Nir’s Note: This guest post is by Ryan Hoover. Ryan blogs at ryanhoover.me and you can follow him on Twitter at @rrhoover.
When Snapchat first launched, critics discounted the photo-messaging app as a fad – a toy for sexting and selfies. Their judgements were reasonable. It’s impossible to predict the success of a product on day one, let alone its ability to change user behavior. But hindsight is beginning to prove critics wrong.
Snapchat boasts 5 million daily active users sending 200 million photos and videos daily. That’s an average of 40 snaps a day per user! But why are users so engaged to Snapchat? After all, what real need is Snapchat solving anyway? (more…)
Nir’s Note: An edited version of this essay appeared in The Atlantic. Below is my original.
It’s not often an app has the power to keep someone out of a strip club. But according to Bobby Gruenewald, CEO of YouVersion, that’s exactly what his Bible app did. Gruenewald says a user of his app walked into a business of ill repute when suddenly, out of the heavens, he received a notification on his phone. “God’s trying to tell me something!,” Gruenewald recalled the user saying, “I just walked into a strip club — and man — the Bible just texted me!”
YouVersion recently announced its Bible app hit a monumental milestone — placing it among a rare strata of technology companies. (more…)
We are caught in an endless cycle of messaging hell and the pattern is always the same. First, a new communication system is born — take email or Facebook, for example. Ease-of-use helps the product gain wide adoption and reach a critical mass of users. And then things turn ugly.
Some crafty entrepreneur figures out how to exploit the system (more…)
“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…)
Whether designing customer behaviors or your own habits, you’ll benefit from understanding the research I share from user experience design, behavioral economics, and neuroscience.
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