User retention: How to improve user stickiness?

Do you remember the last time you vowed to stick to fitness, but gave up after just a few days?

Do you remember the last time you declared with certainty that you would study hard and improve yourself, but didn’t stick to it for a few days and put the book aside, or forgot the username and password of the learning website? When was that time?

I believe most people have had similar experiences as above, or even more than once. We clearly know that doing something is valuable, but for various reasons, we ultimately choose to give up. This is the confusion we face as users. From another perspective, this is also the confusion faced by product designers when planning products in categories such as sports and learning. It is easy to imagine how challenging it is to maintain long-term user stickiness.

In this article, we will use Keep as a case prototype to analyze how to improve user stickiness and give users a reason to continue using products that are easy for users to abandon but are indeed valuable.

User Psychology

In order to retain users, we first need to understand the psychological changes of users during the process of using the product.

At the beginning, users may learn about a product (not distinguishing between online and offline for the time being) out of their own needs (for example, they are too fat, or others say they are fat), through introduction by friends, or out of curiosity. So the user begins their journey of using the product.

In the first few days of use, users are quite excited and therefore very interested. To give a personal example, our company used to have a free gym, so a few friends who knew each other well made an appointment to go to the gym together, and we also agreed that if anyone didn’t go, they would send a red envelope in the group.

In the first week, everyone was very enthusiastic and naturally maintained full attendance. But in the second week, some people started to say that they were absent from work because they did not get enough rest the night before or for some other reason, so naturally he had to send out red envelopes in the group.

You can imagine the mentality of those friends who were absent during the second week. My friend’s mindset is that he has been exercising for a week or two, so it doesn’t matter if he misses a day occasionally, he can just make up for it later.

But will you really think about what your friends said and make up for it later? The facts tell us that this is difficult. After another two weeks, some people began to consider giving up, and the number of absences increased. In the end, even those who received the red envelopes felt embarrassed. The end result is that you will hardly see them in the gym for a long time afterwards (of course, you won’t get any red envelopes).

Looking at the whole process, we will find that the difficulty of fitness has not changed from beginning to end. For example, the time on the road every day is fixed, the time for exercise is fixed, but what changes is the psychology, and it is divided into nodes. From the initial excitement, to the slight relaxation later, and then to giving up later.

Based on this psychological process of users, let’s take a look at how Keep strives to keep users staying.

There is always one thing that attracts you

The first impression when opening Keep is that the content is really comprehensive.

Keep covers almost all content related to fitness, including sports, diet, shopping, social networking , etc., and under each major category, there are many subcategories. For example, exercise is further divided into training, running, walking, and cycling. Going further, training can be broken down into categories targeting the chest, back, shoulders, arms, and so on.

With so many subcategories, users may get bored after training their chest for a while. At this point, the user can consider training the back for a period of time; or the user does not want to continue training, but wants to go running or cycling, Keep can also meet the needs. If users really don't want to exercise, they can also learn about dietary issues.

In fact, we will find that these massive amounts of content have corresponding user usage scenarios, and there is a certain correlation between the scenarios. The product is designed to meet different usage scenarios and guide users to switch scenes in order to achieve the goal of keeping users.

Be a personal coach for users

In the previous example, for those who gave up halfway, in addition to reasons such as not being able to get up and physical problems, there was another very important reason, which was that there was no effect. Many of my friends exercise to lose weight, but due to the lack of systematic planning and control, they find that after a month of exercise, their weight has not decreased but increased. One can imagine how the user feels at this moment.

In fact, if you analyze it in detail, you will find that this result is mainly caused by two aspects. One aspect is the lack of systematic training. The training positions are not trained, or the intensity is not enough, and the trained positions are of little use for weight loss. The other reason is diet. As the saying goes, 30% training and 70% diet, that is to say, if you don't control your diet properly, it is basically difficult to have a good fitness effect, especially for those who are trying to shape their body or gain muscle.

To address this problem, Keep provides users with the function of making training plans. Users only need to select a few items to generate a detailed training plan. Let’s take a look at the training plan development process

From the screenshot, we can see that users only need to select body goals, body parts and difficulty, start time, duration, schedule and other options, and the system will automatically generate a training plan. In this training plan, we will find that the training content is different every day.

At the same time, Keep will also make dietary recommendations and list in detail what foods are recommended, how many calories each contains, and so on.

In this way, if you can strictly follow the training plan and diet, it will definitely be effective.

Don’t put too much pressure on users

We said earlier that most users are lazy, which is human nature. Therefore, when users use the product, you should not put too much pressure on them, so that they will be more likely to stick with it. As for myself, in the more than two years that I have been going to the gym, there have been countless times when I wanted to give up. In fact, there was no particular reason, maybe I didn’t get enough rest last night, or the weather was cold, etc. In addition to these reasons, another important reason is to exercise for an hour and a half every day. Thinking about these things, it is inevitable to fall into confusion.

How does Keep achieve results for users without putting too much pressure on them? After using it for a period of time, we will find that almost all the training in Keep does not exceed half an hour each. More importantly, in the training plan we developed, the training time is only about half an hour per day.

There is a fundamental difference between taking half an hour every day to do something and taking an hour and a half every day to do something. In this regard, I believe that Keep must have considered this issue when designing the product.

And if that wasn’t enough…

The above content is more based on the value of the product to users, but it may not be enough to keep users staying. We also need to provide users with more stimulation, match the nodes that users want to give up, and trigger new driving forces for users. From the perspective of Keep, these additional contents include three aspects: strategies, activities, and social interaction.

First, let’s talk about the strategy. Just as we need to make a travel plan when we go out, we also need a travel plan when we do sports. In order to provide users with comprehensive strategies, Keep has indeed put in a lot of effort. In the strategy section, it is also divided into categories such as fat loss, body shaping, muscle gain, running, etc., and each category can be divided into multiple subcategories. On the one hand, such a strategy can guide training, and on the other hand, it can also become a topic of conversation. After all, fitness and diet are topics that are often discussed.

The second is activities. On the homepage of Keep, we will see "Recommended Activities" and we can also see "Special Training Camps" in Discovery. A very important role of these activities and training camps is to activate users, attract user participation, and retain users on the platform.

Again, it’s social. Friends who have used Keep know that after completing a training session, they will be prompted to share and then jump to the "Dynamics" section. Although I personally think that Keep’s dynamics are more of an advertising component, they do stimulate users to a certain extent. Seeing so many long-legged beauties and muscular men, and then looking at your own fat, and thinking about other people's comments and strange looks at you, what reason is there not to keep exercising?

Conclusion

Although the article is about Keep, it actually represents a type of product: the product is valuable to users, but not essential, and requires users to persist in investing. For this type of product, in order to make users willing to stay for a long time and use the product frequently, in addition to ensuring the value of the product content, it is also necessary to provide appropriate guidance and stimulation at various points in the user's psychology. In this regard, Keep's design ideas are indeed worth learning from.

The author of this article @E木笔记古木 compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!

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