2016

Why We Keep Coming Back

Habits by DesignFeatures:

Design from the Outside-In

Hooked: The Art & Science of Habit Design

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Contents

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It’s a Fine Line Daniel Diez, EVP, Global Chief Marketing Officer, R/GA

Introduction00

01 Habits by DesignTo keep users coming back for more, tech-nology companies are baking habit-forming mechanics into their products and services.

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8 - 11 Trends: Why We Keep Coming Back

Conversations: Hooked: The Art & Science of Habit Design

Perspective: Design from the Outside-In

David DeCheser, Executive Creative Director, Visual Design, R/GA

18 - 19

12 - 17

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INTRODUCTION

Habits—those rituals and routines we mindlessly perform throughout the day—come in two very different forms: Those that support our lives and allow us to focus on the things that require real attention. And those that paralyze us. Technology treads the fine line between the two. Sometimes it enables us to communicate, collaborate, and grow. Other times it simply gets in the way—with days and hours lost to binge-watching, email overload, and mindless scrolling.

This FutureVision issue explores those brands, products, and services that expertly navigate this fine line.

In “Why We Keep Coming Back,” we investigate how some of today’s most successful brands draw us in (again and again) by quickly satisfying some of our most basic psychological needs. To find out how brands are accelerating the formation of new

habits, R/GA’s David DeCheser sits down with Nir Eyal, author of the book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. Together, they shed light on the very systematic model behind the world’s most addictive products and services. Finally, in “Design from the Outside-In,” we present our strat-egy for brands that are trying to capture a habit already owned by someone else.

The art of designing habits based on the science of behavioral economics is a strategic way of thinking that is inherent in R/GA’s DNA. We hope you find the content in this issue both revealing and inspiring.

Daniel DiezEVP, Global Chief Marketing Officer, R/GA

It’s a Fine Line

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Silicon Slot MachinesAll successful apps have one thing in common – an emotional trigger that seduces us to come back for more. Whether you’re feeling prideful or lustful, envious or lecherous, there’s always an app for that. And like a pocket-sized slot machine, we pump in our time and attention in hopes of winning that emotional jackpot.

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EnvyEndlessly scroll on Facebook

GreedPlace bet on DraftKings

SlothOutsource chores on TaskRabbit

PridePost selfie on Instagram

GluttonyBinge watch on Netflix

Spin the Seven Sins

LustSwipe righton Tinder

WrathAnonymously rant on Reddit

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TRENDS

Why We Keep Coming Back

Let’s face it, we possess a predisposition toward overindulgence. Whether it’s a swig from the bottle, a pull from a cigarette, or that first flirtation, the resulting hit of dopamine in our brains can be enough to make anybody come back for more. This compulsive behavior is especially evident in gambling, where the thrill of chasing a big win can be particularly intoxicating.

Hoping to exploit these well-studied tendencies, technology companies are emulating the habit-forming mechanics of slot machines, baking those principles into their own products in an attempt to put consumers in a state of “flow”—a mindset where hours can seem to go by in minutes.

From the moment we wake up to the moment we go to sleep, we’re glued to our screens. Compulsively checking our phones can feel like an addiction unto itself, but make no mistake, that feeling of urgency is entirely by design.

FOMO Feedback LoopsWe all know the feeling: that vibration

in your pocket that causes you to reach for your phone, almost involuntarily. Perhaps you’ve been tagged on Facebook or endorsed on LinkedIn—regardless of the source, you immediately stop what you’re doing and dive right in. More often than not, these alerts induce feelings of social obligation that, if ignored, cause you to fear that you might be missing out on something important.

If cleverly worded notifications are what drives us to these services, emotional triggers are what keeps us there. For instance, when we’re lonely, we look at Tinder or Grindr. When we’re bored, we look at Facebook. And so on and so

forth—endlessly scrolling, searching for something to scratch that internal itch.

The Reward of the HuntBefore we had bottomless news-feeds and all-you-can-eat social buffets, we sought relief by channel surfing. This insatiable hunger for something better is likely a behavioral carryover dating back to hunter-gatherer times. Back then, the reward took the form of nourishment. Today, our hunting is done via clicks and swipes in pursuit of the next big story or juicy bit of gossip.

So, in this time of media abundance, why aren’t we ever satisfied? As

with any addiction, we keep chasing the dragon, hoping that next piece of content will be even better than the last. This oscillation between anxiety and alleviation (a variable reward) is fundamentally what keeps us asking ourselves, “Will this roll of the dice change my luck?” or “Will this next swipe be my soulmate?” Despite the improbable odds, this unfounded sense of optimism is enough to keep us in our seats.

Delaying the RewardSimple features like Netflix’s autoplay make it obscenely easy to binge-watch an entire season—mindlessly viewing one episode after another without ever hitting “next.” But what would a healthy

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media diet look like? How do we break free from the external triggers force-fed to us by technology companies? One way is through services like Pocket, an app that lets users save articles and videos to view later, breaking the cycle of artificially manufactured urgency and giving us the freedom to choose not only when and where we consume content, but if we even want to in the first place.

Locking in ConsumersTypically, this idea of mindful time shifting is in conflict with what companies want: to keep consumers locked into a brand’s ecosystem. Before the digital era, airlines and credit card companies introduced

point-based loyalty programs to prevent their customers from stray-ing. Current online services employ a similar strategy, using algorithms to keep users locked in—just consider how much better Amazon or Spotify recommendations have become after years of accruing user data.

This all taps into the rationalization “If you’re spending a lot of time doing something, it must be val- uable.” It is the same justification that prevents people from walking away from a slot machine that is “getting hot.” But keep in mind, there is no such thing as luck— just good design.

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“ COMPULSIVELY CHECKING OUR PHONES CAN FEEL LIKE AN ADDICTION UNTO ITSELF, BUT MAKE NO MISTAKE, THAT FEELING OF URGENCY IS ENTIRELY BY DESIGN.”

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Pocket

Pocket lets users save articles and videos to view later, providing a mindful choice for individuals who want to consume content on their own terms.

Spotify

Spotify creates weekly playlists based on the songs you love. The on-point recommendations help keep subscribers invested in the service.

Netflix

Netflix automatically queues up the next episode, making it obscenely easy to binge watch entire seasons.

Photo Credit: Netflix

Photo Credit: Spotify

Photo Credit: Pocket

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CONVERSATIONS

Hooked: The Art & Science of Habit Design

David DeCheser: Can you explain the hook model for those who aren’t familiar with it?

Nir Eyal: Sure. The hook model is a design pattern endemic to habit-forming products—specifi-cally, habit-forming technologies. When we think about companies that are able to dramatically change consumer behavior in a very short period of time, companies like Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat, the question is: “How do these companies do it? What is it about the product design that changes people’s behaviors and habits?” What I uncovered was this model, composed of four steps—trigger, action, reward, investment—that companies run users through.

When consumers experience successive cycles of these four steps, their preferences are changed, their tastes are formed, and habits take hold.

DD: I’m sure every one of our clients wants people to get hooked on their product, but not every product or service requires a habit. What types of products require habits and which don’t?

NE: Some business models require the user to interact with the product frequently. Think about the companies I just mentioned: Their business models crumble if they don’t have frequent engagement. They have to form habits or they go out of business.

A company that’s interacted with infrequently, like an insurance company, doesn’t need a habit, because the business model is just fine with infrequent interaction.

Whether it’s a consumer-focused product or an enterprise-focused product, anything that requires unprompted engagement for the business model to be viable requires a habit. So it’s not that every business needs a habit, it’s that every business that needs a habit needs a hook.

DD: You’ve consulted with tons of organizations on the hook model. What have you found to be some of the challenges of implementing it, and how can companies better

Why do some products capture our attention, while others flop? David DeCheser, ECD, R/GA sits down with Nir Eyal, author of Hooked to discuss how habits can be used to design successful products and the responsibilities brands face when influencing users.

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integrate the model into their design process?

NE: The first step is to recognize that this pattern isn’t an accident. These companies that we find ourselves glued to, they didn’t build their products this way by chance. They have people very well trained in consumer psychology who design these products to be engaging.

Next, look at the four steps of the hook model. First, what’s the internal trigger that your product is addressing? What’s the user’s itch? What’s the external trigger that prompts them to action? Second, consider the action phase of the hook. What’s the simplest thing the user can do to get an immediate reward? Third, the reward phase

is about how can we scratch the user’s itch while leaving them wanting more. Finally, look at the investment phase. What’s the thing the user does to increase the likelihood of the next pass through the hook?

What makes these iterative technologies so special is that they store value. Everything in the physical world depreciates with use. The more wear and tear, the less valuable a thing becomes. But the amazing part about habit-forming technology is that it appreciates: it gets better and better with use. These products always ask us to invest something in them: data, accruing followers, building reputation, contributing content. And our investment increases the likelihood

we will make another pass through the hook. So it’s really about looking at the hook model, putting your business in that framework, and then very quickly you’ll figure out where the deficiencies are.

DD: Clients tend to fall into a very feature-centric view of their products or services. How can the hook model help companies define a product’s mission?

NE: I can’t tell you how many times I get into a client engagement and they start doing the feature talk. “Our product can do this! Look at this technical specification, look at this amazing whiz-bang thing that we can do.” But they’re stumped when I ask, “What are the psychological requirements

of your product? What itch occurs frequently in your user’s life that you’re addressing to form this habit?” When I’m bored, I use Facebook. When I’m uncertain, I check Google. When I’m feeling lonely, I check Tinder. Whatever it might be, that internal trigger guides us and helps define which features do or don’t go into your product.

DD: You mentioned that new habits are really hard to form. How realistic is it for a company with a new product or service to form a habit?

NE: The response I always get is: “Fantastic, I know my internal trigger, but another company owns it. Whenever consumers feel a certain way, they use their product.”

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There are four ways to capture an incumbent’s consumer habit.

First, you can increase velocity through the hook. Send your user through the four steps of the hook with greater speed: trigger, action, reward, investment. If you can shorten the distance between the recognized need and the reward, making it easier to do the intended behavior, you can increase the velocity through the hook.

The second way is to increase frequency through the hook. This typically happens when we shift from one interface to a new one. When we went from desktop to laptop to mobile and now to wearables, every time there’s an interface shift, the habit deck gets

reshuffled. Oftentimes, the incum-bents can’t make that transition, allowing new entrants to capitalize on emerging interfaces. As these technologies become increasingly portable, we can use them more frequently, and these new habits on these new interfaces stick.

The third strategy uses the reward phase. If you can deliver a much greater reward than your competitor, you can bring in new customers. Take Snapchat versus Facebook. If a user gets a message or notification from Snapchat at the same time as a notification from Facebook, which one are they going to open first? Where is the reward most rewarding? The Facebook message from Aunt Matilda? Or the snap from someone they’ve been flirting with? It’s

going to be Snapchat. It’s better at scratching the itch.

The final way is to make it easier to enter the hook in the first place. Look at how Google Docs took on Microsoft Office. Google Docs was not a great product at first—nowhere near the features of Microsoft Office—but it was free and required no software to install. So it was easier to get into in the first place, and that’s how they captured the user.

DD: Shifting gears, what are your thoughts on products, like activity trackers, that aim to help people change their behavior?

NE: I think there’s a lot of promise. But many times these companies

design their products and services in a suboptimal way that actually hurts users. The biggest danger around what I teach is that people use these techniques with the best of intentions to change the wrong behavior.

For instance, fitness apps to date have focused on the wrong thing. The science of losing weight, or being healthier, is not exercise first. It’s diet first. There are all these psychological phenomena that we don’t consider. For example, there’s this idea of moral licensing—we’ve seen this effect documented time and time again: When I’m good in one area of my life, I tend to cheat in another. It’s why people go to the gym, sweat on the treadmill for an hour, then go get a Jamba Juice

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with 60 grams of sugar. So, if we don’t create these behavior change programs for the right behavior, they tend to backfire.

DD: On that note, it seems like every week I’m reading an article about our unhealthy relationship with technology. Do you see grounds for concern?

NE: There’s a lot of commentary along the lines of, “Oh, Facebook is ruining our lives, the Internet is making us dumb, and Google is melting our brains.” But I think it’s overhyped. Whether I’m learning to play tennis or the piano, everything changes the brain over time. That’s nothing new. The real problem is not that companies have mastered

habits; it’s that far too many of their products and services don’t suck us in—they just suck.

DD: Then how do we unhook from products that suck?

NE: If you read my blog, 50 percent of what I write about is how to make products more engaging, how to hook users with healthy habits. The other half is about how to get unhooked. It’s a conversation we need to have, because we’ve adopted technology wholesale—the good and the bad. The bad side of the information revolution is, of course, that it depletes our attentional resources. That doesn’t mean we need to stop using these technologies altogether; we just need to be more conscious of how we

use them. A big part of what I teach is how to use the hook model, the same four steps of trigger, action, reward, investment, to break unwanted habits. To break an unwanted behavior, simply remove one of the steps. Take out the trigger, make the action more difficult, delay the reward, or don’t invest.

DD: You touched upon consciousness. As marketers trying to capture new audiences, what kind of responsibility do we have when using these types of behavioral hooks?

NE: We have to think very carefully about how we apply the techniques. The test I propose for any product developer or marketer who’s creating a habit-forming experience is to

ask two questions: “Am I the user? And does this materially improve people’s lives?” If you can answer these questions in the affirmative, you’re in a really good spot from an ethical perspective as well as from a pragmatic perspective for designing a better product or service.

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You’ve done all the right things: sized the market; found the white space; mapped the customer journey and identified user needs. People are downloading your app, but after one or two interactions, engagement has fallen off a cliff. What went wrong?

David DeCheserExecutive Creative Director, Visual Design, R/GA

PERSPECTIVE

Design from the Outside-In

Thus begins the obsession with the product roadmap and all the features that had to be cut so you could launch on time. However, the answer doesn’t lie in out-featuring the competition, and great design is table stakes.

According to a recent report by comScore, close to 80 percent of our smartphone app time is spent on just three apps—with our favorite app occupying a whopping 50 percent. The driver of this behavior? Habits.

Habits are a survival mechanism.They are our brain’s way of storing a behavior learned through repetition, and are formed by making asso-

ciations between a trigger and a reward. For instance, the fear of missing out (FOMO) tends to be the trigger driving our compulsive desire to stay connected.

The reward is the relief from anxiety you feel after checking in on your favorite app to make sure you’re not missing out on anything.

For some that app is Facebook or Instagram, for others it might be email. Regardless, it occupies the lion’s share of a user’s screen time. Your brand’s new app will more than likely be competing for the habits and limited attention associated with the remaining 20 percent.Fortunately, a new design technique

has emerged where an app’s core features can be utilized outside of the actual app. This strategy atomizes features in a way that lets users have micro-interactions in already popular interfaces—leveraging existing user behaviors rather than fighting to replace them. At R/GA, we call this approach “outside-in design.”

For example, Google Maps owns the “How do I get there?” habit, a territory Uber is also interested in. But instead of going toe-to-toe with the search giant, Uber integrated its service inside of Google Maps, so that its fare estimates sit alongside routes for walking, biking, driving, and public transportation. This is a great example of a service providing

core utilities outside of its own app. With just one tap, a user can go from looking up directions to requesting a ride, without having to open up yet another app.

To be successful, you need to set up shop where habits already exist. This rationale is precisely why we’re seeing brands appropriate messaging apps as conduits for their services.

Apps like Messenger, Snapchat, WeChat, and WhatsApp are some of the most habitually used on earth, which is why they are quickly becoming gateways to services ranging from financial planning to shopping. Initiatives like Agent Q or Facebook’s Businesses

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on Messenger enable people to use the all-too-familiar “text bubble” interface for services ranging from ordering a new coat to making a dinner reservation. In China, this is already a well-established practice, with WeChat offering over 10 million third-party applications that users can access without ever leaving the chat window.

Another aspect of outside-in design is leveraging underutilized features. For instance, all those “swipe to dismiss” reminders on your lock screen can now be used for a variety of useful functions, such as favoriting a post, archiving an article, or triggering more advanced actions with services like IFTTT.

Sometimes this micro-action is the extent of your product moment, other times it’s a doorway deep-linking into the app. Typically thought of as bonus features, these notifications are quickly becoming another low-barrier avenue where users can interact with your product.

Speaking of low barriers, email is one of the most powerful and, perhaps surprisingly, underleveraged ways to deliver a product moment. Why? Because everybody sends email; it’s one of the oldest and most ingrained digital habits there is, and something you can easily process in your own time.

Even though consumers are already addicted to their apps, social

networks like Twitter and LinkedIn still send perfectly timed emails about retweets or professional endorsements. It’s time to stop thinking about emails as just marketing or CRM, and instead view them as an extension of your product interface.

Outside-in design represents a new way of approaching product and service design—it balances what’s happening inside of your app with the more frequent interactions happening outside of it. This type of thinking enables teams to crystal-lize the psychological requirements of their product into a few core behaviors. It also broadens the definition of successful engagement

by acknowledging the importance of interactions happening outside of your app.

Just to be clear, the app is not dead. It’s simply evolving. As marketers, we will continue designing great user experiences that are enticing enough to drive downloads. However, instead of betting it all on bringing the user to the product, your brand needs to start thinking about how it can leverage existing habits and bring the product to the user.

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