Real World Captology
Cracking the Feedback Formula: 5 Tactics for Sustained User Engagement
Simple design tactics to motivate long-term behavior change
What does a good feedback notification look like?
Congrats, you went on a run today!
That’s definitely not it. Not very motivating, is it?
Good feedback not only communicates specific information, but also invokes positive emotions that fill users with a sense of optimism and self-efficacy. In Engaged: Designing for Behavior Change, Amy Bucher defines it as,
“…good feedback is specific, has some objective component, gives meaningful direction for next steps, guides people toward a goal, and is delivered near enough in time to the action so that people can learn from it and adjust their behavior accordingly.”
We’ll improve on the poor excuse for feedback throughout this article to transform the generic text above into enticing, engaging and effective feedback.
The Feedback Formula to improving feedback is to:
- 🎯 Make it Specific
- 🥳 Make it Cheerful
- 👀 Give it Hindsight
- 🐝 Make it Collective
- ✅ Make it Actionable
Although we’ll focus more on health and fitness, the tactics below can be leveraged in any domain.
🎯 Make it Specific: Made to Measure
Effective feedback begins with a specific and personalized message based on objective measurements, much like the art of goal-setting.
Measuring a baseline unlocks personalized feedback. Understanding a user’s starting point allows for meaningful feedback for all, from first-time users to loyal customers.
The Hawthorne effect highlights that the mere act of measuring a behavior can influence it. For example, the consistent and specific biofeedback provided by activity trackers increases awareness and supports the formation of healthier habits. In fact, a study of 160,000 participants showed an increase of 1800 extra steps per day due to the use of activity trackers.
I’ll let you into a little dirty secret of the fitness industry: the 10,000 step daily goal is a myth. Still, counting steps helps people move more, so it’s still a win!
In our example, we need to adapt the text to the user context. For a beginner who has never ran 5K, it’s more meaningful to give feedback on their progress towards that goal, such as “You ran 4K today, one more to go!” For a seasoned marathoner, a 4k run is short and sweet, so their feedback could be along the lines of “another one for the collection, every run counts.”
🥳 Make it Cheerful: Hip Hip Hourray!
Effective feedback cheers on users and encourages a target behavior during, or immediately after, its performance.
Most people suck at celebrating their accomplishments. Effective feedback helps users celebrate even the smallest of wins, in beautiful colors and delightful tones. Duolingo’s masterful post-session feedback is a case-in-point.
Duolingo encourages users with gamified multi-sensory feedback combining verbal, visual and auditory feedback into an aesthetic . They also show personalized performance accolades (like “committed”, “perfect!”) to further enhance the good vibes.
In our running example (pardon the pun), we could take a page from their book. At the end of a session, we can provide haptic feedback with short pulses of vibration for every kilometer ran by the user. We can include personalized accolades as well, such as “Speed Runner”, or “Forrest Gump” for long distance runners.
👀 Give it Hindsight: Feedback is 20/20
Effective feedback empowers hindsight by distilling activity and progression metrics into meaningful insights to foster a growth mindset in users.
On the one hand, retrospective feedback can focus on recent activity, with techniques like the daily streak that sustains engagement through the fear of losing the streak. On the other hand, retrospective feedback can highlight long-term progress with weekly trends or monthly summaries.
A little personal advise: beware of the dashboard syndrome. It’s the common temptation to show users an Excel sheetload of numbers and graphs. But not everyone is a data scientist so, before waterboarding users with streams of data, consider the underlying story being told.
Instead of dashboards, indicators paint a more meaningful picture of progress, by distilling raw data into intuitive symbols.
The Shapa scale illustrate the power of indicators over numbers when it comes to losing “weight” (= losing fat, nobody wants to lose muscle). On a traditional scale, checking your weight every morning can be discouraging. The body’s weight naturally fluctuates from one day to next making it hard to discern the long-term trend from the noise of daily measurements. Shapa uses colors, instead of numbers, to indicate whether the user is maintaining, gaining, or losing weight.
In our example, we could incorporate colors for hindsight in our runner’s feedback. If they are running the risk (again — sorry for the pun) of overtraining, we can indicate that with red. If they are increasing their average pace or distance, we could use blue. Green could show that they are on track for their goals.
🐝 Make it Collective: Beyond Leaderboards
Effective feedback leverages the collective to compare a user’s behavior with that of similar users in a healthy and motivating way
Collective feedback acts like a social GPS, giving users a sense of their positioning compared to others and a sense of direction towards a reachable improvement.
A cohort-based comparison is essential for collective feedback. Comparing novices to experts is a surefire way to get them both to disengage. This is the main issue with leaderboards — they only truly motivate the leaders and focus on the extremes, rather than the middle of the pack.
In our example, we could tell the user: “You are in top 20% of fastest runners who usually run 10K, if you improve your pace by 4 minutes, you’ll crack the top 10%”. This feedback not only gives them a sense of pride and accomplishment, but also provides a direction for them to strive for improvement.
✅ Make it Actionable: No fear of commitment
Effective feedback proposes meaningful next steps for users to take immediate action and commit to their progress.
Users are more inclined to reinforce their commitment to repeating a behavior when they feel successful. Commitment devices help users stay accountable by overcoming future procrastination with a single immediate decision.
Once again, Duolingo offers us a masterclass of user engagement with their timely commitment device. On the third day of a streak, Duo (the app’s main character) tells the user to commit to a longer streak. Notice the anchoring effect used on the descriptions of each streak duration (a 7 day streak is only “Good”, but a 30 day streak is “Incredible“).
In our example, we could make our feedback accountable by allowing users to commit to their next run and schedule it directly into their calendar. If they’ve just finished a speed run, we could even offer them a mobility session on the following day for recovery.
The example above is actually taken from our work Behale, where we leverage these tactics and many more behavior change techniques to help everyone move more often, for longer and have fun while doing it.
Above all, effective feedback design requires empathy. Only after running a mile in our user’s shoes can we provide meaningful feedback that really resonates and engages with them in the long term. The few tactics listed in this article will help make the structure of feedback more efficient, but the effectiveness of the strategy is up to the designers.
As with most things in life, it’s not a question of quantity, but rather quality of feedback. Less, but better.
