Chapter 13: Desire
Psychographic segmentation, dividing the market according to psychological criteria in consumer behavior such as personality, attitudes, and lifestyle.
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Using statistical techniques on collected data, analysts identify both the purchase hook of your product and groups of users who think in similar ways.
The obvious lesson from psychographic segmentation is that people do not respond ambiguously to features aimed at needs unrelated to them. They either dislike those features strongly or experience them as a distraction. People who are dieting for their lives or trying to feed impatient family members have no interest in creating profiles, sharing recipes, or choosing wine pairings. Others, however, visit a site to satisfy needs for belonging or esteem.
These strong emotions arise from what Maslow called prepotency. In other words, people tend to show interest in higher-level needs only after lower-level needs have been satisfied. Of course there are exceptions, such as the starving artist who pursues self-actualization before physiological needs are fully met.
Chapter 14: Fun
Fear - death = fun
Chapter 15: Reinforcement schedules
Users clicked your meme. At least they clicked it once.
Key point: increasing visit frequency and click frequency among existing users is often a better way to raise advertising revenue than simply increasing the number of users.
There is a simple business lesson for anyone who wants to get rich through their creations: do not charge users to access the meme. Let them use it for free, and instead resell the scarce resource they possess, their attention. Users do not want to pay money. They pay instead with attention. But attention itself does not buy anything directly. So convert it into money through the enormous digital advertising market. People already know the saying that fits this model: if the user is not paying for the product, the user is the product. Users are equipped with strong psychological bottlenecks that help them filter for the content most useful to them.
- The first is the variable-interval reinforcement schedule. It makes the time until the next reward unpredictable.
* In every schedule discussed here, "interval" means that the criterion is time rather than clicks.
- One-to-one messages such as texts and email
- One-to-many user-generated content such as social posts and email
- Breaking news alerts
- Sales events and coupons
- The second is the variable-ratio reinforcement schedule. In this case, users cannot know how many actions are required to obtain the meme that serves as the reward.
* Here, ratio means the schedule is based on behavior rather than time, such as the clicks, swipes, and scrolls needed to load content and advertising pages.
In this kind of schedule, the number of actions required before a reward appears may be fixed, like five or ten repetitions, or it may vary randomly within a range, creating a variable ratio users cannot predict.
Generally, the following digital features reward users according to a variable-ratio plan that hides how many clicks are needed before enjoyable content appears.
When a random and unpredictable variable-ratio schedule is used, users are left with only one option: keep clicking until the reward appears. This makes them revisit the site again and again, viewing more pages and therefore more ads. Web analytics professionals call this stickiness. We call it addictiveness. Under a variable-ratio schedule, even if rewards are cut off entirely, people take a very long time to stop clicking.
Even when the task has become impossible or when no more rewarding content remains, users exposed to a variable-ratio schedule take a long time to recognize that they should stop. Long after there is nothing left to gain, they continue the behavior.
- Internet lists where each item opens on a different page
- Collections of thumbnails, such as Pinterest, Medium, or other galleries
- Profile lists on dating sites
- Items in maze games or physics-based games, such as hidden switches or pathways
- All games, including single-player games and probability-based gambling games
- Walls and feeds
Users keep clicking and scrolling because they do not know how many actions are needed to find the most enjoyable content.
Chapter 16: Rising immersion
As the previous chapter suggested, timing matters as much as content when it comes to successful memes. In other words, sequence determines meaning. Let us look more closely at the power of order and timing.
Among the digital interfaces you provide to users, the most important may be (a) the onboarding pages that guide signup and app download, and (b) the payment pages. When you are first dreaming in a garage with a developer friend, these details rarely come to mind. At first you only care about the meme itself, whether it satisfies users' desires, and whether it offers fun and interest. But at some point you must also care about revenue. Then you need a UX flow that sets up the attention channel through the signup process. It is through this flow that users eventually pay. That moment is decisive enough to separate success from failure. This is called the conversion flow.
Psychologists had already been observing this behavioral pattern since the early 1960s. When people become involved in something through a series of small actions and receive rewards along the way, they often accept in stages what they would have rejected if asked all at once.
When you visit Classmates.com, the site first asks you to do something relatively small: choose the state where you graduated high school. Then it asks for the first letter of the city. Users assume such small bits of information cannot do much harm. As reinforcement for those small actions, the site shows the name of the town they lived in. That is itself a reward.
If you are a meme developer, do not be evil. And if you are a user, do not be fooled. Sellers should sell only what they claim to sell, and buyers should buy only what they intended to buy. A multi-step give-and-get process opens us up to the meme and widens the bottleneck that normally protects us. Once we obtain what we wanted, we should narrow that bottleneck again as quickly as possible.
Chapter 17: Approach and avoidance
As the previous chapter showed, shortening the conversion flow used for registering, downloading, or paying for your digital invention is not always more effective. Even if it requires more clicks, a slower, longer give-and-get sequence that gradually raises commitment often works better.
That can be hard for computer engineers to accept. How can something less efficient be more effective? Yet in this case it often is. Jesse Schell, once a designer at Disney, said something similar about games. If players could skip the boss and go directly to the final treasure the moment the game begins, it would become the least fun game imaginable. Remember: the memetic fitness you create is proven when there is maximum synergy between user psychology and programming. As a meme developer, it does not matter if the programming itself feels aesthetically satisfying.
Digital product marketers face a similarly difficult idea.
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Key point: the further we proceed along a conversion flow, the more likely we are to shift from an approach mindset to an avoidance mindset.
The relevant psychological phenomenon is approach-avoidance. Since the work of psychologist Neal E. Miller in 1959, many studies have been published in this field.
The devil is in the details.
Some people jokingly call this the marriage graph. When people propose, they focus only on a partner's strengths, a smile, a good job, a great body. At that stage, those advantages seem sufficient. But during the engagement and wedding preparation, avoidance-oriented thinking begins to grow, and anxiety with it. By the time people walk into the wedding hall, approach and avoidance may be balanced, or avoidance may even dominate. Then they become filled with worries about future disadvantages: personality, debt, and even the family members seated in the hall. It suddenly seems perfectly natural that some people cry when they answer "I do." From that moment on, things can only get better or worse.
Therefore, in the early pages of a conversion flow, it is better to emphasize carrot-like messages, while later pages should calm worries about the stick. The key is not to ignore people's concerns but to reassure them. That is the better route to getting more people to sign up.
