Key Points
- Habits are one way the brain learns complex behavior
- habit forming products increase Customer Life Time Value (CLTV)
- Customers of habit forming products are relatively price insensitive
- Viral cycle time -
time it takes for user to invite another user
- higher user engagement levels - more visits per day > grow faster than competitors
- Older Habits are more resilient than New Habits - LIFO
- Habit potential
Frequency
- Perceived utility
- Vitamins versus Painkiller
Habit formed over time could transform a vitamin into a pain killer
- Habit forming technologies are both vitamins and painkillers
- Types of Product Creators
Peddler
- Facilitator
- Dealer
- Entertainer
The model
Trigger
- habits are built upon
- External triggers
put yourself in their shoes to understand the task they want accomplished
- Internal Triggers
5 whys - till arriving finally at a basic emotion
Action
- increasing motivation is expensive
- reducing effort is easier
- must be easier than thinking
- identify desire and use technology to take out steps
Motivations
- Seeking pleasure and avoiding pain
- Seeking hope and avoiding fear
- Seeking social acceptance and avoiding social rejection
Effort
Subjected to users current situational context
- Money
- Physical effort
- Brain cycles
- Social deviance
- Non-routiness
Autonomy
- implicit choice of doing things the old way
- a new more convenient way to do things
Variable Reward
- Tribe - who it comes from
- Hunt - material outcome of action
- Self - perception of self mastery
Investment
- Reciprocation - humans treat machines like humans too
- Escalation of commitment
- Cognitive dissonance
- leads to improvement of service for the specific user which increases the likelihood of users returning
content
- data
- followers
- reputation
- skill
Habit Testing
- Identify
who are the product's habitual users?
- Based on frequency of use
- Codify
make sure at least 5 percent of users will find your product valuable enough to use as much as you predict they would
- Habit Path: a series of similar actions shared by your most loyal users
codify they steps they go through
where they come from
- decisions they make when registering
- sift through data for similarities
- Modify
identify ways to nudge new users down the same Habit Path taken by devotees
- Cohort tracking
Enabling Technologies
- Technology wave
Infrastructure - when technology makes an existing behavior easier
- applications built on top of infrastructure - causes more people to exhibit behavior
- subsides - the next technology wave starts forming
- Look for Nascent Behavior
discover apps occupying the first screens on mobile devices
Further Readings
- *Just Enough Research*, Erika Hall
- *Something Really New: Three Simple Steps to creating truly innovative products*, Denis Hauptly
- *Evil by Design*, Chris Nodder