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Mass Persuasion, One User At A Time

Personalized persuasion outperforms traditional persuasion methods

“Successful entrepreneurs recommend reading this article about the persuasion techniques companies use to drive engagement.”

Scratch that, how’s this? “Tons of people are tweeting this article. Find out why.”

OK, here’s one more. “This article will only be on the TechCrunch front page for a few hours before fading into the information abyss.”

Perhaps your preference for one of the opening lines above is a matter of taste, but for companies leveraging the explosion of personalized data, (more…)

Getting Your Product Into the Habit Zone

In the Habit Zone

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, (more…)

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…)

Designing User Habits Video

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

Note: This Designing User Habits 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:

https://www.nirandfar.com/designing-user-habits-video/

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User Investment: Make Your Users Do the Work

Paying attention to user investment helps create products users loveThe belief that products should always be as easy to use as possible is a sacred cow of the tech world. The rise of design thinking, coinciding with beautiful new products like the iPhone, has led some to conclude that creating slick interfaces is a hallmark of great design. But, like all attempts to create absolute rules (more…)