3 ms·

Want To Hook Users? Drive Them Crazy.

71 points by nireyal 15y ago

dinkumthinkum 15y ago
[citation needed] But seriously, B.F. Skinner is hardly considered mainstream psychology anymore. The part about drawing conclusions about people that half pay attention while they are playing video games seems to strain too hard to arrive at the desired explanation. Maybe there is something to this, I don't know. There aren't many human examples. I think you could probably make a lot of money telling people this is true though. Maybe that's the point? :)
- nireyal 15y ago
  I appreciate the jaundiced eye looking for a profit motive, I do the same thing myself. All I can say is that my blog is intended to help spur entrepreneurs to make products that create healthful habits while informing user about the way technology (and the companies who use it) can manipulate us. As one of my readers told me, "It isn't a superpower unless it can be used for good or evil."
- Wilduck 15y ago
  Well, Skinner's work may be old, but Behaviorism as a discipline certainly hasn't died out. Citation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behaviorism#21st-century_behavior_analysis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behaviorism#21st-century_behavi...
- Lewisham 15y ago
  This was my response as well. I've been researching all of this stuff for a while now for my PhD thesis. I'm a CS guy, not a Psych guy. I'm largely interested in what works, not why. I've largely steered towards behavioral economics because there's clear experimental evidence that's easily understood. Social games use BE effectively and often (although it is not clear to me how many developers really understand what they're doing, and how many are just copying Zynga). Skinner is not entirely rejected by everyone (Ariely uses variable schedules as to describe email addiction in Predictably Irrational), and it seems to make sense when you're discussing reduced problems like slot machines or email. However, it feels too reductionist for all problems. I'm largely working more with Daniel Pink's Autonomy/Mastery/Purpose framework, which seems to do a lot better at describing why people are encouraged to perform more complex tasks over and over, particularly games. Games tweak AMP very directly, and they fail quickly when one isn't in alignment. Autonomy is the freedom to make decisions, mastery is the space to get better at something and continue learning, purpose is discovering that what you're doing matters to you. What people are seeking is usually feedback. Feedback about themselves, feedback from others. Feedback is usually the only reward you get, but feedback is what is required for AMP to work; you need to know what choices you are actually making (autonomy), you need to know how well you're doing (mastery), whether what you're doing is affecting anything that matters (purpose). Feedback is what drives people that care about karma on Hacker News or Reddit. HN is a decent example of this if you're karma-oriented: you can write what you want (autonomy), but you can't do much to encourage people to agree or upvote (mastery), and if no-one upvotes you, you lose your purpose. Instead, if you focus on a goal like "writing makes me better at understanding my own ideas", you really can get a real AMP thing going. How many blogs have died because the author thought no-one was reading? I think designing for AMP is the real desire engine; a self-perpetuating intrinsic motivation built on feedback.
  - benkant 15y ago
    Interesting. Which department/group are you doing this in? It doesn't seem like the type of PhD you'd usually do in CS.
    - Lewisham 15y ago
      I'm part of the Center for Games and Playable Media at UC Santa Cruz, which is a video game research center. You're right that this research isn't particularly pure CS. When I started it was very much focused on social games and whether the lessons from them could be applied to other software. It just so happens that motivation theory is a pretty wide body of literature, so you can spend a lot of thought cycles outside of CS. You can spin it as a software engineering thing (architecting for retention), an HCI thing (how users respond to different interaction patterns) or even something outside CS altogether. Once you venture towards the user-end of the spectrum, you can put a lot of different hats on CS research. You just have to be careful that you don't end up either trying to end up spending lots of time learning another undergraduate major's worth, or worse, not knowing enough and being laughed at by a different academic group.
ars 15y ago
Use this knowledge to trick yourself into doing what you want. Or said another way, to make yourself enjoy doing what you already need to do.
peter_l_downs 15y ago
Or, build a product that they'll want to use, and do away with the psyche tricks altogether. The simplest "desire engine" is a product that people both want and need.
- nireyal 15y ago
  Funny thing is, the "psyche tricks" are the reason they "want and need" to use the product in the first place, they just don't know it.
  - peter_l_downs 15y ago
    I felt that this article was aimed at companies to suggest different strategies for "hooking" (which I took to mean "intentionally addicting") their users. I meant what I said only in that if the company were to have a good enough product in the first place, they wouldn't have to resort to these methods ("psyche tricks") that I consider to be underhanded.
    - Lewisham 15y ago
      Depends on your POV. "How can we make the product better?" is usually synonymous with "What do users want?", which, following the rabbit hole down enough, you reach those psych things. Look at all the terrible gamification implementations. These are responses to seeing a certain pattern in design, but they're not backed up with any real idea as to why users seem to respond (I'll avoid using the word like) to these systems, and they usually suck. Knowing exactly why one strategy is good and why one is poor can help create a better product.
  - Jare 15y ago
    Behavioral tricks are used to make users confuse what they "want and need" with what "satisfies" them. In extreme cases, users will descend that downward spiral into abuse and addiction, damaging themselves without even realizing what's happening (the boiling frog analogy).
joezydeco 15y ago
"At the heart of the desire engine is a variable schedule of rewards: a powerful hack that focuses attention, provides pleasure, and infatuates the mind." In other words, a casino. We've known about these for ages. Now we're going to repackage the idea as a 'desire engine'?
- smashing 15y ago
  That's one way to acquire funding : redefining scientific terms as company brands to drive traffic to social networking sites. On a completely unrelated note, have you signed up for Klout, the completely new and different social net site with totally awesome and random rewards ;)
  - joezydeco 15y ago
    If I can get a comped dinner once in a while, sure.
staunch 15y ago
Oh gosh, I wonder how many upvotes this comment will get. crosses fingers
krausejj 15y ago
Great article! Reminds me of OkCupid and other dating sites - variable rewards (occasionally finding matches) and you have users coming back every single day.
rralian 15y ago
I really enjoyed and feel inspired by this article. It's given me specific ideas for my next project that I'm excited about. So I was surprised to see mostly negative comments here. But I suppose it's because the ideas and conclusions in this article seem to have been derived more anecdotally than experimentally, and HN is a very scientific-minded audience. But I absolutely recognize the power of variable and unpredictable rewards as a hook in my own behavior. So that's just more anecdotal evidence, but in my opinion, applying this idea to your product will make it more fun for the user (assuming others feel the same). On a sidenote, I disagree with the common aversion to applying psychology in the design of your product. Applying psychology to the user is a means of manipulating them, but so is interacting with people in any sense. It doesn't automatically make it a "bad" thing. Better understanding people's desires and making products that meet those desires seems to me like a pretty worthwhile goal.

71 points by nireyal 15y ago

[citation needed] But seriously, B.F. Skinner is hardly considered mainstream psychology anymore. The part about drawing conclusions about people that half pay attention while they are playing video games seems to strain too hard to arrive at the desired explanation. Maybe there is something to this, I don't know. There aren't many human examples. I think you could probably make a lot of money telling people this is true though. Maybe that's the point? :)

nireyal 15y ago
I appreciate the jaundiced eye looking for a profit motive, I do the same thing myself. All I can say is that my blog is intended to help spur entrepreneurs to make products that create healthful habits while informing user about the way technology (and the companies who use it) can manipulate us. As one of my readers told me, "It isn't a superpower unless it can be used for good or evil."
Wilduck 15y ago
Well, Skinner's work may be old, but Behaviorism as a discipline certainly hasn't died out. Citation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behaviorism#21st-century_behavior_analysis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behaviorism#21st-century_behavi...
Lewisham 15y ago
This was my response as well. I've been researching all of this stuff for a while now for my PhD thesis. I'm a CS guy, not a Psych guy. I'm largely interested in what works, not why. I've largely steered towards behavioral economics because there's clear experimental evidence that's easily understood. Social games use BE effectively and often (although it is not clear to me how many developers really understand what they're doing, and how many are just copying Zynga). Skinner is not entirely rejected by everyone (Ariely uses variable schedules as to describe email addiction in Predictably Irrational), and it seems to make sense when you're discussing reduced problems like slot machines or email. However, it feels too reductionist for all problems. I'm largely working more with Daniel Pink's Autonomy/Mastery/Purpose framework, which seems to do a lot better at describing why people are encouraged to perform more complex tasks over and over, particularly games. Games tweak AMP very directly, and they fail quickly when one isn't in alignment. Autonomy is the freedom to make decisions, mastery is the space to get better at something and continue learning, purpose is discovering that what you're doing matters to you. What people are seeking is usually feedback. Feedback about themselves, feedback from others. Feedback is usually the only reward you get, but feedback is what is required for AMP to work; you need to know what choices you are actually making (autonomy), you need to know how well you're doing (mastery), whether what you're doing is affecting anything that matters (purpose). Feedback is what drives people that care about karma on Hacker News or Reddit. HN is a decent example of this if you're karma-oriented: you can write what you want (autonomy), but you can't do much to encourage people to agree or upvote (mastery), and if no-one upvotes you, you lose your purpose. Instead, if you focus on a goal like "writing makes me better at understanding my own ideas", you really can get a real AMP thing going. How many blogs have died because the author thought no-one was reading? I think designing for AMP is the real desire engine; a self-perpetuating intrinsic motivation built on feedback.
- benkant 15y ago
  Interesting. Which department/group are you doing this in? It doesn't seem like the type of PhD you'd usually do in CS.
  - Lewisham 15y ago
    I'm part of the Center for Games and Playable Media at UC Santa Cruz, which is a video game research center. You're right that this research isn't particularly pure CS. When I started it was very much focused on social games and whether the lessons from them could be applied to other software. It just so happens that motivation theory is a pretty wide body of literature, so you can spend a lot of thought cycles outside of CS. You can spin it as a software engineering thing (architecting for retention), an HCI thing (how users respond to different interaction patterns) or even something outside CS altogether. Once you venture towards the user-end of the spectrum, you can put a lot of different hats on CS research. You just have to be careful that you don't end up either trying to end up spending lots of time learning another undergraduate major's worth, or worse, not knowing enough and being laughed at by a different academic group.

ars 15y ago

Use this knowledge to trick yourself into doing what you want. Or said another way, to make yourself enjoy doing what you already need to do.

peter_l_downs 15y ago

Or, build a product that they'll want to use, and do away with the psyche tricks altogether. The simplest "desire engine" is a product that people both want and need.

nireyal 15y ago
Funny thing is, the "psyche tricks" are the reason they "want and need" to use the product in the first place, they just don't know it.
- peter_l_downs 15y ago
  I felt that this article was aimed at companies to suggest different strategies for "hooking" (which I took to mean "intentionally addicting") their users. I meant what I said only in that if the company were to have a good enough product in the first place, they wouldn't have to resort to these methods ("psyche tricks") that I consider to be underhanded.
  - Lewisham 15y ago
    Depends on your POV. "How can we make the product better?" is usually synonymous with "What do users want?", which, following the rabbit hole down enough, you reach those psych things. Look at all the terrible gamification implementations. These are responses to seeing a certain pattern in design, but they're not backed up with any real idea as to why users seem to respond (I'll avoid using the word like) to these systems, and they usually suck. Knowing exactly why one strategy is good and why one is poor can help create a better product.
- Jare 15y ago
  Behavioral tricks are used to make users confuse what they "want and need" with what "satisfies" them. In extreme cases, users will descend that downward spiral into abuse and addiction, damaging themselves without even realizing what's happening (the boiling frog analogy).

joezydeco 15y ago

"At the heart of the desire engine is a variable schedule of rewards: a powerful hack that focuses attention, provides pleasure, and infatuates the mind." In other words, a casino. We've known about these for ages. Now we're going to repackage the idea as a 'desire engine'?

smashing 15y ago
That's one way to acquire funding : redefining scientific terms as company brands to drive traffic to social networking sites. On a completely unrelated note, have you signed up for Klout, the completely new and different social net site with totally awesome and random rewards ;)
- joezydeco 15y ago
  If I can get a comped dinner once in a while, sure.

staunch 15y ago

Oh gosh, I wonder how many upvotes this comment will get. crosses fingers

krausejj 15y ago

Great article! Reminds me of OkCupid and other dating sites - variable rewards (occasionally finding matches) and you have users coming back every single day.

rralian 15y ago

I really enjoyed and feel inspired by this article. It's given me specific ideas for my next project that I'm excited about. So I was surprised to see mostly negative comments here. But I suppose it's because the ideas and conclusions in this article seem to have been derived more anecdotally than experimentally, and HN is a very scientific-minded audience. But I absolutely recognize the power of variable and unpredictable rewards as a hook in my own behavior. So that's just more anecdotal evidence, but in my opinion, applying this idea to your product will make it more fun for the user (assuming others feel the same). On a sidenote, I disagree with the common aversion to applying psychology in the design of your product. Applying psychology to the user is a means of manipulating them, but so is interacting with people in any sense. It doesn't automatically make it a "bad" thing. Better understanding people's desires and making products that meet those desires seems to me like a pretty worthwhile goal.