environment. So let's do a quick pop quiz here. Slot machines. A billion dollars a day in the United States is put into slot machines. What kind of variable rewards are at play here? Hunt. Right. Clearly, that's probably the top motivator, is the search for resources. But there's also, as you can see, the social element. And there's also rewards of the self. Right. So flashing lights are a sensory stimulus. So trying to bring order to all this chaos that they put you in is a sensory reward. Let's do spectator sports. What's the variable reward system here? Tribe. Right. Very big tribalism instinct here. Right. And then there's also for the rewards of the self, whether you're going to win. Right. You transpose yourself into the game, and there's this huge variable reward around whether you through your team will be victorious, whether you will master the game. All right, let's do the newsfeed. What's at play here? Self. Why self?

Because you're getting information.

Yep. Okay, so there's the sense of completion here. Right. There's a defined beginning. Where the heck's a defined end? You just keep searching and searching and searching. And there's also the element of the hunt that information is. This is where we see information and of course, the social element of rewards of the tribe, because this is where we communicate with others around us. Why is it that this mechanism, by the way, is so popular? Have you ever noticed that in every social product, in every Web 2.0 product, we see the feed. Why is that? Because this is such a fantastic slot machine, right? Searching and searching with the flick of a wrist, with a flick of a thumb, we can keep searching endlessly. In fact, you know who does this incredibly well is Pinterest. Very high density of information, Lots of sexy rewards that we endlessly search for. So this came off of a pin board on Pinterest called Pinterest Addicts. That's where I found this. And it has a guy. I'm not sure if you can read in the back there. It has a guy at the top, says, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll. And he has a little, like, half smile. Ha ha. Scroll, scroll, scroll. That's exactly what's going on. It's the endless search. It's the endless hunt for more content. Not satiating it, but endlessly searching. That's the purpose of variable rewards. So when we put variable rewards into our products, there are three things we can play with. We can play with the type. The more different types you have rewards of the hunt, tribe, and self, the more different ones you can have how often you provide the reward and how great the reward frequency and amplitude. Finally, the last step is the investment phase. So this is something that I've never seen before in other models of reinforcement or in other feedback loops, but is critical for product design. You need to ask for an investment. So what is an investment? An investment is the bit of work that the user does. It's the value they put in the system in anticipation of future rewards. It's where the user pays with time, money, social capital, physical effort, emotional commitment, or personal data. It's where the bills get paid. Essentially, it's where the user does work. And it turns out that doing work actually binds the user to the action and makes it more likely to do next time. So let me give you a couple examples. By the way, this is really counterintuitive because everything you've been told as designers before has probably been minimize effort, right? We're all supposed to minimize the effort of the user, make it easy. I'm telling you that that's wrong if done at the wrong time. Sometimes it's right if you're trying to incentivize the action, make it easy. But if you want to incentivize returning, you need a bit of investment. You need to make it a little bit difficult at the right time. So here's some evidence of that. People who pick their own lottery numbers. Has anybody ever, like, I'm sure some of you have played the lottery, right? Anybody played the lottery, where you actually have to fill in these bubble sheets? This is not a good user experience. This is a pain in the ass to pick your numbers. This is like taking the SATs, okay? This is not easy. And yet people who do this play more. This study was done in isolation. It wasn't a lottery study. But there was several studies been done that show that the more effort you put into picking your numbers, they're more likely to play and you'll actually take worse odds if you spent the time to pick your own numbers. So people value doing the work of picking their own numbers more highly. Here's another example of that. Palo Alto, 1966. Researchers went to two groups of homeowners and they asked these Homeowners, excuse me, Mr. And Mrs. Homeowner, we'd love for you to put this sign. There's a very important message on this sign. It says, drive carefully. And we need you to put this sign in your lawn. Now, this sign is kind of big. It's about 4ft wide. It's pretty much going to take up most of your lawn. It's pretty huge. Will you put it in your lawn? Group one, 83% says, no way. Group two, 76% say, fine, let's do it. What's the difference? The difference is commitment. The difference is that bit of investment. What I didn't tell you is that group number two, two weeks prior was asked to put up a three inch sign on their lawn. A three inch sign that said the exact same words, drive carefully. And it was tiny. Almost 100% of respondents said, sure, put it on my lawn. That bit of commitment had a huge impact two weeks later when they were asked to put the large sign. Little commitments, little investments make a big difference. Investments. This phase of building investments into your product, this last phase of the designer engine is about the anticipation of future rewards. They make the next action, the next cycle through the desire engine more likely. Let me show you how one particular product does that. Anybody here use any do? Few anydo users. Okay. So any do has a particularly innovative onboarding process in which they actually ask the user to do work. They ask the user to invest in the product the first time they use it, and they do that by actually telling them what to do in the app itself. So it's a to do list and it tells you tap and hold to drag me around, swipe to the right to complete, tap to add a reminder or share. And you can't see the other screens here, but they make you by the time, by the first time you use the app, they make you do something that sets a reminder or that invest in the usage of the app. What does this give them? 1. You're starting to learn how to use the product. You're starting to invest in the product and you've loaded the next trigger because now they have an external trigger to bring you back to the app. So you set a reminder, remind me tomorrow to buy some milk. And now the app has an external trigger to re engage you. So that little bit of effort at the end of the desire engine is critical. So now I've shown you the design engine canvas. It's meant to be a canvas. It's meant to be a sounding board. Here's when it works. The two conditions when design engines work best is when you have a frequent behavior with fast cycles. So don't use the desire engine to try and create behaviors that you only want to see once. Okay, so if you, you know, logging into the Facebook, logging in through Facebook is not necessarily a behavior you need to create a desire engine around, but if you have an action that you want the user to want to do, you want to create an itch around that behavior. That's where you use the desire engine. If you had these two conditions of a frequent behavior. So if you have a behavior that occurs once a month, you may have a problem. Those behaviors are very difficult to create habits around. And if you have a behavior where the user can't go through all four phases of the desire engine, trigger, action, reward, investment. If they can't go through all four of those within a session, you may have a problem as well. Because the more gap there is between those phases, the less likely the user is to complete all four and the less likely a cycle is to be completed. But if you can have a frequent behavior that goes through all four phases, here's what happens. Back to BJ Fogg's behavior model. When we start using the product, it's a vitamin, it's nice to have. It's a pleasure seeking behavior. We do it because it's easy, right? This is the ability line. Very easy to do. Maybe we have low motivation, but the more we use the product, the more we cycle through these desire engines, we go up the motivation curve and we're able to do more work. This is where it becomes a painkiller. The user is actually able to do more work because they become more motivated. So how do you use it? The desire engine helps you prioritize hypotheses of what to build next. Remember my first piece of advice that you should actually listen to things that help you go through the build, measure, loop faster. The desire engine will help you come up with hypotheses to test that have some kind of psychological framework to them. So you can use a desire engine to come up with the hypotheses for what to test. First, second, third. So here's how we use it. Start with the intended action. Every desire engine, that's second block. That's where you start. Every desire engine has to have its own discrete simple action. So ask yourself, what behavior does your business depend upon? First and foremost, what does your business model depend on? If it depends on a regular behavior, what is that distinct action? Make it very simple and defined. For example, we want the user to desire to scroll. For example, if you're Pinterest, we want them to understand that this is the behavior that the product is built around. Next, think about what the internal trigger will be. What's the existing behavior attaching to and when would the user engage? So what's the narrative? Every time you blank. Every time you verb use the product, that's the internal trigger phase of every time you see a cute baby, that's an Instagram moment. You need to understand what that internal trigger that you're forming will be. Next, take it to the external trigger stage. So if we want to capture if that's what the Instagram moment needs to be. What do we need to do today to capture that external trigger trigger to bring them into the product? And to do that, the call to action needs to be embedded with the answer to the question, what is the product for? And as we saw with Instagram, they showed you by showing you how your friends use the product, they taught you what the product is actually for. Fourth step here is to add is to add. The variable rewards. So this is very important. So a lot of people ask, well, where does gamification fit in? Gamification has elements. One of gamification elements is variable rewards. It's something that you can use. The rule is that it has to be meaningful and authentic. So this goes back to that manipulation matrix, right? If you're a peddler, you're going to do stupid shit like putting in badges where they don't belong. And if you do that, you're doing that because you're thinking, well, I don't really like it, I don't really use it, but the user will and you'll get it wrong. I don't have any problem with badges and points. If they're authentic, if you would use them, put them in, that's great. But if you're thinking it's going to be for somebody else and they're not authentic, they're not meaningful, it's going to flop. So the first thing has to be meaningful and authentic and then you can play around with different types of rewards. The more different types tribe, hunt and self variable rewards you have, the more powerful and you can also play around with frequency and amplitude of those rewards and then finally ask for the investment. So ask yourself, does this increase the likelihood of the next engagement? Do you have some kind of bit of work that the user puts into the system that makes the next cycle through the desire engine more likely? And this is in the form of time, money, social capital, data, emotional commitment, physical effort. So finally, parting thought, be the facilitator. Okay, I'm going to borrow very loosely from Gandhi and ask that you build the products, build the change you want to see in the world. Thank you very much. One last thing. I'm going to take some questions, but one last thing. Can everybody raise their phone in the air for a second? Everybody get their phone up? Okay, awesome. Love it. Please go to this website, type this in as a URL five question survey. Love your opinions, love your feedback on how I can improve the presentation, what you thought of it, and then if you complete that presentation, your reward is the slides. So you go straight to a link to the slides after the five question survey and I'd love to take some questions. Yes.

Hence they don't understand the other aspects of it.

What do you mean they don't understand.

Certain people skewed to think. Okay, you just think by yourself and hence you understand stuff like elements like misfeed and don't understand, so on and so forth.

So I think when it comes to variable rewards, which ones you use needs to be authentic. So if your community is one where rewards of the tribe matter more, great. But it won't work if that's not what the community is looking for. If they're not authentic for that community is that kind of. The ones that are most powerful are the ones that can engage all three. I think the best products have a bit of the search for rewards of the hunt tribe and self within their products. But there seems to be always one of the three that raises above the rest that users really come to engage with the product for.

Well, my question was do people skew towards like people as individuals? Do they relate more to one concept more than the other?

Oh, you know, I don't know. I'm not even going to try and make up an answer because I really don't know. I don't know what's more powerful. Tribe hunter stuff. What do you think?

I think different people are like they skew towards one or the other. Could be there's a concept in like EC clinics and places like that where they use motivational interviewing. Figure out where people skew. So that's a place you can start with motivation.

Yeah. Yes sir.

You spoke about the habits and stuff and I just want to commend you on your semantics and it's well thought out and stuff. But have you ever liked consider like what I would consider like a virtual handicap where physical interaction is degraded through technology and within your research or work. Do you ever dwell in that area before?

So the question was, does do technologies take away from.

Well, they do. I was asking if you ever thought about the. Like I said, the virtual handicap, you know, where people are so enthralled and so within their technology that they lose track of physical interaction. I mean it's quite obvious that people no longer know how to communicate or to speak with people now due to the fact that social media and technology is ubiquitous. I was just wondering if you ever.

Considered, I think it's a great question, this question of are we losing the ability to interact with each other in the real world because we're so tied to our technologies. I actually wrote an article that was in TechCrunch called the Strange Sex Habits of Silicon Valley, which was all about, like talking about physical interaction. So I wrote about how technologies, particularly, this is a very intimate article, how technologies kept my wife and I from being romantic because we had a plugged bedroom, right? We had a computer and we had iPad and we had our phones and we had to take all that stuff out. We had to remove all the triggers so that we could have a normal relationship and actually talk at night as opposed to doing this and this. So I think. So there's two reasons I do this stuff, okay? Reason number one is because we need to understand, as the world becomes more addictive, we need to understand how to not be manipulated because the addictive potential is growing faster than we can build antibodies, right? So, you know, we're the guinea pigs right now, right? The generation in the 1940s that was pushed cigarettes by Ronald Reagan, they didn't know either, right? They were the guinea pigs of that generation. We're the guinea pigs of the Internet generation. We don't know what this technology is doing to us. So we need to be careful and cautious. The way to understand this and diffuse it is to understand what's going on, right? To understand the phases of what's happening to us. So we can begin to put barriers and say, oh, you know what? I'm being manipulated by this product. I'm losing something in my life. How do I stop that? So for me, it was. Removing the triggers was one way. The second reason I do this is to start using these same principles. I don't make a judgment on whether technology is good or bad. I'm not a Luddite. I love technology. What I'm trying to do, the second purpose of why I do what I do is to start using this for good so that we have more technologies that help us be better. That's this push for being authentic entrepreneurs to create products that create long term benefit for users. So I think that that's a big motivation for me. Yes, sir.

Say I'm evil and I want to use this to get kids to start smoking. Can this system be used to combat evil uses of the same system? Which is one part of the question, and I don't want you to. You can either say yes or no. You don't have to like, say how or is there another counter system that could be used that the antithesis that could be used to combat the evil uses of it or for evil purposes to combat the Good purposes of this system.

I missed you on the evil versus evil versus evil. So can you make it. Can you try again.

To combat evil behavior like smoking in America or obesity?

Can you stop behavior using this?

Yes.

Yes. Okay. Yes, you can. So I write about the personal implications of this for this audience. I wanted to just talk about how do you design products with this, given the audience? But absolutely. So I've used that in my own life to a tremendous degree. Right. So after adnactor sold, I wanted to really focus on. On taking some time to improve myself and try and figure this out, all out. And so I use these techniques. So when I wanted to stop a behavior, I broke the desire engine. So when I looked at my life and I saw when was I doing things that I wasn't happy with? Right. When was I being manipulated by things in my environment? For example, television. I've had this habit every time when I would come home. The trigger was being tired. The pain that was in that was the internal trigger was a negative emotion of feeling tired. My internal trigger was then to turn on the television. That was the habit. Well, instead I said, the rule is I can't watch television unless I'm doing something I want to be doing, like working out. So I still got the rewards. Television is a variable reward system in itself. The pleasure that comes out of television is a variable reward system. But I manipulated where that experience is in the desire engine to make the action a positive one. Instead of sitting on the couch, the action was working out. So I kind of life hacked using this stuff to create new behaviors and stop doing old behaviors that I didn't like. So yes, I think it can be used for that.

And for one more.

Yeah, yeah. What's your advice for designing around behaviors that don't lend themselves to desire entrance? So behaviors that are not as frequent or just don't move as fast. I don't have advice for that. That was the precondition. It has to be like, my stuff is only useful. There's lots of people who write about landing page optimization and making things easier. I think actually BJ's work is good for that. Right. Singular behaviors. Singular actions that you're trying to make easier. So increase ability, increase motivation, make clear triggers. That's how you get solitary actions. That's the best advice I know about. Great. Is that it? Or just do one more. Okay, sure. Yeah. Could you share with us how you.

Come up with the engine?

And also one startup that's done tuned the entire engine really successfully. Okay. So the question was how did I come up with a desire engine and an example of a startup that used it successfully. Okay, let me try without blanking out again here like we did in a minute. Let me actually. Do you guys want to do email or Twitter or farmville? Not farmville, not farmville. Twitter. Twitter. Okay, so here's the Twitter desire engine. No, it's not. Ta da. Okay, here's the Twitter from the consumer aspect, right? Because remember, every time there's a different action, you need a new desire engine. By the way, these slides will also be up. There's several examples of different desire engines for different companies. So the action, remember we start with the intended action. The action is the scroll. What Twitter wants you to do as a consumer of information is learn the scroll. Get addicted to the scroll. The reward, I think primarily is the hunt for information. The investment is the follow. Why is the follow not an action? Because it's about the anticipation of future reward. You don't get, you know, bling, bling, you followed somebody. You don't get any kind of rewards, magic sounds, or a badge for following. It's about the anticipation of future rewards. The investment creates future triggers, but also creates future external triggers by building community, et cetera, right? So let's say you're a consumer at first, right? So you're just taking in information. But I don't think you're addicted yet. At this point. By the way, when you become addicted to Twitter is when you become a content creator. This is where you become hooked to Twitter. Because now the action they want you to take is to retweet or tweet. And notice following the fog behavior model. Why is the retweet so darn powerful? Because it's so easy. They moved everybody's ability curve dramatically to the right now you don't have to think of a blog post, of course, that's way too hard. You don't even have to think of a Facebook post where you can write all you want.

How?

140 characters, that's all you can do. They made it super, super simple. Or even better, just push retweet. They increase people down. They push people down the ability curve to make the behavior even easier. So the action is a tweet or a retweet. The reward now becomes a different reward. Now it's about social reward. How many people retweeted my stuff, what kind of comments do I get, et cetera. And every time I put into the system, I reply back, I direct message someone, I comment on somebody, those are all investments for future boards where now the product can trigger me with external triggers to say, hey, there's some kind of interaction here. I do this enough times. I go through the engine enough times. And now I'm using it for the internal trigger of boredom, curiosity, feeling lonesome. I'm at a red light. Good. Love to keep answering, but I'll be around too. By the way, if anybody wants to come up for Q and A, and if we don't have time today, if for some reason you don't have time, my email is just nearal.com you can always email me.

Big round of applause. Thank you.

Thanks. I'll take you to your slides. Here's your slides.