Monat: April 2022

It’s a fact that we spend a staggering 40% of our day doing things without thinking about them. Instead, we follow learned behaviors: how we respond to people; how we react to certain emotions; when and how we move, eat, and drink. These automatic behaviors are also known as habits.

“We are what we repeatedly do.
Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” 

– Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy

Digital products have the power to form habits. Companies that can create customer habits through their products gain a significant competitive advantage, because products and services weaved into customers’ automatic behaviors are less susceptible to attacks from other companies. But how can companies create products that people use every day? What are the secrets of building highly engaging services?

What are habits?

Let’s start with habits. Researchers define a habit as an “automatic behavior triggered by situational cues.” Simply put, habits are activities triggered by something and done with little or no conscious thought.

We all know that there are good and bad habits. Negative habits are often considered unhealthy, unproductive, or even dangerous. This includes eating unhealthily, compulsively scrolling through social media for hours, or smoking cigarettes. On the contrary, activities such as exercising, reading books, and drinking lots of water are considered positive habits.

Habits aren’t built overnight. Research has shown that it takes 18 to 254 days to form a new habit.

Digital products have the power to build and break habits, both good and bad. Let’s discover how it’s done.

The Hook Model

The Hook Model is a 4-phase process developed by behavioral economist and entrepreneur Nir Eyal. Companies can use it to create habit-forming products and services.

The goal is to generate voluntary, high-frequency user engagement. At its core, the Hook Model is about creating a customer habit. This is achieved by connecting a user’s problem to a company’s solution with enough frequency to make the engagement an ongoing practice.

The creation of habitual behaviors via a looping cycle can be divided into 4 steps: Trigger, Action, Variable Reward, and Investment. Breaking it down can help us to understand how habits are formed and how we can build habit-forming products.

1. Trigger

First, there’s the trigger. An external trigger contains some information that lets you anticipate a reward, thus, causing your brain to innate a behavior. Our ancestors looked for cues that signaled the location of rewards such as food, water, and shelter. Nowadays, we’re constantly analyzing our environment for indications that promise money, fame, power, status, recognition, or personal satisfaction.

Triggers come in two types – external and internal.

External triggers are sensory stimuli from the physical environment. These can be something you hear, see, smell, taste, or feel.

Internal triggers are learned associations about what to do when having a thought or an emotion.

Product designers can employ external triggers such as call-to-action buttons on a web page, push notifications on smartphones, or emails with a link to drive users to engage with digital products. External triggers do not have to be software-based only. Research has shown that wearable activity trackers can act as a powerful external cue by reminding users to exercise.

Many popular digital products use external triggers to remind users to perform a behavior. Calm, a meditation smartphone app, increased retention threefold by showing users a daily reminder on their smartphones. Duolingo, a language learning app, sends out daily reminders via email to remind users to keep practicing. Gina Gotthilf, VP of Growth and Marketing at Duolingo, said: “Emails and notifications have been extremely effective in bringing people back.”

To build habit-forming products, product designers need to discover which internal trigger they can tie to a desired action. Then they need to figure out how to initiate the habit loop by using external triggers that drive users to the action.

For example, boredom is often associated with an action on a digital product. Just think about how often you check your email inbox or Instagram out of sheer boredom.

2. Action

After the trigger comes the action. The action is the behavior made in anticipation of the arrival of a reward.

But not every trigger ends in action. Dr. B. J. Fogg at Stanford University has a model that describes in a simple manner what drives our actions. For any action to occur, 3 criteria must all be present at the same time:

1. The user must have sufficient motivation
2. The user must have the ability to complete the desired action
3. There must be a noticeable trigger

Let’s walk through two examples to explain the model.

Your phone rings, but you don’t pick it up because at least one of the following factors is present:

Low Motivation: You see that the call is from a call center. Therefore, you decide not to answer.
Low Ability: You hear the phone ringing but are in the shower and can’t pick it up.
Lacking Trigger: Your phone was on mute, so you didn’t hear it.

An app that tracks and analyzes running activities has a promotion for its monthly subscription fee. However, you don’t subscribe because at least one of the following factors is present:

Low Motivation: You’re not a runner. Therefore, you’re not interested in getting the subscription – even for free.
Low Ability: It still costs more money than you can spend. Your financial ability is limited.
Lacking Trigger: You can’t find the button to subscribe and profit from the promotion.

3. Variable Reward

A reward helps a person’s brain figure out if a particular loop is worth remembering. While the neurotransmitter dopamine surges in anticipation of a reward, introducing variability multiplies the effect, increases focus, and suppresses areas of the brain associated with judgment and reason. That’s why it’s more entertaining to spend an hour on a slot machine than work for an hour at a set wage.

As a product designer, give users what they came for. But leave them wanting more so they keep coming back to your product. To leave them wanting more, introduce an element of mystery about what they might find the next time they engage.

For apps with a content feed, make sure there’s some fresh content each time a user comes back. Successful products, whether Instagram, LinkedIn, or Pinterest, all make use of the variable rewards technique. Every time you open one of these apps, the content varies, and there’s no way you can anticipate what you’ll see.

4. Investment

In the last step of the loop, the user does some work. This investment can occur in many forms, such as time, data, effort, social capital, or money. Whenever a user invests in a product or service, the odds for another pass in the cycle increase in two ways.

First, an investment loads the next trigger to start the cycle all over again. For example, writing a message (investment) on WhatsApp makes it more likely to get a reply in the future (external trigger). An image posted on Instagram (investment) usually gets a few likes, a piece of information the app will deliver to the user via push notifications (external trigger).

Second, investments store value, which means that a product improves with use, increasing the likelihood of users returning. Such stored value can be content, data, followers, reputation, or skill. For example, on LinkedIn, users‘ online curriculum vitae (CV) embodies the concept of stored value. The company found that the more information users add to their online CV, the more likely they’ll return. There’s another benefit of stored value in your product. As the invested value is usually not transferable to another solution, users will also be less likely to switch to a competitor’s solution.

A powerful tool

In summary, an external or internal trigger elicits an action, which provides a reward. Then follows the investment phase, which lets users set themselves up for future triggers. Over time this learned sequence forms a neurological loop that becomes stronger with every additional cycle.

The Hook Model helps product designers create habit-forming products. It can also be used to uncover weaknesses in existing products which failed to form habits.

Use it for good

With great power comes great responsibility. As seen above, habit design is a superpower and should be used cautiously. If used for good, it allows product designers, entrepreneurs, and innovators to build habit-forming products that improve users‘ lives. If misused to exploit, companies use it to build habits that can turn into wasteful or even dangerous addictions.

We recently worked with eduwo, a startup in the growing EdTech sector. We helped them design a wizard that helps users find their ideal education program.

Hold on, what’s EdTech?

Technology has long been an essential part of education, from the ancient abacus to pocket calculators, from overhead projectors and whiteboards to modern projectors and e-learning. These tools help people learn in simpler, faster, more effective, and cost-efficient ways.

„Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world“

– Nelson Mandela

Nowadays, education technology (EdTech) is an umbrella term covering not only online learning, but a whole suite of digital services and products that help facilitate learning. In other words, EdTech includes all software, hardware, and tools such as online learning applications, curriculum management software, digital textbooks, communications, and administration platforms for students, teachers, and parents.

OK, so what’s a wizard?

When it comes to inputting data in web and mobile applications, the two most common user experience (UX) patterns are forms and wizards. Wizards can be considered mini-applications that guide users through a sequence of forms that they need to complete to accomplish a goal. As the Nielsen Norman Group puts it, „A wizard is a step-by-step process that allows users to input information in a prescribed order and in which subsequent steps may depend on information entered in previous ones.“

Now, what’s the eduwo education finder?

Eduwo’s education finder helps users identify the education program best-suited to their needs. After completing the wizard, the system makes intelligent recommendations based on their educational and professional experiences, needs, and preferences. Think of it as a digital school counselor that asks you specific questions to find your ideal education options.

Here’s a quick peek at some of our work, plus 6 important lessons this project taught us along the way.

1. Make the purpose of the wizard clear

If users don’t understand the purpose of a user interface (such as a wizard) right away, they’ll quickly leave. Therefore, we ensured that users easily comprehend the overall purpose of the education finder. We added the wizard’s title to the navigation panel, which stays there during the entire wizard. Additionally, users see a personal greeting at the beginning of the wizard, as well as the wizard’s purpose.

Once a user has begun the wizard, it’s crucial to keep them engaged by making every step clear. Therefore, we placed a concise title at the top of every step.

2. Logical order of the steps

A wizard consists of multiple steps. By completing a step, a user reaches the next step. As part of designing a wizard, you need to define the optimal step order.

In some cases, the user inputs logically depend on each other, limiting the degree of freedom in which the steps can be ordered. In our case, the user inputs did not have many dependencies and, therefore, could be freely arranged to a large extent. We structured the steps according to two principles.

The first principle was to start with easy questions and slowly progress towards questions requiring more time to answer due to additional selection options, or because users have to think about their needs and desires. The wizard starts by asking for their birth year – nothing users have to think hard about – and moves on to questions about the fields they would like to study. Once users invest some time answering several easy questions, they are less likely to abandon the wizard midway and are more likely to keep going due to the sunk cost bias.

The second principle was to structure questions chronologically along people’s mental timelines. The wizard starts by asking questions about a person’s past, such as the already mentioned birth year, as well as previous qualifications and work experience. It then continues by asking what they are currently doing, such as requesting them to enter their current job title. After that, the wizard wants to learn about their future, such as which field they would like to study, their budget, and ideal start date.

3. Explain why you’re asking for the information

A variety of personal information is required to determine each person’s most suitable education options. However, users are (rightly) cautious about sharing such information, especially on the internet.

Explaining the reason why you’re asking for specific information, especially if there’s a benefit for the user by sharing it, establishes trust and increases their willingness to provide personal details.

4. Keep the cognitive load low

Dividing the inputs and placing them in individual steps, and displaying only the most relevant elements, keeps the user interface light and doesn’t seem overwhelming. However, this segmentation increases the number of wizard steps. Users perceive a wizard with many steps as tedious and time-consuming, causing them to abandon it at the beginning or midway when they lack the feeling of making real progress. There’s a fine line between not overdoing individual steps and, at the same time, keeping the number as low as possible. As an overall goal, we tried to keep the wizard at a maximum of 10 steps and only focus on the most critical questions.

5. Don’t design in isolation

When the task at hand is to design a wizard, you obviously need a UI/UX designer. Involving other specialists is less obvious and therefore often gets neglected. Which leaves a lot of potential off the table.

Teaming up with various experts brought the education finder design to the next level. It also prevented issues that the development team would have encountered later when implementing the design.

Interviewing potential users to understand how they make decisions when choosing education programs, and where current solutions‘ pain points are, led to valuable insights. We used these in the ideation process and later involved potential users again to get feedback on our ideas, with the intent to refine the wizard’s design.

Eduwo’s engineers were involved early on to let us know about all available data that can be used in the wizard. If you omit involving engineers, you risk designing an interface that can’t be implemented because the necessary data is not available at all or not in the form you need for the interface. Moreover, you might even miss an opportunity because you don’t know about some valuable data you could use to build a better wizard.

A UX writer improved the microcopy of the wizard by using words that keep users engaged and verbally guide them through each step of the education finder. They made these changes at the wireframe stage, where it is relatively cheap compared to later stages.

Viewing the product owner not only as a project sponsor but actively involving him proved to be extremely valuable. In addition to informing us about the project’s goals, he shared deep knowledge about the users‘ needs.

6. Invest in a pattern library

Specifically for the education finder, we designed a pattern library with reusable components and interactions, such as buttons, input fields, and navigation elements.

Creating a pattern library costs time and money. But it’s a worthwhile investment: it accelerates the overall design process and subsequent development. A pattern library not only ultimately saves time, but also ensures a consistent user interface, which improves the user experience and makes a product look more professional. Moreover, the created pattern library can be reused later to build further wizards.

In an ideal world, you would create a pattern library before starting the wizard’s design. But the more natural way to create a pattern library is to start with the wizard design and build the library as you go. Whenever you can’t build an interface with existing library elements, you add or extend the required components to the library.

Wrapping up

Here’s a summary of the 6 takeaways from designing the education finder:

1. Ensure that users understand the wizard’s purpose as a whole and its individual steps. Users will abandon the wizard if they don’t understand what they get in return for completing it.
2. Present wizard steps in an order that makes sense for users. Don’t cognitively overwhelm them by starting with hard questions.
3. People are cautious about sharing personal information – explain why you ask for it and what’s in it for them if they provide the information.
4. Don’t overload the wizard’s steps; keep the number below 10.
5. Gather a team of experts — UX/UI designers, potential users, engineers, UX writers, product owners — and you’ll be better equipped to deliver a great product experience.
6. Invest in a pattern library — the returns will be manifold