Nir’s Note: In this guest post, Ryan Hoover takes a look at how new behaviors are shaping tech opportunities. Ryan blogs at ryanhoover.me and you can follow him on Twitter at rrhoover.
Startups that build a product attached to nascent behaviors have an opportunity to form habits before anyone else. First mover advantage matters. Once a habit is formed, it’s difficult to change and often provides a sustained competitive advantage.
In order to mine for yet untapped opportunities, I began to observe my own behaviors and those of people around me:
How is my daily routine different than last year?
What new behaviors have I seen amongst my social circles (online and off)?
How are “normals” engaging with technology in new ways?
Here are some of the nascent behaviors I’ve observed:
- Gamification of Life – Have you noticed how different teens and pre-teens use social networks? From my observations following my younger cousins and other’s writing on the topic, younger audiences are in constant competition with one another, using Instagram, Facebook, and other platforms as a game. Teens perceive follower counts, likes, and other forms of social currency seriously, directly prompting others to reciprocate.
- Diverse Media Expression – In 2009, the primary form of self-expression online was in text via the “status update”. Today we see a variety of mediums used to express oneself: stylized photos on Instagram, micro-videos on Vine, animated GIFs on Cinemagram, ephemeral pics on Snapchat, anonymous photo-captions on Whisper, doodles on MessageMe, and so on. MessageMe, recent addition to the booming mobile messaging market, has embraced this behavioral shift, enabling users to communicate through photos, video, voice, music, location, and (my personaly favorite) doodles within a single experience.
- 24/7 Asynchronous Messaging – Mobile messaging apps are blowing up and for some, become the primary form of communication. These experiences are not simply a replacement to traditional SMS, a communication protocol primarily designed for one-to-one messaging. This new breed of apps are designed for one-to-many communication as group chats organically form amongst friends, family, and colleagues. In doing so, a single message is broadcasted to not one, but many people, amplifying spread and instigating further communication more than ever before. These little devices in our pocket become a chatterbox of discussion, connecting us more frequently than ever before.
- Microtransactions – Far from new, the growing adoption of microtransactions in mobile gaming will continue to bleed into other markets. As friction is removed and the behavior becomes routine, new opportunities will emerge. We’re seeing this in content publishing as startups like Flattr and CentUp attempt to benefit from this change.
- Second Screens – Second screen usage is becoming the norm. In a study by Business Insider, more than 80% of 18 to 24-year-olds reported using their phone while watching TV. I see this in my own behavior as well as I context switch back-and-forth between the TV and my phone.
- Lightweight Reciprocation – The “like” has had a tremendous influence on the web and our connectedness between one another. Nearly every social product has some form of lightweight interaction to give users a quick way to acknowledge each other’s contributions with little cognitive overhead. This is becoming increasingly prevalent as we “favorite” a tweet, “heart” an Instagram photo, and “like” a Facebook post. As a result, more signals of reciprocation are triggered, re-engaging users. But do these lightweight interactions lead to less meaningful interactions and thoughtful engagement? Are we conditioning people to interact mindlessly?
I find that I am most creative and insightful when consciously observing human behavior. Observe yourself. Observe others. Seek anomalies. You never know what insights you might uncover.
What nascent behaviors do you see and what business opportunities do you think they create?
Photo credit: Lettuce
NOTE: This guest post was written by Ryan Hoover
Top Consumer Psychology Articles
- The One Fitness App That Hooked Me For Good
- Here’s How Fortnite ‘Hooked’ Millions
- How Apps Can Shape Your Future Self
- How Netflix’s Customer Obsession Created a Customer Obsession
- Want to Design User Behavior? Pass the ‘Regret Test’ First
- How to Trigger Product Usage that Sticks
- How to Get People to Help Each Other, Online and Off
- Here’s How Amazon’s Alexa Hooks You
- How to Use Psychology to Make Persuasive Video
- How to Use Personality Science to Drive Online Conversions
- The Unbelievable Future of Habit-Forming Technology
- The Secret Marketing Power of Evolutionary Psychology
- Don’t Ask People What They Want, Watch What They Do
- How Cognitive Biases Can Help (and Hurt) Your Business
- What Most People Don’t Know About Behavioral Design
- How to Start a Career in Behavioral Design
- Your World is Full of Placebo Buttons (and That’s a Good Thing)
- How to Build Technology that Feels Like a Friend
- 3 Pillars of the Most Successful Tech Products
- Here’s How to Ethically Manipulate Other People
- How Two Companies Hooked Customers On Products They Rarely Use
- How to Hook Users in 3 Steps: An Intro to Habit Testing
- Die Dashboards, Die! Why Conversations Will Reinvent Software
- The Secret to Sending Emails and Notifications That Work
- How to Win Your Competition’s Customers
- Hooked for Good: How Habit-Forming Products Improve Lives
- Good Products Start With Good Questions
- Human + A.I. = Your Digital Future
- Why ‘Assistant-As-App’ Might Be the Next Big Tech Trend
- People Don’t Want Something Truly New, They Want the Familiar Done Differently.
- 4 Ways to Win Your Competitor’s Customer Habits (Slides)
- Here’s Why You’ll Hate the Apple Watch (and the Important Business Lesson You Need to Know)
- The Secret Psychology of Snapchat
- The Psychology of Notifications: How to Send Triggers that Work
- How Technology Tricks You Into Tipping More
- The Limits of Loyalty: When Habits Change, You’re Toast
- 4 Ways to Use Psychology to Win Your Competition’s Customers
- The Real Reason “Stupid” Startups Raise So Much Money
- The Psychology Behind Why We Can’t Stop Messaging
- The Psychology of a Billion-Dollar Enterprise App: Why is Slack so Habit-Forming?
- Framing Reward is as Important as Reward Itself
- A Free Course on User Behavior
- It’s Not All Fun And Games: The Pros and Cons of Gamification at Work
- Getting Traction: How to Hook New Users
- Designing for Behavior Change Book Review
- The Sneaky Trick Behind the Explosive Growth of the Kardashian Game
- How Successful Companies Design for Users’ Multi-Device Lives
- The Link Between Habits and User Satisfaction
- What Triggers The Best Word of Mouth Marketing?
- What Tech Companies Can Learn from Rehab
- The Secrets of Addictive Online Auctions
- Teach or Hook? What’s the Real Goal of Online Education?
- Using Mind Control to Raise Startup Cash
- How To Build Habits In A Multi-Device World
- How To Cope with Your Insane Jealousy Of The WhatsApp Deal
- Why Do Fads Fade? The Inevitable Death Of Flappy Bird
- You’d Be Surprised By What Really Motivates Users
- Nostalgia: A Product Designer’s Secret Weapon
- How You Can Help Users Change Habits
- Is “Lean Startup” Right for Your Idea?
- Hunting for Habits: Keying in on smart design to make a product irresistible
- Are Companies Too Obsessed With Growth? How to Measure Habits
- Refresh: The App a Secret Agent Would Love
- Angel or Devil: Who’s Really Investing In Your Start-Up?
- In 10 Years, We Won’t Use Personal Technology
- 4 Simple Things I Did to Control My Bad Tech Habits
- “Yes, And”: The Two Words that Created a #1 App
- From Laid to Paid: How Tinder Set Fire to Online Dating
- What if In-App Purchases Came to Real Life?
- Hooking Users One Snapchat at a Time
- How To Save Your Startup From The “Spotlight Effect”
- Bible App: Getting 100 Million Downloads is More Psychology Than Miracles
- How to Boost Desire Using the Psychology of Scarcity
- Marketplaces & The Curse of the Network Effect
- Today’s Behaviors, Tomorrow’s Startups
- Venture Capital and The Superstitious Investor
- Temptation
- The Future is Driven by Interface Changes
- Why Business is Addicted to Habits
- Viral Loops Or Viral ‘Oops’?
- Making a Marketplace
- What Killed Turntable.fm?
- What You Don’t Know About Human Intuition Can Hurt You
- Designing to Reward our Tribal Sides
- New Video – “Hooked: Building Habit-Forming Products”
- How Technology is Like Bug Sex
- Ways To Get People To Do Things They Don’t Want To Do
- The Network Effect Isn’t Good Enough
- Mass Persuasion, One User At A Time
- How Investment Drives Engagement (Slides)
- Getting Your Product Into the Habit Zone
- Where Have The Users Gone?
- Infinite Scroll: The Web’s Slot Machine
- Designing User Habits Video
- Psychology of Sports: How Sports Infect Your Brain
- This is Your Brain On Boarding: How to Turn Visitors Into Users
- User Investment: Make Your Users Do the Work
- Behavior by Design Video
- When Designing for Good Is Bad
- Stop Building Apps, Start Building User Behaviors
- The Morality of Manipulation
- The Next Secrets of the Internet
- User Growth and Engagement: A Hacker Metric
- Spotting the Next Facebook: Why Emotions are Big Business
- The Billion Dollar Mind Trick: An Intro to Triggers
- Why Everyone Hates I.T. People
- Hooking Users In 3 Steps: An Intro to Habit Testing
- Abolish The Reference Check
- Variable Rewards: Want To Hook Users? Drive Them Crazy
- How to Design Behavior (The Behavior Change Matrix)
- How To Design For “Normals”
- Hooks: An Intro on How to Manufacture Desire
- User Habits: Why Startups Must Be Behavior Experts
- What Is, and Is Not, Your Product’s Job
- Pinterest’s Obvious Secret
- Personalized eCommerce Is Already Here, You Just Don’t Recognize It
- Where is the Web Going?
- The Developer Divide: When Great Companies Can’t Hire
- Being a Quitter Makes You a Good Entrepreneur
- Behavior by Design
- Why You Should Run Your Business Barefoot
- Are you a Startup Star, Wacko, or Wannabe?