All posts tagged habit zone

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  • Practical insights to create habits that stick.
  • Actionable steps for building products people love and can't put down.
  • Behavioral techniques used by Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and others.

What Killed Turntable.fm?

by Nir Eyal in Users with 15 Comments

tumblr_inline_mj26m0Ky5N1qz4rgpNir’s Note: In this guest post, Ryan Hoover, Director of Product at PlayHaven, utilizes my thinking on the “Habit Zone” to shed light on where Turntable.fm fell short. Ryan blogs at ryanhoover.me and you can follow him on Twitter at rrhoover.

Remember Turntable? When it first launched in May of 2011, the music service seemed to own the internet, growing from zero to over 420,000 monthly active users (MAU) only two months later [1]. Unfortunately, that growth didn’t last long as many of its early adopters ditched the service. It is now estimated to have only 20 – 50,000 MAU’s, a fraction of its early peak [2].

As I described nearly two years ago, much of Turntable’s success was due to its well-executed social engagement loop; however, that wasn’t enough. So what went wrong?

Turntable failed to create long-lasting habits [3], leaving it vulnerable to competitors who more quickly became a daily part of users lives. Nir Eyal, a researcher on habit design and blogger at NirAndFar.com, posits that habits form when users have a high perceived utility and use a product frequently. The most sticky products are used multiple times a day. How often have you checked your email or Twitter feed today? In other words, users need to value the product and use it often to form lasting habits and enter the “habit zone” as represented by the graph below.

One of the most common complaints about Turntable is its demand for attention. It is both its greatest strength and weakness.

Read the full post (570 words and 3 images, estimated 2:17 mins reading time)

Getting Your Product Into the Habit Zone

by Nir Eyal in Users with No comments

As the web becomes an increasingly crowded place, users are desperate for solutions to sort through the online clutter. The Internet has become a giant hairball of choice-inhibiting noise and the need to make sense of it all has never been more acute.

Just ask high-flying sites like Pinterest, Reddit, and Tumblr. These curated web portals connect millions of people to information they never knew they were looking for. Some have started monetizing this tremendous flow of traffic and though it’s too early to call winners and losers, their strategy of driving user engagement by creating daily habits is clear. These companies are following a plan implemented by web titans like Amazon and Google and are hoping to yield similar results.

Creating user habits leverages two critical factors that should be considered by every company attempting to build high-engagement products.

Action Without Cognition

Habits are one of the ways the brain learns complex behaviors. In order to allow us to focus our attention on obtaining new insights, neuroscientists believe habitual behaviors are moved to the basal ganglia, an area of the brain associated with actions requiring little or no cognition. Habits form when the brain takes a shortcut and stops actively deliberating about the decision being made.

The brain quickly learns to codify behaviors that provide a solution to whatever problem it encounters. For example, nail biting is a common behavior, which occurs with little or no thought, typically triggered by the unpleasant feeling of stress. The biter associates the satisfaction of nail chomping with the temporary relief it provides. As any habitual nail bitter knows, the conditioned response is extremely difficult to break.

Read the full post (1079 words and 2 images, estimated 4:19 mins reading time)