How to develop an addictive app?

In contrast, successful mobile app companies are able to develop addictive apps that go viral and create a large community of new users.

So the question is: How do you create an app that can go viral and become addictive? In this article, I will explore how to create a truly addictive mobile app, mainly from a psychological perspective.

“The key to building a high-quality, healthy, addictive app that resonates with users is to develop, test, launch, promote and sell the app with the goal of creating a popular product that solves a pressing pain point in a hungry market , so that the app can naturally achieve virality and become addictive .”

In summary, for today’s technology startups , if they want to build a business that can achieve sustained high growth, the bolded parts in the above paragraph are the points they must focus on.

This article mainly shares: How startups can use the psychological theories behind habit formation (addiction) to develop applications that are easy for users to be addicted to, so that users not only like the applications you develop, but are also willing to actively share your applications with others.

1. What is “viral marketing ”?

When we talk about “viral marketing” or “achieving viral growth,” what exactly are we talking about?

"Viral marketing" is the key driving force for the company to achieve scale operations . We can explain "viral marketing" from two perspectives:

1. As a general term applied to the Internet industry: a picture, a video or a piece of information spreads quickly from one netizen to another. This rapid and widespread spread is viral marketing.
2. As a professional term in user acquisition: through some recommendation mechanisms within the product, existing users can recommend other users to use the product, thereby achieving rapid user acquisition.

To understand the essence of acquiring users through viral marketing, we can compare the difference between the traditional marketing funnel and the viral marketing funnel:

1. Traditional marketing funnel: Companies spend a lot of money to acquire traffic for their products (websites, apps, etc.), and then convert a small portion of the traffic into active paying users .
2. Viral marketing funnel: In the viral marketing funnel, you don’t convert a small number of potential users into real users, but let a small number of real users help you bring in more users, so that the number of users grows exponentially.

In viral marketing, each user brings one or more new users, and the new users bring more users, and so on. The difference between traditional marketing and viral marketing is shown in the figure below:

Viral marketing is rooted in two mechanisms:

1. The usage mechanism of the product, for example, Facebook users will naturally recommend their friends to try out this social networking site.
2. The operating mechanism of the recommendation system, for example, Uber users will share invitation codes with others. After the invitee uses the invitation code, both the inviter and the invitee can enjoy a free ride service.

Technically speaking, viral growth is growth where the “virial coefficient” is greater than 1.0. What is the Virial coefficient? Let me give you an example to illustrate this: if 100 existing users of a product invite 300 new users through the product's internal recommendation mechanism, and the 300 new users bring another 900 new users through the invitation recommendation mechanism, and so on, the Virial coefficient in this case is 3.0. The goal of viral marketing is to achieve a higher "virial coefficient".

Why is it so important to ensure that the virial coefficient is greater than 1.0? Because if the Virial coefficient is over 1.0, then you can continue to grow your user base without any marketing budget.

The viral growth we are discussing here is driven by the “viral loop”, that is, a user first comes into contact with and uses your product, and is later stimulated and motivated to actively recommend the product to others, allowing your user base to grow exponentially through word-of-mouth communication. Because this process is continuous, it is called a cycle.

Here’s a rough outline of the viral loop drawn by Sam Hutchings of Tapdaq:

As shown in the figure below, the process of viral growth is:

1. At the beginning, you can get some traffic by doing some exposure, and then get some initial users.
2. Convince your initial users to start using your app (i.e. user activation) by creating an app that is easy for people to use and form habits.
3. Incentivize your initial users to actively recommend your product to others, thereby bringing you more traffic and new users without any cost to you.
4. Repeat and cycle this process over and over again.

The key to building an effective viral loop is to provide one or more features or rewards that motivate users to share your app with others.

You should provide something valuable to your users instead of relying on annoying ads and spam.

The valuable rewards you provide to users need to be visible and immediately obtainable. Only in this way will users be willing to recommend your app to their family, friends, and colleagues. In addition, you also need to make the process of user recommendations and obtaining rewards as simple, easy to understand and complete as possible, and not let users get confused at all, otherwise it will be difficult to achieve the desired goal of quickly acquiring users.

Dropbox and Uber are two startups that have mastered the viral loop theory. They use viral marketing to not only greatly increase the number of product users, but also greatly increase the popularity of the product.

• When Dropbox was first launched, it offered free storage to users who recommended other users to use Dropbox. This move helped Dropbox easily gain 1 million users in just 7 months.
• Uber uses a two-way invitation code mechanism. Both users who invite others through the invitation code and users who are invited to use Uber can get a $20 free ride voucher. This strategy was very successful, and nearly 50% of Uber's new users came through this invitation mechanism.

Uber's two-way invitation code mechanism:

Everything we’ve discussed so far in this article assumes that you’ve already built an app that people actually want to use.

If users are not willing to use your app at all, let alone expect them to recommend other users to you. At this point, no matter how attractive the referral rewards you offer to users are, it will be of no avail because no one cares, and your app is doomed to fail. For example, what good is it to offer a user a $10 Uber voucher if the Uber app on their phone keeps crashing? Obviously it is useless.

We can compare motivating users to share and recommend your app to the icing on a cake: no amount of icing will make people want to take a bite of a bad cake. In the same way, before you try to encourage users to recommend and share your app with others, you first need to create a truly "delicious" app, one that users can't stop using.

Only once you’ve done that should you focus on implementing some marketing strategies to help your product achieve virality.

To understand how to build an addictive app that users actually enjoy, we need to analyze the psychology behind addiction.

2. Psychological Analysis Behind Addiction

When designing and developing an app, your primary goal is to create an app that users will develop habits of using.

This may sound obvious, but it’s worth repeating: you have to build an app that users will come back to again and again. Think about apps like Facebook, Instagram, and Spotify: Are these the kind of apps that users use once and never come back to? Or do users spend hours on these apps every day?

After you update a status on Facebook, share a new photo on Instagram, or listen to a single on Spotify, do you close the app and not use it again for a few months? Basically no. Instead, you’ll often be browsing your friends’ status updates, liking or commenting on pictures shared by others, listening to songs or albums similar to what you’re currently listening to, and so on.

Did you know that when people wake up every morning, they immediately pick up their phones to check their favorite news, social, financial and other apps? What you should strive for is to make users habitually use your product, that is, to make users "addicted" to your product.

This doesn’t mean you should try to deceive or manipulate users into doing things against their will or best interests. Instead, what you need to do is understand user psychology so that you can develop a product that can provide real value to users while also allowing your startup to grow and develop into a large enterprise.

The Oxford Living Dictionary defines habit as: "a fixed or regular tendency or behavior, especially one that is difficult to give up."

Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit, believes that “a simple neural loop exists at the core of every habit. Each loop consists of three parts: a cue, a routine behavior, and a reward.”

"Clues", or triggers, are used to prompt or stimulate users to perform a certain behavior; "daily behavior" represents the user's daily habitual behavior itself; "rewards" are used by our nerves to learn how to encode this behavior pattern for the future.

In order to form a habit, all three of these elements must be present.

Hazel Gale explains Dugigg's model in more detail:

• A “cue” is something that triggers a habitual behavior, which could be a negative emotion like loneliness, boredom or stress. Or, it could be a certain situation, like a group of friends together, a certain time of day, etc.
• “Daily behaviors” are the habits themselves, such as biting your nails, smoking, or walking to the refrigerator to eat a large block of cheese.
• A “reward” can be anything that is pleasurable. It may be as noticeable as the physical stimulation from nicotine or sugar. It can be a sense of acceptance, belonging, and accomplishment. It could also just be a reason to get away from your desk.

These are basic overviews of habit formation. Let's talk about this from a technical perspective.

Over thousands of years, humans have developed a variety of systems in our brains that motivate us to do things including eat, sleep, and reproduce. Specifically, our ape ancestors' brains were designed to encourage us to seek out activities that help us survive and thrive, with a variety of neural systems that reward us for doing those kinds of things. In short, this is why activities like sex and eating are pleasurable experiences (i.e., they are nature’s way of rewarding us for surviving and passing on our genes).

Now, to truly understand what causes habit formation and addiction, we have to discuss the basics of two key neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitters are brain chemicals that carry messages between neurons called synapses, helping different parts of the brain communicate with each other.

The first neurotransmitter of note is “dopamine,” which helps control the reward and pleasure centers of the brain. Dopamine also helps regulate motor and emotional responses, allowing us not only to see rewards but also to take actions to obtain them.

The dopaminergic system is often casually referred to as the brain's "pleasure sensor," but this is not an entirely accurate description. "Dopamine causes seeking behavior. Dopamine makes you want, crave, seek, and search. It increases your arousal levels and goal-directed behavior. The dopamine seeking system keeps you motivated to move through your world, learn, and survive. This is not just about physiological needs, like food or sex, but abstract concepts as well. Dopamine makes you curious about ideas and motivates you to seek out information."

Dopamine is all about craving: it motivates you to take action, pursue a goal, go after something in the hope of receiving a desired reward.

The second most important neurotransmitter is opioids, the "feel-good" chemicals produced in the brain when you actively experience something pleasurable (like eating a delicious bowl of ice cream).

Opioids speak of liking and fulfillment: they are the product of genuinely experiencing pleasure. That is, when you accomplish something, you feel a sense of pleasure.

Both dopamine and opioids are involved in habit-forming behaviors:

• The first is the “desire” system, which represents the drive to seek something (e.g., driving to the bank to withdraw money and then to the convenience store to buy a pack of cigarettes, or opening a web browser , typing a phrase or question into a search engine , and trying to find a specific piece of information);
• The second is the "liking" system, which represents the satisfaction of a craving (for example, the pleasurable feeling after inhaling cigarette smoke or finding the information you need).

When it comes to building addictive apps, you have to realize that the dopamine system is more powerful than opioids, which means that the dopamine system has a greater influence on our behavior than the opioid system.

In other words, people are more likely to be motivated by the process of seeking pleasure than by the pleasure itself. We humans have a stronger compulsion to seek out the process of things—solving a puzzle, discovering new information, developing a plan of action, etc.—than the outcome.

Before we move on to how all this science is used to create an addictive app, there’s one final psychology/neurobiology question we need to address.

Dopamine has the greatest impact on our behavior when we engage in activities that are unpredictable and full of anticipation. Simply put, our brains release more dopamine when we attempt to achieve goals where the chances of success are unclear, compared to when we already know what the outcome of our efforts will be.

Because our excitement for predictable outcomes that occur frequently wears off, scientists now understand that reward anticipation is a more powerful regulator of deep addiction than the outcome of the stimulus itself. In other words, the more times you do something, the less exciting it becomes because you can now accurately predict the outcome of doing it.

This was also demonstrated by neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky in experiments on monkeys.

The researchers trained monkeys to perform a behavior. Every time the monkey succeeded, they gave it food. They also measured the monkeys' "happiness levels" (they calculated the monkeys' happiness levels by measuring the dopamine secreted by the monkeys' brains).

It seems that common sense suggests that the monkey should be happiest at the moment it gets the food. But actually it’s not. The peak in dopamine occurred when the monkeys knew that the experiment was about to begin. This surprising result shows that it is not about possession, but expectation. It is not the getting of the food, but the knowledge that there is a possibility of getting food that brings happiness.

But there is more to it than that. The researchers conducted another experiment. This time, every time the monkey completes a task, there is a 50% chance that he will get food. At this time, everyone discovered that the secretion of dopamine in monkeys can be divided into two stages. The first is the stage I just mentioned. When the monkey knows that the experiment has begun, dopamine begins to increase. When the monkey completes the task, dopamine begins to increase again (the monkey is looking forward to food), and when the monkey is about to get (or not get) food, dopamine reaches a second peak.

What’s particularly interesting is that if the 50% chance is adjusted to 25% or 75%, the second peak is not as high as the 50% chance. This shows that the second peak is not related to getting food itself, but to the certainty of getting food. The greater the uncertainty, the higher the peak. The more certain you are (whether you are certain to get it or not), the lower the peak value will be.

These results suggest that apes (including us) and ape-like creatures respond much more strongly to stimuli that are novel and unpredictable than to stimuli that are familiar and expected.

Or you could think about the excitement and nervousness you felt when you first started dating a new romantic partner, and then contrast that feeling with how you felt when you were dating someone you’d been dating for a long time. Through this comparison, I believe you will have a deeper understanding of this truth.

To understand the significance of this important scientific finding, humans appear to be more motivated to seek out, search for, and plan activities, as well as to experience novel, unpredictable activities, rather than to complete the activity itself, or to experience the predictability of familiar activities. Now let’s look at a very influential idea about building addictive products from psychologist and entrepreneur Nir Eyal.

3. The “addiction model” of addictive products

Let us explain the Hook Model in detail. The Hook Model is a four-step model that companies use to attract and make users addicted to their products.

The four steps are: trigger, action, variable reward, and investment .

1. Trigger

Triggers are the drivers of behavior, like the spark that starts an engine. There are two forms of triggers: external triggers and internal triggers. Addictive technologies often begin by alerting users via email, a website link, or an app icon on their phone. By looping the user through this addictive experience, the user begins to form a relationship with the internal trigger, and the internal trigger begins to become connected to the user’s daily behaviors and emotions. Soon, every time the user feels a certain way, internal triggers will remind them to take the next action through various associations in the user's memory storage. By letting users repeat this process over and over again, internal triggers begin to become part of their daily behavior, and habits are formed.

2. Action

After the trigger comes the purposeful action. At this stage, the company takes full advantage of two major elements of human behavior: motivation and ability. In order to increase the possibility of users performing a certain behavior, behavior designers need to make the behavior as simple as possible while effectively motivating users. This phase of addictiveness draws on the art and science of usability design to ensure that users act in the ways that designers intend.

3. Variable Reward

What distinguishes addiction from ordinary feedback loops is its ability to create a need in the user. There are all kinds of feedback loops around us, but predictable feedback loops cannot create desire. Just like you know that opening the refrigerator door will turn on the refrigerator light, this predictable feedback loop will prevent you from opening the refrigerator door over and over again. In any case, adding some variability to the reward, assuming that every time you open the refrigerator door, there is a magical new thing inside, will stimulate your interest and desire, and make you open that door over and over again like the animal in the Skinner box experiment.

Variable rewards are one of the most powerful tools a company can use to keep users addicted. A study found that when the brain anticipates a reward, dopamine levels surge, and variable rewards can double dopamine levels, creating a frenetic hunting zone in the brain and activating brain areas related to desire and expectation. Typical examples include slot machines and lotteries. In summary, variable rewards are ubiquitous in addictive technologies.

4. Investment

The final stage of addiction is to get the user to do something. For the behavioral engineer, this phase has two goals. The first goal is to give users another addictive experience when the next trigger occurs. The second goal is to deliver on those rewards, since the user’s dopamine levels have already been raised by the varied rewards in the previous phase. The time, data, effort, social capital or money that users contribute are all investments to some extent, and companies should return these investments when appropriate.

The investment phase is not about getting consumers to open their wallets. Investing is about actions that improve the quality of service in the next round. Inviting friends, stating preferences, building virtual assets, and learning to use new features are all investments made by users. With these investments, users can make the triggers more appealing, the actions easier, and the rewards more exciting when they go through the addictive loop experience in the future.

The following picture is a summary of Eyal's "addiction model":

As shown in the figure below, some of the most popular apps today (such as Quora, Facebook, Instagram, etc.) are using the "addiction model" to create an addictive app:

4. How to use theory to guide practice?

Now that we’ve explored the theoretical principles behind building an addictive app, let’s move on to some practical strategies you can use to build your next truly addictive app.

1. If possible, add as many novel and unpredictable puzzle elements as possible to your app

As mentioned above, humans seem to be more motivated to seek out, search for, and plan activities, as well as to experience activities that are novel and unpredictable. Therefore, your app should take advantage of the fact that we humans are the most curious species on Earth.

If you’re developing a mobile game , there are many different ways you can introduce novel, surprising elements into the gaming experience, including letting users discover something special in the game, encounter unexpected enemies, and receive unexpected rewards for completing tasks. Non-gaming apps can also take advantage of this. In fact, quenching your inbox of new messages can stimulate your neurons just as much as playing a game of StarCraft.

For example, Uber allows passengers to track the driver’s location in real time using GPS, which successfully stimulates passengers’ curiosity and planning ability while they wait for the driver to arrive:

• Will the driver take this route or that route?
• If the driver takes that street, will he arrive faster?
• Why didn't his car move? Was there an accident at that intersection?

Finally, you should take advantage of triggers such as push notifications in your app (note: push notifications allow apps to send notifications to users’ smartphones).

I recently shared the importance of designing triggers like push notifications in your mobile app: “These triggers are incredibly addictive, not only because they provide a brief moment of pleasure when they occur, but also because they create an expectation for more push notifications in the future that will provide a similar feeling of pleasure. You need to keep bringing users back to your app, and push notifications are a very effective way to do that.”

Once again, it’s dopamine that’s at work, the powerful rush of dopamine that’s at work when we’re searching and predicting activity, that makes push notifications so enticing. Every time a user receives an unexpected push notification, the desire chemicals in the brain go wild as the user takes action to determine what special information has been pushed.

Be sure to include such triggers in your mobile app. But at the same time, you can't push too many messages to users, which may scare them away. You have to strike a good balance.

You can follow these principles:

• Use a targeted/opt-out notification push system instead of indiscriminately pushing notifications to users’ phones.
• Design your triggers around the most common, valuable events, rather than pushing for everything.
• Don't add vibration to your push notifications, it's extremely annoying and ineffective.
• Make your push notifications more personal (e.g. Mark, Kevin just liked your picture).

2. The second key strategy is to leverage the power of gamification

Gamification is a strategy increasingly favored by mobile app developers that incorporates game elements into the process of completing a series of tasks, with the goal of tapping into the human drive to overcome obstacles, accumulate achievements, and gain recognition.

We humans are a species that enjoys puzzles and conquests, which means that people are naturally attracted to tasks that require passing different stages to achieve a goal that may result in a reward.

The 250MB of free storage space that Dropbox provides to users is a good example of gamification. If users complete a series of tasks using Dropbox, they can get additional free storage space. This approach can stimulate users to use Dropbox services more, so it is a win-win strategy.

FourSquare/Swarm awards badges to users based on the number and type of check-ins they make, which is another popular and successful way to leverage the power of gamification.

3. Make the app onboarding experience as smooth, engaging, and accessible as possible

The login and usage guidance of an application refers to the process of guiding users to use your application, making them familiar with how to use the application, convincing them to become long-term users, and preferably making them active disseminators of the application and recommending your application to more people.

The main goal of app onboarding is to guide users to use your app correctly until they reach the "wow moment", that is, they determine that your app can bring value to their lives and then become your loyal users.

Startups can use the following six specific strategies to maximize the app’s onboarding experience:

1. Reduce friction by removing all unnecessary barriers to the registration process.
2. Provide users with clear progress indicators to tell them how many steps they need to complete before they can freely use the application.
3. In order to minimize the pain of users registering and logging into the application, we support logging in using accounts such as Twitter and Facebook.
4. Incentivize users by offering free gifts (such as free storage space or coupons, etc.)
5. Provide customer stories to show users how others have used the app successfully and conveniently.
6. Provide short and useful tutorials that answer common questions or confusions for your users.

Here are some examples of apps that support logging in with social network accounts:

4. Make sure to motivate and encourage users to spend more time in your app

As Nir Eyal highlights, convincing users to take specific actions creates a deeper connection with your app so that when users go through the addictive loop again in the future, you can make the trigger more appealing, the action easier, and the reward more exciting.

How can you get users to invest time in your app? This is when you need to use the concept of "sunk cost". Sunk costs are costs that have already occurred due to past decisions and cannot be changed by any current or future decisions. When people decide whether to do something, they not only consider whether it is good for them, but also whether they have invested in it in the past. We call these irrecoverable expenses, such as time, money, and energy, "sunk costs."

In fact, we are all familiar with how sunk costs work:

• If you have spent the past two years using Instagram to build your Instagram profile, use specific hashtags, follow friends, etc., it would be very difficult and costly to give up Instagram and switch to another mobile camera app. But if you have only signed up for Instagram for a day, it will be much easier for you to give up Instagram and switch to another similar product, and the cost of switching platforms will be much lower.
• If you've been using Dropbox to store your files for the past year, it's going to be very difficult and costly to switch to a different storage tool. Because in order to switch platforms, you need to reorganize and re-share all the files and information you have stored on Dropbox in the past year, which is a very tedious and time-consuming task. But if you’ve only signed up for Dropbox for a day, it’s much easier to switch to a similar storage product, and the cost of switching platforms is much lower.

There are countless examples of this kind.

The point here is that you must encourage users to invest in your app to increase user retention and achieve virality. You can do this: the more users use the app and the more frequently they share the app, the more rewards they will get. After users complete certain steps (such as sharing a few new pictures within a specified time) or make significant progress (such as reaching a new learning level on an educational application), they will receive corresponding digital product rewards.

Once you’ve designed and developed addictive features for your app and released it to the public, it’s time to launch your product PR and marketing campaign.