02-March-2024
Products are fundamentally voluntary and your product takes effort to use. Speak to the user with a shared vocabulary so they are able to understand why you are worthwhile.
Remember, you’re competing against doing nothing and against pre-existing habits. Pre-existing habits are overcome through deliberate behavior, positive motivation, and reduced switching costs.
Designing for User Involvement is a reliable way to increase the likelihood of initial adoption. Design the user’s initial exper...
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Near the beginning of a person's personal productivity journey, they may be fine with using Apple Reminders as their form of task manager. Eventually, User skill level increases over time, so they may want to sort tasks into projects. Apple Reminders can handle that, so the user remains satisfied.
Eventually, they read Getting Things Done and realize that the Lists within Apple Reminders just won't do the trick. According to the principles of Difficulty Matching, this is the point where they...
If an app enables the user to accomplish only one goal, then the user will be lost as soon as the one goal disappears or is accomplished better by using some other product. Accomplishing multiple goals makes for a sturdier foundation of usage that is more resilient to changing life circumstances, as User goals change over time.
Imagine if all LinkedIn was good for was finding a job. If this were the case, then people would stop using it as soon as they found a job. However, they can also be ...
New users do not yet have the vocabulary to understand the app, but as User skill level increases over time, so does their vocabulary. They are able to conceptualize and express desires that they couldn’t express before, so User goals change over time. If the app can only handle the user's goals 2 weeks in but not 2 months in, then it can't expect the user's continued involvement.
This points to the importance of Continuous onboarding for Difficulty Matching. If the user's skill level doesn'...
The way a product is designed shapes the way that people use it. Every app is designed for behavior change, intentionally or unintentionally, so the questions that drive behavioral product strategy must be addressed. User Involvement is a set of metrics whose success is defined by the combination of user behaviors that contribute towards creating a desirable outcome. Behavioral product strategy is making product decisions to influence user behavior and improve user involvement.
It doesn't ma...
I started out my career studying behavioral economics in college, graduated wanting to keep working in the space but figured that technology was the best place to apply behavioral science for high impact.
I figured that I could continue to learn about behavioral science by reading papers on my own and working with products to apply the insights and see them in action.
For three years, I worked as an independent consultant specializing in behavioral product strategy and gamification. Through...
His twitter
He is working on Kanopi
Below is a chat I had via Discord with Licat, one of the co-founders of Obsidian, an excellent application that I use for editing all of the markdown files on this website. I'm working on developing a community for GuidedTrack, so this conversation was incredibly helpful.
I'm a behavioral product strategist. That means I like to think about design decisions with respect to how they influence user behavior.
For example, how does the medium of communication influence the frequency with which ...
His twitter
A brilliant thread on Clojure and Data Science where we first (inter)met:
Great question!#Clojure has started to gain a small but exuberant following of data scientists, so there is definitely SOME traction here.The real question is: Why hasn't there been more? And is this a flash in the pan, or is there real ongoing potential here?— Christopher Small (@metasoarous) April 27, 2021
This is a dense topic, but the short version is:
Clojure has many different data types. Maps, vectors, and lists are all different data types, but you can generally use the same functions to work with them because, abstractly, they're all sequences. This means you need to learn fewer primitives and functions are more likely to work on whatever data type you're using if you think they will.
See the first couple of sections of Chapter 4 of Clojure for the Brave and True for more details.
Why I'm learning Clojure
Domain-specific languages as end-user software
How I'm learning Clojure
What I like about Clojure
I’m still working on this one, leave a comment or send me a note on Twitter @RobertHaisfield if you want to see more on this page!
See initial thoughts here: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/Rob-Haisfield-Thinking-in-Public/page/GPiXkEoEZ
I’m still working on this one, leave a comment or send me a note on Twitter @RobertHaisfield if you want to see more on this page!
Fabriq is a personal relationship management tool that enables users to be intentional about how they prioritize, track, and invest in the people close to users. You can add contacts to your inner, middle, or outer circle, set connection frequencies, and note down important details. While working with them, our focus was on increasing retention. In order for users to gain value out of Fabriq, they must use the app as a means of personally scheduling who to talk to. In my behavioral audit, I t...
Once we’ve set the behaviors involved in enhancing User Involvement in motion, we create a virtuous cycle of involvement. User behavior turns into goal accomplishment. This reinforces the value of those user behaviors, so the user is more likely to use your product when they have a goal that the product can help them accomplish.
People internalize the value of the app more deeply over time, so Designing for user involvement has positive effects on adoption, retention, and virality.