How to build what users want
If you want your product/service to sustain, you might want to probe its problem solving ability.
Building truly attractive products requires an understanding of how to persuade people to act. For example, you want them to search you, then click on your ad, then fill up the form on your landing page, then read what you send them as an email and so forth. You also want them to repeat desired behaviours on your product for a long time so as to successfully engender them into using your service and paying you.
Companies that become successful at building habit forming business are often associated with game changing, wild innovation. But innovation is easier said than done. It happens rarely and comes at the cost of replacing another old habit, and old habits die hard. It is extremely hard to change the defaults so firmly lodged in our heads. Borrowing a term from accounting, LIFO- last in first out, explains why the habits you’ve most recently acquired are also the ones that go out the first.
For new behaviors to hold, they must occur often. A closely guarded myth associates it with passage of Time, i.e the longer you keep on a new habit the more it will hold, but various studies have shown that it is ‘frequency’ of repetitions over a short period of time and not the ‘time lapsed’ that will hold a habit firmly.
Habits also keep users loyal because they hold them captive to an experience their mind/body/brain labels as preferred or pleasurable. Why pleasurable? Because familiarity brings comfort, and we are risk averse by nature. The cost of switching has a high perceived cost because of the cognitive effort it takes. Adopting the difference in the new product makes us work harder, and slows our automatic-thinking down, making us feel inferior and hence drives the centres responsible for perceived-pain.
You can begin to determine your service/product’s habit forming potential by plotting two factors: frequency (how often does the behavior occur) and perceived utility (how useful or rewarding is the behavior over alternative solutions)
Some behaviours never become habits because they don’t happen frequently enough. No matter how much utility is involved, these rare actions stay infrequent and remain ‘conscious actions’ and never create the automatic response of a habit. You may ask, how frequent is frequent enough? And the answer is likely specific to each business and behavior.
However, if you want your product/service to sustain, you might want to probe its problem solving ability. One of the pet questions that VCs ask, is are you building a Vitamin or a Painkiller. The correct answer from the perspective of most of the investors is-Painkiller because it solves an obvious need, relieves of a specific pain and therefore has a predictable market. Vitamins, on the contrary, don’t solve a specific problem but they rather appeal to users’ emotional needs, and taking a vitamin is like checking off a task on your mental list and it gives more psychological comfort than physical relief.
But if you look at some of the hottest consumer technology companies: facebook, instagram, twitter (and more), they are helping us discover our emotional needs and are feeding the virtuous/vicious cycle of social validation, but like so many other inventions, we did not know our internal triggers and latent needs until someone told us we do. Compare it with a sensation of an itch — it’s a feeling that manifests inside the mind and doesn’t let go until it is satisfied.
A personal opinion on the vitamin vs painkiller question: I think, habit forming technologies are both. They offer nice-to-have (vitamins) but once the habit is established, they provide an ongoing pain-remedy. Loss aversion, risk minimisation are the facades of the same need, and avoiding pain is a key motivator in building habit forming products.
I usually start thinking about whether a product/service by answering these questions:
- What habits does this business require to exist?
- What problems are your users trying to solve by turning to your product?
- How do they currently solve the problem above, and how deeply are the current alternatives to your business ingrained in your users’ minds?
- How frequently do you want your users to engage with your product?
- Which new behaviours do you want to turn to habits?
Follow my thoughts as I write the next blog on triggers and why they work.
