Getting Hooked: Improving Retention for YourStory
You wake up in the morning, even with one eye closed, and you pick up your phone unconsciously (I am sure I might be generalizing here however this would definitely be apt for the majority of folks) to catch up on your email, Instagram, or Twitter feed, and after spending a good half an hour mindlessly scrolling, finally, you start getting ready to start your day and sit in front of your laptop.
In only a minor span of time, these apps have taken up a significant chunk of our day by hooking us onto them, only by understanding how humans and their habits work.
With millions of applications/products available with just a click of a finger, companies are severely competing with users’ attention to become an indispensable part of their lives. Unfortunately, with ever-decreasing attention span, easy availability of hundreds of alternatives to even the minutest of user problems, and extensive user awareness — it has become harder each day to grab users’ attention.
Hence, to keep users engaged and make them keep coming back to your product offering, it becomes essential to create habit for your product and have them hooked onto your platform. Instagram, Twitter, Inshorts, Duolingo — these apps have very cleverly leveraged Hooked Model to their core.
In Nir Eyal’s words — Product teams cannot buy retention or engagement, it needs to be built into their product itself. Customer retention is vital for every app business: if customers don’t hang around, neither will the company. Therefore, a successful retention strategy is becoming more important for every product. This is where Hooked Model comes into the picture.
The Hooked Model works in 4 phases. Image Courtesy: nirandfar.com
The Hooked Model is a way of describing a user’s interactions with a product as they pass through four phases: a trigger to begin using the product, an action to satisfy the trigger, a variable reward for the action, and some type of investment that, ultimately, makes the product more valuable to the user. As the user goes through these phases, he builds habits in the process.
The Hooked Model defines 4 steps to creating habits that will help retain users in the app:
- Trigger. An event that encourages someone to act, which is either an:
- External trigger: something in the environment — a ping, a ding, or a ring — that alerts a person to do something.
- Internal trigger: the desire to escape from an uncomfortable emotional state.
2. Action. A behavior that anticipates a reward — opening an app, scrolling a feed, checking a dashboard, or playing a video. The simpler the behavior is to accomplish, the more likely the user is to do it.
3. Reward. The user gets what they came for.
4. Investment. The user puts something back into the product that makes it better the next time they use it.
A few months back, I had the opportunity to solve one of the Product case studies, in which the problem statement revolved around YourStory wanting to increase their DAUs to at least 50% (which was currently 20% out of ~10mn MAUs) — by using habit formation as the lever to convert existing user base into deeply engaged repeating user base.
Before proceeding, I must mention, I am not affiliated with Yourstory in any capacity, and the views for this article are strictly my own.
The User at Focus — Personas
It’s important to understand that when we talk about engaging and retaining our users — being customer obsessed becomes essential. If product teams launch head-first into solving problems without understanding their users first in-depth, all efforts will go in vain.
A user persona is a profile that represents a product’s ideal customer. By creating such personas, companies gain the ability to tailor their efforts and connect with the target audience to meet their needs and solve their problems.
For YourStory, their offerings gave some insight as to who their target user cohorts could be. On further talking 1:1 with similar users, it was easier to zero down on majorly three user personas:
3 user personas for YourStory
The main purpose of a user persona is to create empathy for customers. Understanding and relating to what matters to the customers is an essential part of product management. This requires ongoing research about target user segments to build an informed roadmap.
Here are the key benefits of defining user personas:
- Explain the “why” behind product decisions
- Focus on the needs of the most important user groups
- Prioritize features that solve actual user problems
- Implement new functionality in line with how customers will actually use it
Leveraging Hooked Model
The ultimate dream is to build an app, people will love to use and get crazy about. However, it’s heartbreaking when Product teams build something and no one cares about it. Well, the bitter truth is there is no such thing as a product that sells itself.
The biggest challenge is not only getting new users but keeping the existing ones engaged and coming back. So how do teams make sure their app is captivating and is able to retain users? They build the best habit-forming features leveraging the Hooked Model.
Feature Suggestions
User Levels — Rewarding Users
Addictive games keep users engaged by getting them to complete tasks that resonate with their goals and intrinsic motivations. Gamification applies this same strategy to non-game products by figuring out the things that trigger users to take action and rewarding them with features like point systems, badges, or even just simple progress indicators. The result is a product that motivates users and keeps them coming back for more.
On this very basic human behavior, one of the first features suggested for YourStory is to gamify the entire experience around reading more and rewarding the same.
Everyday Reading — Setting achievable goals
Reading goals are important because they help humans focus on their reading, and when they set specific goals, they can now have something to “achieve.” Without reading goals, it can be easy to get sidetracked, and reading becomes a chore.
Valuation Calculator
Young startups are one of the important cohorts YourStory targets — through their news pieces covering them, or how’s the entire startup ecosystem is currently like, with trends, predictions, etc.
Ergo, helping such young startups by providing them an offering of a Valuation Calculator to ensure and enable decision-making is easier for them — would make sense for YourStory and could transform such users into paid and loyal customers of the platform.
Community Building
At the moment, YourStory is a household name among users who are associated with startups in one way or the other. It’s essential for YourStory to develop their brand name among other cohort of users who could become their potential users one day.
Targetting young college folks and giving them a helping hand to join the startup industry could very well help YourStory in driving engagement, stickiness and engagement.
Prioritizing the Features
“This or that? Or this, then that? But we might need to do that before this because my boss is more interested in the other.”
As a product manager, there’s no such thing as a shortage of initiatives and product ideas. PMs are always making decisions and trade-offs because while the ideas are unlimited, their time and resources are not.
Image courtesy: https://hygger.io
Constraints lead to creativity, though — and having a defined process for product prioritization helps PMs and their teams make the best decision every time.
For the features suggested for YourStory, we used RICE framework to analyse which features should be prioritized first, and which features can wait for some time.
RICE framework ensures PMs consider each factor about a project idea with clear-eyed discipline and combine those factors in a rigorous, consistent way.
RICE framework and what each element means. Image courtesy: https://plan.io
Key Metrics
Metrics is a quantifiable measure that allows businesses to define and track the success of a product or a business activity. Metrics are used by stakeholders, marketers, and the product management team to detect problems, set goals, and make informed decisions.
Today, the biggest issue with metrics is not how to measure them — Google Analytics alone is a valuable tool for calculating and visualizing success. It’s choosing a few key metrics to keep an eye on, spending less time tracking, and more time acting upon the found data.
For YourStory, our aim was to increase stickiness on the app by forming habits, and this is what we should be measuring to analyse whether we’ve been successful in our endeavour or not:
Who has gotten us hooked?
Duolingo
You think of habits, you cannot stop thinking about Duolingo and how with their fantastic gamification, they have gotten 500mn registered users hooked to their app and learning new languages every day.
Image courtesy: www.pcmag.com
But how did they leverage the Hooked Model? Let’s break it down further:
- Trigger:
If users already installed the app and started learning, Duolingo reminds them to take a quick lesson constantly via e-mails and notifications.
So once they get the external trigger, the internal trigger steps in: enthusiasm for learning a new language.
2. Action:
Lessons are short, activities are fun in Duolingo. As users complete them one by one, they feel their progress and improvement, thus, get motivated to keep going.
3. Variable Rewards:
Users get to learn a new language. Users can go on a world tour, meet new people, or advance in their careers. What they want to achieve next is up to them, but Duolingo promises them a ”free, fun, and effective way to learn a language!”.
4. Investment:
The more users spend time in Duolingo and take the lessons, the more achievements they collect and go up on the scoreboard.
To make the learning process more interesting for the users, Duolingo keeps track of the users’ progress and lets them challenge their friends.
Tiktok
This is the ultimate habit-formation app, everyone around the world would agree upon. Once you start scrolling through the short videos, you cannot stop for hours.
But how did they get us all so hooked? Let’s find out:
- Trigger:
Let’s assume the external trigger is a TikTok video sent by a friend. A user received the message and wanted to check the video because the friend who sent it is a fun person.
So their motivation (internal trigger) is to laugh with a friend.
2. Action:
User needs to create an account, but as it takes less than a minute, it’s not a problem for them. They create their account -maybe even download the app- and then watch the video. Voila! One of the simplest actions in the world.
3. Variable Rewards
-Make your day.
It’s the motto of TikTok. Making a normally dull and ordinary day a pleasing and memorable one.
TikTok takes users on a product hunt. They scroll down to find the most hilarious video, the most beautiful destination, the cutest dog video, and you know hours have gone by.
4. Investment:
In the previous phases, the product pulled the user deep inside by giving little rewards each time they took an action (liking a video, writing a comment, following someone, etc.).
The more they spend time and interact with the content the more they will see videos that attract them, which means they will get rewards (happiness, fun, inspiration, etc) that resonate better with them. And at the end, TikTok will have a good connotation for them: a valid reason to use the product, an internal trigger.
Do you have more products in mind who has gotten us absolutely hooked? Share with me —
, I’m always up for a good product discussion.
