Next steps: What am I going to do with this?
As a user, I’ve been long worried about the social dilemma caused by so-called habit-forming products while feel so strengthless about my own social addiction. Globally, this issue has also raised wide discussion and concern. The vicious addiction to social platforms could lead to physical and mental disorders; the advanced algorithms may narrow down users’ insights and cause tragedies to teenagers due to the lack of monitor and regulation will lead us to. In the interviews took placed in a recent documentary “The Social Dilemma”, none of the interviewees, either engineers or executive leaders, in the leading tech companies such as Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest could give out a definite answer.
So, where is the boundary of habit forming? What’s the standards of morality of manipulations?
As a designer, gladly, I kind of seeing a solution provided by Nir in the book, which is called the Manipulation Matrix.
First of all, the whole human race still has a long way to form the antibodies to the social addiction and before that, we can only use our will-power and self-discipline to fight against it.
The Manipulation Matrix contains two questions: “Does the product materially improve user’s life?” and “Does the maker use it?”
This matrix seeks to help designers like me to answer the question “Should I hook my users?” instead of “Can I hook them?”
Facilitators, according to author, have the highest chance of success as designers use the product themselves and hold the belief in their products. They are their own users, thus having the most closely understand of the user needs/ their own needs.
Peddlers must be cautious about the hubris and inauthenticity that comes from building solutions for people they do not understand first-hand. A designer must emphasize build product for target users, not himself.
Entertainers could only be successful when keep catering their products to the current trends very closely otherwise would be competed and fail without lasting.
Dealers are usually into rapid success, if not fail. And they often find themselves in morally precarious positions.
Habit Testing
The last official chapter in this book reveals the habit testing inspired on the “build, measure, learn” methodology for those who have the intention to build their own habit-forming product. So far, I haven’t planned to start my own product yet so I adapted my current project “Work Manager” into the context to make sure I have a product, users, and meaningful data to explore.
Step 1: Identify “WHO” and “HOW OFTEN”
“WHO” refers to your users and “HOW OFTEN” is the frequency you think the user should be using your product.
For “Work Manager”, the users are office workers, especially cooperating with international clients or colleagues, who work from home currently and will work onsite afterwards.
They “should” use my product at least five days a week, from 9am to 5pm. Because they need this office software to aid their daily office work such as attending meetings held in other time zones, viewing calendar events for all email addresses and chatting with others.
Step 2: Codify “HABIT PATH”
You should have at least 95% of the selected users find your product valuable enough to use as predicted. Otherwise, the product idea needs to be reconsidered and adjusted.
Finding the “HABIT PATH” is to find what similar aspects of the product hooked them? A series of similar actions shared by the most loyal users is a HABIT PATH.
The goal is to determine which of these steps is critical for creating devoted users so that you can modify the experience to encourage this behaviour.
For “Work Manager”, the shared actions are checking calendars and chatting with others.
Step 3: Modify…the existed features, flows, steps…
This step resembles the iteration in the double diamond UCD process, they both require constant testing and communication with old users to improve the product and nudge new users down the same Habit Path taken by devotees.
According to the test participants, “Work Manager” is very easy to use and has clear layout, but the functions are too limited. For now, it aims to save the hassle to calculate meeting times in different time zones to local time, and integrates events for all working email addresses one may have. However, this might only attract companies with international clients while not attempting enough for smaller corporations. Also, could an office tool count as a habit-forming product only because people use it for work’s sake despite I, the designer, play the role of a facilitator?
These are the questions I definitely should think through if I really want to put this prototype into practice. And huge thanks to “Hooked” for deepening my understanding of habit- forming model and helping me interrelating my knowledge towards UX design. It is self-explanatory and easy to read, and I could confirm that it is indeed a “Must-read for those who cares about driving customer engagement.”
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