Rob's Hypertext Notebook

Rob Haisfield

Behavioral product strategist and gamification designer. This is my public hypertext notebook, sharing my thinking in motion at various stages of development.

 Scaling Synthesis      
avatar

Start Here

Tags
suitcase icon

Work Together

RSS

    Home

    Designing for user involvement has positive effects on adoption, retention, and virality

    AdoptionAdoption
    This page is simply to collect pages that link to it. Use this to jump to other locations.

    The most successful app adoptions come from a projectThe most successful app adoptions come from a project
    #stub

    New users do not yet have the vocabulary to understand the app. A big mistake that many people make when they try out a new app is that they’ll try to understand features in a very abstract sense. They will try to understand what it is without knowing what it is for. When people make this mistake, Adoption goes down. Projects allow the app to Speak to the user with a shared vocabulary. They put functionalities into context, closing the feedback loop on learning the usefulness of said f...     because that gives users the motivation to learn functionalities in the context of when they are useful and persist through failures. Adoption requires a baseline of user involvement in order to overcome inertiaAdoption requires a baseline of user involvement in order to overcome inertia
    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...    . Designing for user involvement allows you to Speak to the user with a shared vocabularySpeak to the user with a shared vocabulary
    New users do not yet have the vocabulary to understand the app. They understand the product through the lens of their own goals and what's familiar to them. The company will generally have its own goals, like increasing the frequency of engagement. However, we can't just tell people to use the app every day. The user needs to have a reason to do so, articulated in terms of the user's own goals.

    When working with clients, I often Use a badging system as a method of actionable user research to...    . People design their own experience in an app through their actions, so designing for User InvolvementUser Involvement
    Imagine purchasing a gym membership in order to lose weight or grow more muscular. Having a gym membership is not enough on its own! In order to successfully accomplish that goal, you would need to work out regularly on the right muscle groups. You might have a higher likelihood of success if you participate in exercise classes or hire a personal trainer. Your outcomes are shaped by your own behavior in the gym.

    User involvement is defined by the set of user behaviors that lead to experienci...     early on means that the user will be doing behaviors that help them realize the value of the app. As a result, they’ll be more willing to pay.

    In these notes, I tend to use adoption, conversion, and onboarding not necessarily interchangeably, but in similar contexts.

    RetentionRetention
    This page is simply to collect pages that link to it. Use this to jump to other locations.

    User involvement and retention are so deeply intertwined that I think it’s best to reframe retention as “continued user involvement.” User involvement is incredibly goal oriented, so as User goals change over timeUser goals change over time
    A user’s goals 1 week into using your app and 6 months are rarely the same. “Elder users” often won’t even retain the goals that they had at the start of their experience. Apps with continued user involvement enable the user to accomplish multiple goals to maintain users through full goal transitions.

    New users do not yet have the vocabulary to understand the app. User skill level increases over time, giving the user new vocabulary to conceptualization and express desires that they didn’t ha...    , it must be the case that Apps with continued user involvement respond to changing user goals over timeApps with continued user involvement respond to changing user goals over time
    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'...    .

    I design for user involvement, not engagement. See: The difference between user involvement and user engagementThe difference between user involvement and user engagement
    With high quality User Involvement, people are using your product when their lives call for it and in a way that allows the product to fulfill its promise to the user. This is distinct from how high user engagement is generally conceptualized in product world, which is when people use your service as much as possible.

    Designing for engagement is unsustainable. It’s an outcome that is often at odds with what the user actually wants from the app, as is the case with much of social media. Peopl...    , where I talk about designing for how user involvement is an input metric for business and user goals. Focusing on user involvement aligns incentives.

    Virality

    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!