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Teach or Hook? What’s the Real Goal of Online Education?

Nir’s Note: This guest post is written by Ali Rushdan Tariq. Ali writes about design, entrepreneurship, creativity and innovation on his blog, The Innovator’s Odyssey.

As I clicked the big green “Take This Course” button, I became acutely aware of an uneasy feeling. This would be the 22nd course I’d have signed up for on Udemy.com, one of the world’s leading platforms for teaching and learning classes online. I had become a binge-learner.

Or had I? After scanning my enrolled course list, I gathered the following stats: (more…)

How You Can Help Users Change Habits

Nir’s Note: This guest post comes from Stephen Wendel, Principal Scientist at HelloWallet and the author of Designing for Behavior Change. Steve’s new book is about how to apply behavioral economics to product development. Follow him on twitter @sawendel.

Help users change habits

It can be extraordinarily difficult to stop habits head-on. Brain damage, surgery, even Alzheimer’s disease and dementia sometimes fail to stop them.1Eldridge, Laura L., Donna Masterman, and Barbara J. Knowlton. 2002. “Intact Implicit Habit Learning in Alzheimer’s Disease.” Behavioral Neuroscience 116 (4): 722. But why are they so difficult to change? (more…)

References[+]

New Video – “Hooked: Building Habit-Forming Products”

My latest video overview of the “Hooked Model

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How Investment Drives Engagement (Slides)

This week, focused on the science behind how consumers make decisions.

During the class, we walked through my Hooked Model, a four-step cycle that creates preferences and usage habits. Readers of my blog will be familiar with the Hooked Model but I wanted to share some slides regarding one particular part of the Hooked Model, the “investment phase”.

The investment phase involves customers doing a bit of “work”, which commits them to the usage of the product. Investment makes re-engaging with the product more likely, and with the slides below, I try to explain why.

Slides from the Investment Phase discussion are below and I apologize for not having a voiceover to go with them yet. I’ll be writing more on the investment phase in the coming weeks but wanted to share some of the research into the topic.

Also, more slides from the class are available on my Scribd page here.

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Where Have The Users Gone?

Variability keeps users engaged

Step 1: Build an app. Step 2: Get users hooked to it. Step 3: Profit. It sounds simple and, given our umbilical ties to cell phones, social media, and email inboxes, it may even sound plausible. Recently, tech entrepreneurs and investors have started to look to psychology for ways to strike it rich by altering user behavior. Perhaps you’ve read essays on how to create habit-forming technology and figured you’d give it a shot?

Well hold your dogs Pavlov! Though I’m an advocate for understanding user behavior to build high-engagement products, the reality is that (more…)