Random draw, an addictive way to motivate users!

Why are we addicted to TikTok? Because we never know what the next post will be, so every swipe of our finger is an exploration of the unknown world.

Users opening the app or website every day is the greatest encouragement and recognition for product managers , so product managers must live up to the users’ activity and really operate the users’ participation effectively. Product managers must find ways to design mechanisms that make users addicted and keep users active on the product.

Today I will share with you the form of lottery, which is also a design of random rewards.

Highlights of this article: 1. Lottery, a force that determines the future 2. How to design lottery products more effectively 3. Risk control design of lottery products

1. Lottery: a force that determines the future

User motivation is a very important environment for product design. Many products claim to be user-centric and designed for users. So I have recently studied the incentive systems of many platforms and hope to write a series of articles to talk about how to design user incentives. Each product has its own unique user incentive system, such as levels, badges, points, coupons, rankings, etc. This time I will talk about three aspects: lotteries, points and coupons.

Let me share the lucky draw with you today

What are user incentives?

Baidu Encyclopedia: Motivation is the process by which an organization stimulates, guides, maintains and regulates the behavior of its members through designing appropriate external reward forms and working environment, using certain behavioral norms and punitive measures, and relying on information communication, so as to effectively achieve the organization and its individual goals.

We motivate users in the hope of exerting some external influence on them, allowing them to continue to be active and adjust their behavior according to the design of the product.

Why motivate users?

We have entered the era of mobile Internet. The devices that connect users to products are online at all times. In China, many games, Weibo, and Moments have seriously divided users' time and attention. The experience is extremely fragmented and it has become very difficult to concentrate. Therefore, user incentives can help products accomplish the following functions:

1. User reminder

2. User behavior guidance

3. Improve user activity

4. Create expected benefits for users

What is a lucky draw?

The lottery is a form of lottery. The word lottery comes from the Italian word lotto, which means a force or motivation that can determine the future. It is a random reward.

The biggest excitement that random rewards bring to users is that they never know what they will get, and users like this uncertainty very much. The most famous psychological experiment is the Skinner box.

Skinner, a psychologist at Harvard University, created an operant conditioning chamber: a rat was placed in a box. Have the mouse pull a lever in the box. Sometimes the rat was given some food to pull the lever. Study what conditions cause mice to pull the lever more often. The Skinner box is a very famous psychology experimental device. Let us introduce the content of Experiment 4.

Probabilistic Rewards

Experiment 4: Put a very hungry mouse in a Skinner box and press the button multiple times, resulting in food falling with a probability. Result: The mouse learned to press the button continuously. When food was no longer dropped, the mice's learning behavior disappeared very slowly. As the probability gets lower and lower, the mouse's learning behavior of pressing the button does not change. Until a food falls after pressing the button 40-60 times, the mouse will still keep pressing the button for a long time.

If this behavioral characteristic is extended to humans, then based on the opportunity to obtain rewards, many people will perform an activity more frequently, which is what we often call gambling . Slot machines bring the "Skinner Box" concept to humans.

This is a biological emotion we give to users. Happiness is to make users feel good. If we can make users feel satisfied after being suppressed for a period of time, that feeling of good will be more exciting and more impressive.

2. How to design lottery products more effectively

1. User incentive model

We can draw a user incentive model, which is actually to give users goals and formulate corresponding rules, and reward them when they complete the prescribed actions to make them satisfied; a more advanced approach is to let users form certain expectations and let them know that as long as they can complete the predetermined actions, they can get satisfaction.

2. Numerical setting of reward mechanism

Speaking of specific product design, the setting of probability is very particular. For the benefit of both users and products, many products will try to be absolutely random, but instead use a pseudo-randomness with a guaranteed bottom line. This pseudo-randomness is intended to improve everyone's experience, or to provide some compensation and comfort to users with a low probability of "bad luck".

There were three important technological breakthroughs in development, which will not be discussed in detail here. If you are interested, you can discuss it with your company's development.

How to design pseudo-randomness, how to set the random pool, and whether to perform classification processing.

How to design a guaranteed minimum? Whether it is a big turntable or opening a treasure chest, the user's choice is also random. How to design a guaranteed minimum?

For the first reward, only by allowing users to gain certain advantages in the early stage and get a little benefit can the users’ interest be aroused. Stimulate communication and comparison among users, and users will spread the message, and they will also have the illusion that "I am very lucky.

3. Risk Control Design of Lottery Products

This point is overlooked by many product managers. Many product managers are excited when designing normal flows and often forget the design of abnormal flows. The risk control discussed here is just a reminder, not the specific technical implementation.

3.1 Risk Control at the Security Level

Any interaction with the server or database cannot be absolutely trusted and must be encrypted and verified.

Even if we are making a lottery system, we have to consider that the user's data and the server's data interact one or more times, and many security risks may arise in this process. For example, malicious award-boosting, falsifying data, falsifying write-back data, etc.

3.2 Risk Control of Economic System

The purpose of the lottery system is to give users a reward, but this reward must be balanced in the entire system. The reward must be distinguished from the rewards for normal behavior, or have a mutually reinforcing effect. We must not allow the number of people who sign in every day to receive more rewards than active users, causing the entire incentive system to become unbalanced.

3.3 User-perceived risk control

It is also mentioned above that pseudo-randomness should be used to control the user's feelings, especially the first reward. If the reward for the first participation is fixed, users will infer that the rewards they get for each card they draw are fixed and they will lose interest in the draw. However, if the user's first reward is a poor one, he or she may think that he or she will not get better benefits in the future, which will lead to low desire for subsequent consumption. We want to give users a feeling: "Lady Luck is always friendly to newbies."

IV. Conclusion

1. Don’t just follow the crowd to design some sign-in and clock-in functions, but think from the perspective of the overall user incentive system.

2. Users’ daily behavior is the biggest reward for product managers. Product managers must live up to users’ activeness and truly operate users’ participation effectively.

Source: Eric