Want people to be your users? Design your registration process first.

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Editor's note: This author Nir Eyal is the founder of several start-ups and is a consultant to several San Francisco Bay Area companies and incubation centers. He focuses on the interdisciplinary field of psychology, technology and business, as well as a lecturer at Stanford University Graduate School. This article mainly through the "desire to the engine" concept of the model, detailing how the designer should design the product registration process. For ordinary visitors to become your users, the design of the registration process is not taken for granted.

You must allow users to register on your product before you can change the world, go public in your company, or have millions of of loyal users have to use your product. In any industry, building a portal for people to use a product is critical, especially for web and mobile applications. Distractions are everywhere, and you want them to be registered as your users? It's not easy.

But if done well, the user registration process can be the first step in developing user habits. Products that need to be used consistently are designed to trigger, act, reward, and invest in a fixed design pattern called the Desire engine. It allows designers to efficiently design repetitive behaviors. The registration process can also be the first to start a desire engine pass.

Pull the trigger, trigger.

The first step for users to register is to let users in. But a successful trigger will not only be a simple portal, but it may also be the beginning of a new habit for the user to remember. Josh Elman, an early product manager who worked in Linkedin,facebook,twitter, called the Trigger "implant (Inception)" (Yes, and inception in "Inception"). "Implant is the idea of why and when the product will be useful to some people." "When a user triggers the first recognition of the product through an external trigger, such as through an invitation to join an email, a link in a social networking site, a paid ad or a recommendation for a word-of-mouth marketing." The information passed must be consistent. "People need to talk about your product in the same way anytime," Elman said.

The question of "What this product is for" should be linked to "when the product can be used". In other words, such implants are associated with your product and at some point in the life of your users.

Instagram is doing well on implants when it comes to attracting users. Before registering, Instagram triggered some new Facebook users and introduced the product to capture and share important moments of life with better photos.

When new users follow the link to Instagram's homepage, they see how their friends use the product and get more answers to the question "What Instagram is". With just two clicks, this service effectively brings users into the world and teaches them what the product does.

Of course, not all triggers have the same effect. The best triggers can connect people's behavior with the product. And a new action that can be linked to existing behavior can be easier than creating a new one. New habits are like the surface of the pearl, and the gravel inside the pearl is the behavior of the user before, it provides a new habit attached to the basis of cohesion.

By triggering, Instagram the habit of taking photos of mobile phones before. In the process, they trained users to use Instagram instead of using a native app to take pictures.

To cause to operate or act

After the trigger has explained what the product is doing, the next step in the registration process is to let the user take action-"register". The Stanford BJ Fogg study found that reducing the amount of work required to complete an action increases the likelihood that the action will be implemented. So simplifying the sign-up experience is critical. But it's harder to do than to say. Simplifying the registration experience is not easy, especially for immature products that do not yet know which features are most valuable.

Take Twitter for example. Today the company is praised for its elegant user interface, but it's not always like this. In the 09, Twitter's registration page was a bunch of distracting information. "Twitter is a ... blablabla ..... Is the answer to the simple question, "What are you doing?" ”

By the year 2010, this registration page has been upgraded to a much simpler design. This makes it clearer what the company's intentions are for visitors--you can search for Twitter content or register directly--but that's not good enough.

Today, after about a year of updates, this registration page points to the company's intent to register the user. This design reduces the friction required to allow the user to take the desired behavior of the company, simply log in or register.

Give rewards

Next, it's time to give a little love to the users you serve. They learned what the service was and took the first step to use it. Now it's time to lure them with good things, get their dopamine secreted, and want more.

Studies of the importance of incentive mechanisms can be traced back to Waston,pavlov and Sknner. Behavioral psychology has explained how rewards drive endless stimulus exploration. Giving variable rewards is a powerful way to develop habits. It can be said that when a behavior can produce unequal sizes of benefits, users will increase this action. The core of many addictive behaviors is often variable rewards. In fact, this kind of behavior is not legal, but it also shows the effectiveness of the method (such as slot machines).

With good use, variable rewards can be a good way for users to continue to participate, motivate them, and even drive them to commit to further use of the service. Participation in the attempt and exploration of rewards allows the user to remain involved.

Companies that attract users through variable rewards have the ability to turn users into active users. Interestingly, some of the variable incentives used by Silicon Valley's successful companies are not the same as most people think of the slot machine mechanism. For example, Pinterest a more subtle, but still powerful, variable reward mechanism into their home page-stimulating the user with a buffet-style and an eye-pleasing picture that brings infinite pleasure. The beauty map of food, children, half-naked and handicrafts attracts users to constantly scroll the mouse, endlessly searching for the next interesting thing. When users really fall in love with the site, or love the site to give them the feeling, then they are ready to join Pinterest become registered users.

Invest in the future

Many companies are afraid to ask users to do something. They follow the mantra: Good design should be free from the user's usual, do not want to use the way, can save the user's click to save as much as possible. But they often forget that asking users to do something for them can be a good thing. In fact, doing a good job will give people a higher opinion of the outcome. A Harvard study has suggested the concept of "Ikea effect", referring to "the work of assembling furniture at home is enough to give customers more affection for the furniture they make." ”

This principle applies to the installation of furniture also applies to the use of the app. Because the company never at the right time to ask users to do something, lost the user's commitment to the product opportunities.

Let's take a look at two efficiency App,astrid and any.do. They are all designed to help users get things done. Astrid uses several bullet-type navigation screens to guide the user. This is often used in the design style, through a beautiful interface, a multi-step task to simplify a few pieces of single step of the action, making it easier for users to digest these operations. The user simply slides the screen.

But maybe the process is too easy. And how many users actually stop to look at the instructions when they can quickly sweep through each step to see what happens next? Users will only skip every little text that wants them to understand how to use the app. Although Astrid is actually useful, they should ask users to do something in the registration process. Follow through and make a commitment to the product investment through these small actions.

Looking at any.do again, it requires the user to do more in the registration process. In Any.do, users need to use the app effectively to understand how the app is used to complete registration. They need to do exactly what the mission demands. The "finger right sweep completes the task" can make the default task that the app requires disappear. These are more work than Astrid registrations, but they also help users better use them in the future.

Summary

The registration process model, as an example, explains how to use triggers, actions, rewards, and user investments to develop user habits. Designers can combine these four strengths in their apps and Web sites to create user behavior habits. Obviously, the steps to register a process are one-off, and the benefits of this model can only be used once.

But for those who need users to continue to use the product, whether the effective use of "desire engine" may lead to the final product success or failure of the outcome. Executing this pattern in the registration process can take advantage of the user's most active time learning and using the service. The user's acceptance of the app won't last long, and designers need to be on the right track against the clock.