3. How do you get users to take actions on your product ?!
In the last post, we saw how we can use certain ideas called “triggers” to get people to notice our product and give it a try. Here let’s explore what would most likely happen next.
Actions
So now that we have got people to notice, we need them to do something. We want them to take an action precisely. According to human behaviour scientist Dr B.J Fogg’s, a person’s behaviour under a certain condition can be explained by the following equation.
B=MAT
B — behaviour
M — motivation
A — ability
T –-trigger
We’ve already discussed triggers.
Ability roughly translates to simplicity in our context. Almost any product designed to simplify an existing process by eliminating steps in between succeeds in the market. Let’s compare Yahoo and Google search engines. Which one is more likely to be used? The answer is Google of course. The simplicity of their home page is legendary. So in short, the easier it is for the user to do something,i.e make a task cognitively easier to interpret, the more likely they’re to take an action.
Now comes motivation. Every behaviour is driven by one of three Core Motivators: seeking pleasure and avoiding pain; seeking hope and avoiding fear; seeking social acceptance while avoiding social rejection. Gaming apps are mostly focused on the first part which is seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, while most social networking apps centre around ‘seeking social acceptance while avoiding social rejection part’.
It’s relatively easier to checkbox the ability variable in the above equation than motivation simply because it takes a shorter time to create a user-friendly product than to succeed with motivating people to get hooked to the product. Think about it for a second. For the former, perhaps a team of product people would be sufficient to release a pretty looking product. The success of the outcome is totally in our hands. In the case of the latter, to motivate people to use our product, a lot more things than just the ‘product’ entity comes into the picture. Say, I’m creating a to-do list app — I start off with the assumption that people have an urge to jot down their to-do lists on the go. I break my target audience based on age, sex, interests etc. and try to make individual assumptions about what might motivate a person from each of those categories to write them down. I try to build features that I hypothesise would be enough to catapult these people into the app and also keep them there. As you can see there’s a lot of guesswork going on here. We’re actually devoting precious time and energy building real products without even being sure if our assumptions hold true. So we iterate over different versions and test it with real people and somewhere along the line, we’ll begin to figure out what motivates people to stay and what puts them off. So obviously gaining motivation among users is far more difficult than creating a user-friendly app. But it is safe to say that creating a clean product would significantly boost the chances of a user picking up a product more often than a clunky ugly beast.
But from the equation, it is very obvious that all of the 3 factors must have non zero value. Like, it’s simply impossible to create a successful product that ranks high on ability and motivation but that comes with zero triggers, to begin with.
Some effects that have a significant influence on affecting the variables on the above equation:
Scarcity effect: People tend to have a higher perception of things when they’re sparsely available. Imagine you were casually looking around for a sweater on Amazon. You found a good one. In scenario 1, the description says ‘In stock’. In scenario 2, it says ‘only 4 left’. If it were me, in the first case I’d decide to buy sometime later since its ‘in stock’ anyway. But in the 2nd case, I know for sure I’d buy it immediately, even though I don’t have a real need to buy the sweater, just because there’s only 4 left. E-Commerce companies employ this tactic all the time to boost sales.
The endowed progress goal: People feel more attached to an action when they feel they’re achieving a goal. Video games survive because of this phenomenon. If after each stage of the game, if we weren’t moving up levels and climbing the player ranks we’d never feel the motivation to continue playing. All the mechanisms built into the game by its creators are specifically tuned to boost the endowed progress effect on the player so as to get him/her stick around for the maximum time.
So to summarise the post,
Anytime you create a digital product, make sure you get the Behaviour equation right. Never forget it’s 3 pillars. Motivation-Ability-Triggers. Come up with a trigger idea, that’ll get users to find your product, make the features intuitive enough so that they can check out all of them easily, and lastly, try to connect your product to a fundamental human emotion that’ll motivate your one-time users to keep coming back again.
Next part: Rewards! Rewards!Rewards! How to reward your users for all they’ve given you *>!
Stay tuned!
Hello reader! I’m Meera Vinod, an aspiring product manager. I write blogs about Product Management and product stories that I find interesting. You can find more about me here :)
Happy reading!