All posts tagged investment

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How Investment Drives Engagement (Slides)

by Nir Eyal in Users with 1 Comment

This week, Baba Shiv and I taught a class at the Stanford Graduate School of Business called, “Using Neuroscience to Influence Human Behavior.” The course focused on the science behind how consumers make decisions.

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

This 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 this topic 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.

Investment Phase of Desire Engine

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Designing User Habits Video

by Nir Eyal in Users with 1 Comment

Video from my recent talk at the Designers + Geeks Meetup in San Francisco on August 1st, 2012.

Note: This talk is similar to my “Behavior by Design” talk but has approximately 20% new material.

If you’re reading this over email and the video does not appear, click the link below:

http://www.nirandfar.com/2012/08/designing-user-habits-video.html

This is Your Brain On Boarding: How to Turn Visitors Into Users

by Nir Eyal in Users with 11 Comments

Before you can change the world, before your company can IPO, before getting millions of loyal users to wonder how they ever lived without your service, people need to on-board. Building the on-ramp to using your product is critical in every industry, but few more so than in the ADD world of web and mobile apps. Distractions are everywhere, vying for user mindshare and threatening to pull them off the road to using your products like the donut shops and strip clubs at a trucker’s rest stop.

However, done correctly, the on-boarding process can be the first step in creating strong user habits. Products that create repeat behaviors tend to follow a consistent design pattern of a trigger, action, reward, and investment, which I’ve described as the Desire Engine. This pattern is effective when used to craft behaviors that the designer intends to be repeated regularly. The on-boarding process can be the first of several passes through the Desire Engine.

Pulling the Trigger

The first step is bringing users in. But a successful trigger is much more than just a way to drive traffic, it’s an opportunity to start imprinting new routines. Josh Elman, an early product manager at a string of successful companies, including LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, describes this as the point of “inception”– yes, like the movie. “Inception is about implanting an idea about why and when the product is useful for someone.” Since a user’s first awareness of a product depends on an external trigger, such as a call-to-action in an email, a link on a social media site, paid advertising, or a word-of-mouth recommendation, the message must be consistent. “People need to talk about your product the same way, each and every time,” Elman says.

Read the full post (1607 words and 9 images, estimated 6:26 mins reading time)