A couple of weeks ago I was listening to the Tim Ferris podcast. His guest during this episode was Tony Robbins.

A funny side note: I typically listen to podcasts at 2x speed, but I had to slow this episode down, due to the rate at which Tony speaks. Another confession: I’ve always dismissed Tony as a bit of a self help snake oil salesman. I feel bad for judging him. Turns out, he’s actually a pretty amazing individual.

As a result of this interview, I decided to read his book, “Awaken the Giant Within“. I don’t typically read self help books, but I have to say that I really enjoyed this book.

One of the underlying premises in this book is that all of our actions are ultimately driven by either:

• A) how painful something is, or
• B) how pleasurable something is

The goal of the book is to get individuals to change their behaviors. That said, it actually got me thinking about how these same principles apply to web and mobile applications. One line in the book stood out in particular:

Link pleasure to any behavior you want someone to repeat.

With this as a filter, it’s interesting to think about which apps you use repeatedly, and why. What have those apps done to create pleasure for you?

If you have an app of your own, it’s also interesting to think about how painful, or pleasurable of an experience you’ve created for your users, especially within your onboarding experience.

Questions to consider

• When is the last time you did a pain/pleasure audit on your app?
• What specific things create the most pleasure for your users?
• How long does it take for a new user to find pleasure in your app?
• What can you do to reduce the painful elements in your app and in your new user experience (NUX) flow?
• Are there things you can do to make pleasure more immediate? How might you reduce the time to pleasure (TTP) in your NUX? Could you reduce your NUX TTP from minutes to a matter of seconds?