Want to keep users? Make them do the work

Photo credit: Pixabay.

The 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 on how we should interact with technology, the law that design should always decrease users’ effort in using a product doesn’t always hold true. In fact, putting users to work is critical in creating products people love. This is referred to as “user investment” or, in this article, simply investment.

Effort and commitment

Several studies show that expending effort on a task seems to commit us to it. For example, when buying a lottery ticket, players either choose their own numbers or play a set of digits generated randomly. Certainly, choosing either option has no effect on the odds of winning.

Traditional thinking predicts that the easier path would be the one users prefer. However, the opposite is true. Despite the considerable effort required to pick the lottery numbers—a process reminiscent of answering multiple-choice questions on the SAT—players who choose their own numbers play more.

This phenomenon isn’t just about a skewed perception of luck. According to a classic study by Ellen Langler, even when players are explicitly told their chances of winning, they choose to trade worse odds for the ability to play the numbers they spent the time and effort picking.

Examples of how escalations of commitment make our brain do funny things abound. For one, its power makes some people play video games until they keel over and die. It’s also used to influence people to give more to charity. It has even been used to coerce prisoners of war to switch allegiances.

Commitment is powerful stuff and it plays an important role in the things we do, the products we buy, and our perception of who we are.

Totally committed

The last step of the Hook Model, a framework I developed to help explain a pattern found in habit-forming products, is the investment phase. After a user is triggered into action and duly rewarded, the investment phase is where the user is asked to do work and starts building commitment.

It is here that the user is prompted to put something of value back into the system, typically in the form of time, money, physical effort, social capital, or personal data. As in any feedback loop, the cue, action, and reward cycle predictably condition a series of behaviors. Whenever users want the reward, the thinking goes, and they do the intended action.

For example, what prompted you to start reading this article? You were probably feeling a bit bored and were looking for something stimulating to read. You took the cue (boredom), now you’re doing the action (reading), and you’re now anticipating the reward (keep reading, it’s coming).

But this pattern differs slightly in products that truly hook users. The brain has a unique system for keeping us searching for rewards; it adapts. Soon, something that seemed novel and interesting becomes common and dull.

To keep pace with the brain’s adaptation to stimulus, habit-forming products improve with repeated use. It is here that the investment phase is critical.

Bits of work for future reward

Unlike actions in the standard feedback loop, investments are about the anticipation of rewards, not immediate gratification. The investment is a bit of work, which makes the user more likely to use the product in the future.

Commitments as a strategy

The killer combo