
Want To Hook Users? Drive Them Crazy. - nireyal
http://www.nirandfar.com/2012/03/want-to-hook-your-users-drive-them-crazy.html
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joezydeco
_"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
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
If I can get a comped dinner once in a while, sure.

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peter_l_downs
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
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.

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peter_l_downs
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
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.

------
ars
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.

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rralian
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.

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

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dinkumthinkum
[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? :)

~~~
Lewisham
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
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
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.

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staunch
Oh gosh, I wonder how many upvotes this comment will get. _crosses fingers_

