Deep User Engagement and Zeigarnik Effect
Ever wondered why websites use completeness meters ? Behaviour analysis and case studies show that people tend to co-relate their past on the basis of things they left or forgotten .
Remember someone whom you owe money , next moment he crosses your path and you stand baffled . Psychologist say people tend to remember incomplete or interrupted tasks which is apparently Zeigarnik effect . This probable theory adds a concrete and tangible value to your software or technology .
Consumer internet and social media companies make deep user engagement possible through this effect . You must have noticed websites like Linked in tend to ask users to fill all the information to make your profile more visible to users . Apparently a lot of web applications and job portals use this tactics to understand their customers and generate data to monetize users
Lets talk about Deep user engagement , There are multiple ways of engaging with users and UX engineers work closely on building products that can engage users , increasing active user time and drop offs from websites or mobile applications . Some prominent methods which are closely and commonly followed
- Gamification of UX
The much appreciated theory of any game is to play for a bait . Rewards and Credit systems are commonly a method to motivate users to go deep into any process of your product
Dating sites have been using this platform to monetize and engage users for a long period of time . Apps like Once and more are using this system . Many Games like 8 Ball pool , Clash of Clans and recently popular Pokemon Go had extraordinary user engagement tactics apart from catching em all .
Every Game has levels and Rewards , possibly most of them dont make it big in the market but some of them do figure out how to make users addictive to their games .
People do remember things which they couldn’t do or figure out . There are ways to tackle the good rules and bad rules in the games . Good Rules and Reaching levels of success in a game was monetized in order to generate revenue along with user engagement . Although I will also be publishing a detailed article on Gamification of UX .
2. Setting up Goals , Credits and Scores
Defining a game is not the only method to inculcate deep user engagement , marketing of a product is highly associated with psychology . The fashion of creating an ego among users by creating challenges and publicising achievements stood well in the competition and reason behind success of many products in the market . Most of my friends who seem to be flaunting their weight loss scoreboard and a crowd of people trying to figure out how they did it .
Food Technology industry also starting growing their customer base rapidly , popularly Faasos , Foodpanda and Zomato who used credit system as a good referral marketing tool and user engagement . They setup goals similarly : Refer 3 friends and get incentives on your first order . Deeply creating engagement and make people fall for incentives
Early days of twitter witnessed the same tactics of following people to get someones tweets and even more. Ideally creating good marketing platform for building users without loosing them
3. Completeness Meters
As your mind keeps reminding you of your unpaid bills , the zeigarnik effect plays a vital role in reminding people of their incomplete tasks
Completeness meters have been a part of various social media and job portals where candidate or personal information is required in order to connect or validate the level of genuineness or collect information
Completeness meters are used widely as progress bars or task lists in order to motivate users to complete their information , it creates a tendency or desire to finish their task . Its always better if you can take the necessary information from the user before hand and leave additional data to be collected later . As most users don’t prefer seeing their progress as 10% initially , though this will work widely people trying to engage with others based on interests or community level .Persuading users to upload images , entering additional information create a lot of value to the application and creates a pool of data for analytics and research oriented purposes
There are lot of methods where UX engineering engages the users by diving deep into their brain and motivate them to use applications . Most interestingly I find Freecharge as an interesting Fintech startup where you get something free for recharging or paying your bills . Lot of Indian startups have been spending large amount of time and money to acquire users or discover deep engagement methods. Criteria of engaging with users is to preserve them on your platform and make it a daily part of their lives .
