Nir’s Note: In this guest post, Ryan Hoover describes the design decisions and strategies used to build a habit-forming product, largely influenced by the learnings on this blog.
Recently,
Nathan Bashaw and I launched
Product Hunt, a daily leaderboard of the best new products. As two product enthusiasts, we wanted to create a community to share, discover, and geek out about new and interesting products. But to make it a success, we knew we had to make it a habit, a product people would use every day.
Early feedback suggests it’s been working, as gauged by severaltweets and our own site traffic analysis. Qualitative feedback is great, of course, but what people actually do is more important.
60 percent of daily active users (DAU) are returning visitors 32 percent of unique visitors in the past week have visited the site five or more times 52 percent of subscribers open daily email digest (yes, daily!) and 23 percent are click-through
This is especially encouraging, considering the site’s minimalism and lack of obvious re-engagement features. Here are the design decisions and strategies used to build a habit-forming product, largely influenced by Nir Eyal’s work.
Build for Existing Behaviors
In a recent interview, Ev Williams, founder of Blogger, Twitter, and Medium, shared his strategy for building a billion-dollar business:
Take a human desire, preferably one that has been around for a really long time… identify that desire and use modern technology to take out steps.
We are not attempting to create new desires or behaviors. We are providing people with a destination to do something they already do. Most successful startups begin this way.
People have been sharing and beautifying photography for decades. Instagram made this effortless and more accessible.
Sharing links and updates across social networks was a daily habit for many before Joel Gascoigne, founder of Buffer, scratched his own itch to make this even easier and more efficient.
As social networks increase the speed and frequency of link-sharing, people have become inundated with articles. Nate Weiner emailed himself links — an inefficient and terrible way to save articles. And he wasn’t the only one as his bookmarking service, Pocket (formerly Read-It-Later) solves this problem for millions others.
Similarly, Product Hunt’s inspiration comes from our own desires and observations of existing user behaviors.
New products are newsworthy and a topic of conversation. “What new apps are you using? What’s on your iPhone home screen? Did you see that new product announcement?” Product releases and significant feature updates also drive attention to popular publications like Techcrunch and Startup Grind.
But these behaviors exist outside of the tech, early adopter crowd. Kickstarter has also proven there is mainstream interest in discovering and sharing (and even backing!) cool, new products.
Remind Users to Return
Habits don’t form overnight. It takes several days, often weeks for a product or service to earn unprompted user engagement, triggered by people’s day-to-day emotions. Consider your use of Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or other popular, habit-forming products. Engagement starts with external triggers that inform the user what to do, driving the desired behavior.
Immediately after signing up on Twitter, the service recommends users to follow. Soon after, email notifications are sent to the user, highlighting tweets from those followed. Companies promote their @username through TV commercials, billboards, online advertising, and even their own business card. Friends and colleagues talk about breaking news they discovered on Twitter. All of these external triggers — directly or indirectly delivered by Twitter — re-engage users.
This sounds obvious and some argue companies are too aggressive with external triggers (and some are), but it’s important to realize your startup is of very little interest (at least initially) to others. Users are inundated with the distractions of everyday life — they need and want to be reminded you exist.
Triggers to re-engage:
Product Hunt uses the following external triggers to re-engage users: 1. Daily Email Digest. 2. Twitter. 3. Every day we show off your new idea or product to the world — you can submit your new discovery to discuss with likeminded people. 4. You can discover new long-lasting ideas and products. Find an Internal Trigger
External triggers:
External triggers such as email notifications and word-of-mouth are an important drive of re-engagement but they are not the only thing that brings users back. Internal triggers are where habits are formed. These triggers form within one’s thoughts, often coupled with emotions, particularly those that are negative. When negative feelings arise, users seek resolution, turning to products or services that alleviate the “pain.”
FOMO (fear of missing out) is a form of social anxiety. We all want to stay up-to-date and knowledgable about what’s new and happening. Some may even feel embarrassed by their lack of understanding of particular events or topics. This is certainly true in politics and news but also for products.
Make it Enjoyable to Create and Consume
In addition to the product name and link, contributors must include a short tagline for the product. Contributors can copy and paste the tagline used on the product’s landing page or create their own. For example:
Mindie: Create 7-Second Music Videos Hatch: The app that loves you back Blue Goji: Gamified Exercise Equipment BloomTHAT: Ridiculously Fast Flowers Keezy: Turn your phone into an instrument
It’s fun to come up with a tagline — to think creatively and artistically describe a product to the world. Similar to Twitter, limiting taglines to 65 characters forces succinctness, making creation more accessible and consumable.
This small amount of effort also establishes ownership of the submission. When visitors upvote the product, contributors receive recognition not only for their discovery but also for their efforts describing the product via a tagline.
Make it Unpredictable
Unlike most directories, Product Hunt avoids categorizing products to encourage serendipitous discovery. Although most submissions are technology products, occasionally the delightful and unexpected product is submitted. Last week a Tuft & Needle, a new startup offering boutique-quality beds at an affordable price, was shared. Rarely would I seek a new bed but this unexpected find and AMA with its founders, was enjoyable.
We call Product Hunt: The daily leaderboard for new products.
Let’s break this down:
“Daily” frames the habitual behavior we’re seeking to facilitate. “Leaderboard” implies a ranking and system of curating the best. “New products” communicates the type of submissions accepted.
Note: This guest post was written by Ryan Hoover
Photo credit: Mark Gilmour
