Where Have The Users Gone?

Editor?s Note:?Nir Eyal?writes about the intersection of psychology, technology, and business at?NirAndFar.com. He is the author of the forthcoming book ?Hooked: How to Drive Engagement by Creating User Habits?. Step 1: Build an app. Step 2: Get users hooked to it. Step 3: Profit. It sounds simple and, given our umbilical ties to cell phones, social media, and email inboxes, it may even sound plausible. Recently, tech entrepreneurs and investors have started to look to psychology for ways to strike it rich by altering user behavior. Perhaps you’ve read essays?on how to create habit-forming technology and figured you’d give it a shot? Well hold your dogs Pavlov! Though I?m an advocate?for understanding user behavior to build high-engagement products, the reality is that successfully creating long-term habits is exceptionally rare. Changing behavior?requires not only an understanding of how to persuade users to act — for example, the first time they land on a webpage — but also necessitates getting them to behave differently for long periods of time, ideally for the rest of their lives. The good news is that that companies that accomplish this rare feat are the ones associated with game-changing, wildly successful innovation. Google, Apple, Twitter, and Android come to mind. As we enter a world where, according to Paul Graham, everything is becoming more addictive, the companies that successfully form and control habits in the future will come to dominate the industries of tomorrow. Habits or Hype? But claiming that habits are the keys to success is a tall order. If people like me provide ready-made formulas and guidebooks on how to create habits, why isn’t every company that alters user behavior succeeding? Zynga, an enterprise whose business model depends on hooking millions of people to its games, is hemorrhaging users, employees?and investors. What makes some habits stick while others die like virtual cows on their way to slaughter? Turns out that like any discipline, habit design has rules and caveats which explain why some products change lives forever while others create fleeting fads. Habits are LIFO New behaviors have a short half-life as our minds tend to revert back to our old ways. Experiments show?that lab animals habituated to new behaviors tend to regress to their first learned behaviors over time. This helps explain the overwhelming evidence that people rarely change. Research shows that nearly everyone who tries to lose weight gains back the pounds?within 2

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