Steps to create user habits

The real great consumer technology companies of the past 25 years have one thing in common: they can create habits. This distinguishes the world-changing company from mediocre companies. Every day, most of the users are using Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Twitter products, and their products are so successful that many of us can hardly imagine what life would be like without them.

Creating habits is easier said than done. Although I have written about the importance of behavioral engineering and the habits of the future Internet world, there is not much resources for entrepreneurs to get the tools they need to design and measure user habits. This is not to say that these technologies/methods do not exist, in fact, these companies are familiar with such things. But for entrepreneurs, they are shrouded in mystery.

I have studied the methods used by the best companies in the industry and have integrated them, which I call "Habit testing", which consumer internet companies can use to create products that users not only love but also "hook up" with.

Habit Test

The habit test fits well with the "build, test, learn" methodology advocated by the actionable, and provides a new way to make the data available. Habit tests help you figure out three questions: 1 Who your fans are (and 2) (if any) what part of your product is addictive, and 3 why the parts of your product are addictive.

One of the prerequisites for a habit test is to have a product come out first and "run". Of course, even before the introduction of the smallest possible product (minimal viable product), it is best to test whether your business model is reliable and how your product can arouse the user's desire.

Once your site or application is online, you can start  data. The habit test is not to all the data, but to the data of the right things, then it is very important to establish the proper analysis method. To make a habit test work, you have to keep track of the user's habits on your site.

First step –identify (recognition)

After you have the necessary website and relevant data, you have to answer the first question of the habit test: "Who are the habitual users?" First, define the meaning of your loyal users. Ask yourself how often a user "should" use the site. In other words, if one day your site's bugs are eliminated, the product can be fully taken out, you expect a habit users will often on your site?

Please be frank with reality. If your company does a mobile social application that is similar to Foursquare or Instagram, you will expect custom users to open the application several times a day. However, if you are doing a movie recommendation site, such as Flixster, you don't think that users will be able to visit more than two times in a week. Please don't have too bold a hypothesis; you just need to make a realistic guess to quantify how often users use the site.

One convenient way is to average how often you and your company use your products. Of course, the more people involved. Twitter is a product of the Odeo company (Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey), because Odeo engineers love it.

Note that the higher the frequency of your product usage, the more likely it is to form user habits. This is not to say that the use of less Internet products is not good, they just can not form a habit, but there are other different characteristics. feasible, but can not form a habit of products generally more biased to transactional (transactional), and therefore need to constantly remind customers, so as not to forget.

For example, in the tourism industry, general customers because the use of tourism services are not frequent and can not form a habit. The two online travel companies, Expedia and Travelocity, have spared no effort to compete for consumer attention. These are both feasible and profitable businesses/companies, but they will face more competition threats because they offer products that are not custom-formed. Products that are used every day naturally produce market entry barriers.

Who developed the habit?

Now that you know how often users "should" use your site, you can start to determine how many users have achieved the goal. At this time, a good statistical talent can be useful. You don't have to get your engineers or business people to do it, just hire a graduate student who is proficient in statistics. The best approach is to do a dating analysis (cohort analyses) that provides a baseline for measuring future product iterations.

Step two –codify (carefully recorded)

In general, you will have at least a few active users, and their interaction is often enough to be called a loyal user. But how many loyal users are enough? In my experience, almost 5% of the total number of users. To keep your company/business going, you need a much higher percentage of active users, but 5% is a good benchmark for doing custom testing.

However, if even 5% of users feel that the value of your product is not enough for them to use as well as you expect, then you have a big problem. Maybe you should go back to the whiteboard and rethink your vision. But assuming you've exceeded the standard and determined which ones are your habitual users, the next step is to codify (carefully record) the steps they use to make your product, so that you can understand exactly what "hooked" them.

There are subtle differences between each user and your product. Even if you have a standard user process, users will also produce a unique fingerprint of data in the process of using your site, which can be analyzed to find patterns. Take a closer look at the data and see if there are any similar behaviors. You'd better find a "Habit path"-a series of similar behaviors common to your most loyal group of users.

At the very beginning, for example, Twitter found that once new users were focused on enough other users, they would reach a tipping point that would significantly increase their chances of continuing to use the site. Each company has a different set of loyal users, and the purpose of finding a custom path is to determine which of these steps is critical to creating a loyal user.

Figuring out what they're thinking.

After you've figured out the habit path, the next step is to think about what's going on in this path that makes "passerby B" a loyal user. This step is somewhat like the assumption of causality from relativity (assuming causation from correlation), but in the fog of developing new products, this is usually our best bet.

This phase is a good time to communicate face-to-face with the user to learn more about why and how they use the product. The habit test is to find out what is unique about these "early supporters" and to explore the insights that can be earlyvangelists to other users.

Step three –modify (debugging)

With new assumptions in mind, you can go back to the "build, measure, learn" cycle and bring new users to the same custom path as loyal users. For example, as Twitter leverages their customary path, it is the right to start to focus on others as soon as they sign up for a new user.

Custom testing is a continuous process, and the company can launch every new feature and every iteration of the product. Tracking users through a dating study and comparing their behavior with custom users can guide the evolution and improvement of the product and foster the formation of habits.

In many cases, technology entrepreneurs will find that their vision is understood only because they are unaware of the importance of creating user habits. Unfortunately, on the consumer Internet we are faced with more and more interference every day, if a product can not create habits, it simply can not exist. By using a custom test to determine what the most valuable and familiar part of a product is, entrepreneurs can better serve their users and increase the probability of successfully building a world-changing company.

Original English: Hooking-users-in-3-steps