You'd Be Surprised By What Really Motivates Users-Nir&Far

Hi, I'm Nir Eyal and this is the near and Far Podcast. This podcast is about business, behavior and the brain. On this show, I do a few things. I read quick articles I've written about topics shaping your behavior, I interview authors of books I enjoy, and from time to time I devote episodes to answering your questions. If you want to ask me a question, visit the podcast page on itunes, go to Ratings and Reviews and ask me a question. By leaving a review, I promise to read it and possibly include your question of future episodes. So please ask me anything now. Enjoy the episode and for more, you can always Visit me@nearandfar.com.

You'D be surprised by what really motivates users By Nir Eyal earlier this month, Twitter co founder Biz Stone unveiled his mysterious startup Jelly, the question and answer app that was met with a mix of criticism and head scratching. Techwatchers asked if the world really needed another Q and A service, skeptics questions how it would compete with existing solutions, and pointed to the rocky history of previous products like Mahalo Answers, Formspring, and Aardvark. Sounds great, but one wonders if Biz is being overly optimistic. Aren't we all busy enough? Control for our attention is a constant tug of war as we struggle to keep up with all the demands of our time. Can Jelly realistically help people help one another? For that matter, how does any technology stand a chance of motivating users to do things outside of their normal routines? We hope a few insights gleaned from user psychology may help the Jelly makers improve their jam and provide some tips for anyone building an online community.

The right reward in May 2007, entrepreneur and Internet celebrity Jason Calacanis launched a site called Mahalo. A flagship feature of the new site was a Q and A forum known as Mahalo Answers. Unlike previous Q and A sites, Mahalo utilized a special incentive to get users to ask and answer questions. People who submitted a question would offer a bounty in the form of a virtual currency known as Mahalo Dollars. Then other users would contribute answers to the question, and the best response would receive the bounty, which could be exchanged for real money. By providing a monetary reward. The Mahalo founders believed that they could drive user engagement. The Mahalo founders believed that they could drive user engagement and form new habits. At first, Mahalo garnered significant attention and traffic. At its High Point, over 14 million users worldwide visited the site monthly. But over time, usage stalled. Calacanis blamed Google's algorithm update for having a major negative impact. As Mahalo struggled to retain users another Q and A site began to boom. Quora, launched in 2010 by two former Facebook employees, quickly grew in popularity. Unlike Mahalo, Quora didn't offer a single cent to anyone answering questions. Why, then have users stayed to engage with Quora but not with Mahalo, despite its monetary rewards? In Mahalo's case, executives assumed that paying users would drive repeat engagement with the site. After all, people like money, right? However, Quora demonstrated that social rewards, with the variable reinforcement of recognition from peers, proved to be much more salient motivator. However, Quora demonstrated that social rewards and the variable reinforcement of recognition from peers proved to be a much more salient motivator. Quora instituted an upvoting system that reports user satisfaction with answers and provides a steady stream of social feedback. Quora's rewards have proven more attractive than Mahalo's because of the incentive to answer a question is driven by the anticipation of social, not financial, reward. When it comes to online communities, the need to connect and contribute turns to be a more powerful motivator than collecting cash. Lesson 2 Frequency matters think of the products and services you would identify as habit forming. Odds are most of these services are used daily, if not multiple times per day. For instance, In December of 2013, a remarkable 61.5% of Facebook's over a billion monthly active users returned to the site at least once per day. A survey conducted by the IDC revealed Americans checked Facebook on average of 14 times per day. When it comes to forming habits, frequency matters and studies have demonstrated that how often a behavior occurs is a key factor. When it comes to forming habits, frequency matters and studies have demonstrated that how often a behavior occurs is a key factor in the likelihood of creating a new routine. On Mahalo, only one person was rewarded with monetary bounty, often days after submitting their answer. If payouts were meant to take the form of a game, then the rewards came too infrequently to matter. The same can be said for those asking questions. Relative to the results delivered by Google, Mahalo answers took an eternity. Services that can deliver quick rewards encourage higher frequency use and have an easier time forming new habits. Though it's not as fast as Google Search, Jelly provides feedback relatively quickly. It is not surprising, given his Twitter pedigree, that Biz Stone understands the power of frequent interactions On Twitter. The feedback is fast and often furious. A single tweet can generate favorites retweets replies within seconds. For Jelly to succeed, users must receive frequent reinforcement within 60 seconds of submitting a question. Why do you use Jelly? Four people responded, pulling me back to the app before my grip left my iPhone. When asking a question on Jelly, friends and friends of friends receive a push notification prompting the recipients to help. Unfortunately, to get the notifications, users need to have the app. As one would expect of a fledgling service, Jelly has not yet reached the critical mass of people needed to provide a quick, Twitter like feedback. Users crave for the reward to come fast enough. Not only does Jelly need enough users, but it must also build the right kind of community lesson 3 a community of people whose opinions we care about we are a species that depends on each other. Social rewards are driven by our connectedness with other people. Our brains have adapted to seek rewards that make us feel accepted, attractive, important and included. Many of our institutions and industries are built around these for social reinforcement. From civic to religious groups to spectator sports and the water cooler television shows, the need to feel social connectedness informs our values and drives much of how we spend our time. Sites that leverage these kind of rewards benefit from what psychologist Albert Bandura calls social learning theory. Bandura studied the power of modeling and ascribed special powers to our ability to learn from others. In particular, Bandura showed that people who observe someone being rewarded for a particular behavior are more likely to alter their own beliefs and subsequent actions. However, social rewards are not as meaningful if they come from just anyone. Notably, Banduras showed that when people observed the behavior, people most like themselves or those who were slightly more experienced, social learning worked particularly well. This is exactly the kind of targeted demographic and interest level segmentation that industry specific sites such as Stack Overflow apply. Stack Overflow, the world's largest Q and A site for software developers, generates a staggering 5,000 answers to members questions daily. Many of these responses provide detailed, highly technical and time consuming answers. Users invest effort into what others may see as a burdensome task of writing technical documentation. Like Quora users, Stack Overflow users are not rewarded with money but recognition within the community. Each time a user submits an answer, other members have the opportunity to vote the response up or down. The best responses percolate upwards, accumulating points from their authors. When they reach a certain point level members earn badges which endow special status and privileges. Stack Overflow works because, like all of us, software engineers find satisfaction in contributing to a community. They care about turning a seamlessly mundane task into an engaging game like experience. But on Stack Overflow points are just not empty game mechanic. They confer special value by representing how much someone has contributed to their tribe. Users enjoy the feeling of helping other fellow programmers and earning the respect of people whose opinions they value. Users enjoy the feeling of helping their fellow programmers and earning the respect of people whose opinions they value. Jelly Sweet or sour? Will jelly succeed where other Q and A services failed? It is always hard to predict the success or failure of new, still evolving products. We hope Jelly and other community oriented sites will take lessons from the examples above to provide frequent, meaningful rewards from a community that users care about. By looking to insights from psychology, product designers can increase their odds of forming new user habits.

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