Had the opportunity to attend Habit Summit this week. Here are a few notes:

Roger Dooley (dooleydirect.com) – Habit, persuasion, and neuromarketing
– Predicts use of wearables to be used to gauge biometrics in user testing studies (interesting thought)

Kintan Brahmbhatt (kintya.com) – Amazon Music (reducing friction to increase engagement)
– Lamborghini story. Got remote control car as kid – no batteries. Friction killed the experience.
– Friction stops users from completing their task.
– It’s up to us as product designers to identify that friction, and reduce or eliminate it.
– Dining experience – great food, fantastic food – but check came 20min late. Just remembered that the check was late.
– Moments of disappointment have more weight on recall
– Reducing friction helps make a product more usable
– What causes friction:

1) avoidable effort
– FireTV example – voice search for TV & movie programming vs. typing in on awkward alphabetical (vs. QWERTY) on screen keyboard.

2) anticipate and avoid unnatural context switching
– Example where while watching a movie or TV show, you can pause the show, and see which actors are on the screen.
– Example where you’re watching a TV episode, you can pause the screen, tap on a character, and read the back story of that specific user up to that point in the series.
– Example, dictionary definitions built into Kindle, but also have a setting called “word-wise” where explanations for complex terms will be automatically be shown (for beginning readers).

3) Remove need to make choices
– Example with Amazon is 1-click
– Example – Amazon Fresh – makes it easy to select from past purchases

Bo Ren (Instagram) – Designing products for behavioral change
– How people see themselves – comparing to others can be extremely motivational.
– Example of door hanger experiment where they went around to neighborhoods and hung 4 diff door flyers. 1 based on saving money, one on environment, one on civic duty, one on comparing you to neighbors. The one comparing to neighbors was the only one that caused a decrease in energy usage (by 6%).

Ximena Vengoechea (Twitter) – designing people first
– Getting to know your users
– Please test assumptions before you build, let alone ship a product
– Switch from product first, to people first design
– Strategies to think like regular people, not product people:

1) Identify feelings
– What emotions are you designing for?
– How do they feel when they open my app?
– How do they feel when they close it?
– How do they feel about your competitors
– Way to test – Home screen test (what emotion do you feel)
– if you can identify the feeling, you can identify the relief

2) Consider context
– What’s my users current context?
– You have to consider urgency, state of mind
– Use whatever data you can to help inform context – get creative

3) Understand motivations
– What is my users happiness dependent upon?
– Then design a path to that.
– introvert vs extrovert

4) Get to know their values
– What is my users world view?

Ryan Hoover (Product Hunt) – The building blocks of community
– lot’s of good ideas in his slides
– 3 stages of community:

1) Friends, and friends of friends
– Good place to start a community
– Start with the people you’re most connected to

2) downhill effect – collection of people around similar interest
– Product hunt is that
– Hacker News
– Dribbble

3) platform
– Reddit

Nathalie Nahai (author) – 5 tricks to Persuasive Product Design
1) Endowed progress
– Start funnel progress off on 1, not 0
– Example carwash – Card passed out with 10 circles, and 2 stamped vs 8 circles no stamps – One with 2 stamps had much higher usage rate.
– Increases conversions
– Decreases completion time
– Losses are felt greater than gains (no matter how small the loss)

2) Sunk costs fallacy
– Once we put effort in, we hate giving up on that effort. We feel compelled to continue

3) Appointment dynamic
– They’ve spent time/invested (sunk cost), now schedule a time for them to come back
– Have to know what motivates your users
– Give them relevant initial progress
– use to create a path for them to follow

4) Opportunity cost
– Three main costs
A) Attention – acceptance, belonging, social validation (why Facebook and twitter are so successful)
B) Time – alone, bored/killing time, when waiting
C) Money – fun pain – make it hard, make the time it takes to complete great – then make it easy for them to pay to skip all of that. Adding a intermediate currency, cloaking the perceived cost. Allow people to earn currency. Offer bulk discounts

John Egan (Pinterest) – Measuring for engagement
– R&R team (retention & resurrection)

1) Activation
– Communicating the value of your product is key
– Retained MAU’s
– 30 day window – too long – 1d7’s percentage of users that come back at least once in the first week, high correlation with retained MAU’s and long-term retention
– cohort heat maps – shows how new user retention curve is changing over time

2) Engagement
– Finding your key engagement metric:
a) What action does a user need to take to get value form the product?
b) What is the minimum frequency that someone needs to use our product?
– Classify users into states
a) Core, casual, marginal
b) New, dormant, resurrected

3) Retention & Resurrection
– Each email must raise engagement, or get’s dropped
– look at negative signals – app deletion, spam reports, unsubscribes

Tristan Harris (How to measure success on time spent well)
– After a better web
– One with better motives – not just about money
– Organic type initiative, but for the web
– http://TimeWellSpent.io

Jake Knapp & Daniel Burka (Google Ventures) – 5 day idea sprint
– Story about Nintendo – Rented for 4 days from friend, and decided to was too addicting
– Startups today – MVP, launch, get feedback, iterate/pivot
– Anther approach – 5 day design sprint – focus is on learning
– Lot’s of details here: http://www.gv.com/sprint/
– Super entertaining presentation