Let your product be user-engageable

Editor's Note: Nir Eyal is already the founder of two start-up companies and a consultant to several businesses and incubators in the San Francisco area. He is also a lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and is well-versed in the areas of psychology, technology and business.

Building products should try to be simple and easy to use, this should be the science and technology circle to follow the same principle. The rise of design thinking (illustrated by the case of design-winning iPhones) At first it seemed to me that developing a beautiful interface was just a hallmark of good design. However, as with all attempts to establish absolute rules for human interaction in science and technology, the principle that design should reduce the workload of users is not absolutely true. In fact, the cleavage you want to create a popular user favorite products, then let users involved is a key factor.

Many studies have shown that working on a task seems to stimulate our engagement. For example, when buying a lotto, players will have two choices, one is to choose a group of numbers, and the other is to randomly pick a group of numbers. To be sure, both options have no effect on improving the winning rate. Traditional thinking predicts that users prefer a more relaxed way, that is, the way you do not have to spend much energy.

However, it is not. Although it takes more effort to choose your own lottery numbers (the process is like filling in the SAT multiple choice questions), we found that this type of user chooses numbers more highly. Users here are not just influenced by their perception of luck. According to Ellen Langler's classic case study, even when players are explicitly informed of their chances of winning, they tend to be more time-consuming and laborious to pick numbers themselves.

The above case can be explained by the word escalations of commitment, which means that even if my heart is already aware that the decision is wrong, I will put more effort into laying down more input costs. It tends to make human brains interesting. For example, many people die of being addicted to video games too deep; many people love to do charity out of this principle; and forcing prisoners of war to take advantage of this theory. Input sense far-reaching impact, it's our way of doing things, buying behavior and their own perceptions have a significant impact.

Fully devoted

I have done some research on habit-forming products, and the last step in "desire-driven" is user engagement. When a user is motivated to take action and gets immediate feedback, he or she enters the user engagement phase and starts to work in the product. Here, users typically value the system in terms of contributing time, money, physical strength, social capital, or personal data.

As with any other feedback loop, the signals, actions, and reward feedback loops are all represented by a series of behaviors. Whenever users want to get feedback, they all do something specific. For example, why did you read this article? You may feel a little boring, hoping to find some interesting reading. Because of the boredom you got, there is now an action to read this article, and you hope to get some feedback.

However, this is a bit different from how products are appealing to users. The human brain has a unique system that allows us to constantly seek feedback and the brain to adapt slowly to new things. Slowly, what looks new and interesting before will also become normal and boring. In order to provide continuous fresh stimulation to the brain, the product should be continuously upgraded to attract users to reuse it. Therefore, the user's input stage is crucial.

With the expected psychology of future feedback, the user's contribution to the product is rather different from that in the standardized feedback loop. The input involved here is the expected psychology of the user on the future feedback rather than the timely response. With a little effort, users are more likely to continue using the product in the future. Such as Twitter, its users into specific forms is concerned. As users are motivated by something new and interesting, they start putting in action - focusing on some of the new and interesting users. Of course, there will not be timely feedback and satisfaction after the attention, but doing so will make the service more valuable and users are more likely to visit again next time.

Another example is LinkedIn, which understands how important it is for the product to succeed in getting users to contribute to the site. As Josh Elman, the company's early senior product manager, put it, "If we can make users contribute a bit of information, they are much more likely to visit again, and we allow users to enter themselves as they sign up The current job title, and then the content will entice them to come back again. "Some of the user's contributions, plus the job information that the system can provide to the user, keep the user coming back.

To attract users to invest as a strategy

There is an inherent trigger in the theory of habit-forming technology that allows people to desire to use the product and create spontaneous movements. Whenever triggered by a particular emotion or situation, the user voluntarily uses the service. Putting in here is like pulling a user back from the line. The purpose is to allow users to form a spontaneous unconscious return visit. For this reason, developing products based on custom forming technology can add value to the product. Value will be added to the system in two ways.

Store value

Every time a user enters data, it creates a store value. While Evernote, Salesforce, and Pandora's product cases do not address the strong desire of users, they have created a habit for users to devote a small amount of work to the community. Habits are behaviors that occur without awareness or with a little bit of awareness, so they appear to satisfy the concepts discussed here. People use these store value products so much that they become part of everyday life. The more you put in, the less you realize this action. Evernote's "smile map" to show that, as users spend more time on Evernote, people's activity is changing.

The game is another product that uses value-based storage technology, which has led to crazier consumer products as it puts players in every go-and-go. Players get more points, upgrade, earn money to buy virtual goods, such as buying cattle for their own farms and buying clothes for their own avatars. If the player stopped once, these things are gone. Here, the storage value of game elements must be relied on for time consumption or cash purchase.

Network value

As the number of users increases, the value of the product itself will also improve, and the network effect begins to work. Such networked businesses are generally more likely to impress investors because they are considered to have the potential to become the industry standard and make it hard for competitors to look back. Like the traditional fax and phone industries, Ebay, Skype, AirBnB, Pinterest and some established tech companies will do even better if they attract more users to the Web.

Storage Value + Network Effect = Killer 锏

When storage value and network effects come into play simultaneously, user input becomes more valuable. Both Facebook and Pinterest services are useful value storage products, and as the network effects begin to exert their power, product use begins to explode. Both products are accustomed to the formation of technology products, able to attract a large number of spontaneous return visit. The combination of storage value and network effects, along with the constant contribution of users (content added during the specified period), has attracted a large number of users to keep returning visits.

When this pattern of triggers, actions, feedbacks, and injections drives user behavior, the habit-forming technology comes into play and the product is constantly adding value. The more the user contributes to the product with a small amount of input, the service is more valuable to their life and the user is more satisfied with the product.

Of course, users will not be addicted to your product forever. Although many businesses are doing well today, the next major event on the Internet is inevitable, and we should be better able to attract users to invest in it. With the current view that the simpler and easier to use user experience is still dominant, we should keep in mind that the more users use the product, the greater the value of the service.