Nir Eyal explains why some notifications feel magical and others feel like spam. External triggers work only when they match what users actually feel in that moment, like sending a message when someone is bored or lonely. Timing matters more than frequency.
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Hi, I'm Nir Eyal, author of how to Build Habit Forming Products. And today I want to talk about triggers, good triggers and bad triggers. A question I get all the time is how do I know how to send out good triggers? Quick refresher, in case you haven't had a chance to check out my book, there are two types of triggers, internal triggers and external triggers. External triggers are things that tell us what to do next. Click here. Buy now. Play this. A friend telling you through word of mouth about a great new product you should try out. Those are all examples of external triggers. But maybe even more important when it comes to forming habits is creating an association with an internal trigger. Internal triggers are things where the information for what to do is stored as a memory or an association inside the user's head. What we do when we're in a particular place, partaking in a routine around certain people, and most frequently when we experience a certain type of emotion. Most frequent internal triggers are negative emotions when we're feeling down, lonely, fatigued, lost, bored. All of these are internal triggers. These are pain points. These are things that don't feel good. And so our job as product designers is to solve people's pain. We don't create internal triggers, we find them. That's your job as a product maker, As a business owner, your job is to find those internal triggers and satisfy them. We want to stop the user's pain, scratch their itch, but we've got to be able to articulate what that itch is that occurs frequently enough to form our habit around. Once we know that internal trigger, now we can figure out how to send a good external trigger. One of the mistakes I see companies making all the time is not considering the internal trigger when sending out the external trigger. The difference between an external trigger that feels like spam and one that feels like magic is one word, and that word is context. If you can send the external trigger the moment the user feels that internal trigger, that's magic. That's your challenge as a product designer. How can you fix the user's problem? How can you cater to that pain point the moment they're most likely to feel that itch? There's so many things we can do today to send people a notification, send an external trigger when they're most likely to need our product or service. We can use calendar information, we can use geolocation, we can use good old common sense around when someone's most likely to need our product. So don't just send notifications and external triggers whenever you'd like. Consider the user's emotional state. Consider when they're most likely to experience that internal trigger. Thanks for watching. Good luck. And send me more questions over Facebook, over Twitter, right here on Snapchat. And you can always find me@nearandfar.com.
