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Variable Rewards: Want To Hook Users? Drive Them Crazy

Variable Rewards: Want To Hook Users? Drive Them Crazy

Here’s the gist:
    • Rather than using conventional feedback loops, companies today are employing a new, stronger habit-forming mechanism to hook users—the Hooked Model.
    • At the heart of the Hooked Model is a variable schedule of rewards: a powerful hack that focuses attention, provides pleasure, and infatuates the mind.
    • Our search for variable rewards is about an endless desire for three types of rewards: those of the tribe, the hunt and the self.
(more…)
How to Design Behavior (The Behavior Change Matrix)

How to Design Behavior (The Behavior Change Matrix)

Here’s the gist:

  • The rising interest in the science of designing behavior has also sprouted dozens of competing — and at times conflicting — methodologies.
  • Though the authors often flaunt their way as the only way, there are distinct use cases for when each method is appropriate.
  • Behavior modification methods fall into four distinct types: amateur, expert, habitué, and addict.
  • Each behavior type requires the use of the appropriate technique to be effective. Using the wrong method leads to frustration and failure.

Everyone suddenly seems interested in messing with your head.  (more…)

The Hooked Model: How to Manufacture Desire in 4 Steps

The Hooked Model: How to Manufacture Desire in 4 Steps

Type the name of almost any successful consumer web company into your search bar and add the word “addict” after it. Go ahead, I’ll wait. Try “Facebook addict” or “Twitter addict” or even “Pinterest addict” and you’ll soon get a slew of results from hooked users and observers deriding the narcotic-like properties of these web sites. How is it that these companies, producing little more than bits of code displayed on a screen, can seemingly control users’ minds? Why are these sites so engaging and what does their power mean for the future of the web?

The Hooked Model

We’re on the precipice of a new era of the web. As infinite distractions compete for our attention, companies are learning to master new tactics (more…)

User Habits: Why Startups Must Be Behavior Experts

NOTE: This post originally appeared in Techcrunch

Here’s the gist:

  • In the age of infinite online distractions, successful web businesses must generate new user habits to stay relevant.
  • The strength of a web company’s user habits will increasingly equate to its economic value.
  • Forming strong user habits is more important than viral growth.
  • The Curated Web will run on habits.

Face it; you’re hooked. It’s your uncontrollable urge to (more…)

Forming New Habits: Train to be an Amateur, Not an Expert

Note: I’m proud to have co-authored this post with my good friend Charles Wang.  Charles is a co-founder of LUMOback, a former classmate, and an accomplished psychiatrist.  He brings a great perspective to the art of Behavior Engineering.

Here’s the gist:

  • Forming new habits requires a unique set of techniques.
  • Training to become an expert has a completely different methodology than becoming an amateur.
  • Using the wrong technique will doom your good intentions.

 

Today’s top selling books are about how to acquire world-class skill. Daniel Coyle’s, The Talent Code looks at how deliberate practice is required to achieve greatness.  Joshua Foer shows us how we must smash past performance plateaus to be any good.  Worse, Tim Ferris’s 4-Hour series is doing for hipsters what crash diets do for teenage girls, making promises of quick transformations.

These authors’ methods work.  Yet, they are all dead wrong.   (more…)