While designing a product, we seek ways to gain user, and most importantly, to make them coming back for more.

In the Gamification & Behavioral Design : Octalysis framework, Yu-kai Chou dividing user drives into two, left brain and right brain. While the left brain-right brain core drives are not a true brain science, it is an anecdote to create a more effective design, by dividing the logical and emotional drives.

Left Drive Core Drives

Left Drive Core Drives are extrinsic motivators, you are motivated because you want to obtain something, whether it be a goal, a good, or anything you cannot obtain.

For short, extrinsic motivation is similar with dangling carrot in front of your nose. It motivates you to keep going. So, what can be the dangling carrot?

The dangling carrot can be a lot of things, it can be adding sense of accomplishment, reward, loss, scarcity and so on. In the games, the sense of accomplishment usually integrated in the games by breaking down the challenges into stages, each with check points, level and badges. This way, the player hooked as they feel like they are making progress, with one achievement is coming after another. It can also a gradual reward system, that ensure the user to keep using the product daily, hence maintaining user retention.

Many companies have add sense of accomplishment in their product. It can be as small as adding progress bar on profile creation to encourages the user to complete their profile and submitting data, or adding badge and level to drive user purchase. Or it can also providing rewards after the user completing a series of task, such as giving a free products after the fifth purchase.

Grab reward system and badges to motivate user and driver

The other way can be adding the sense of ownership. Sometimes, we cannot stop playing, just because we already got so far. I mean… how can we stop and leave the game that you start from scratch, when you are already on a high level, with a lot of coins and badges that you collected over times?

So now, take a look at your Linkedin account. You invest a lot of time to build your account, starting with choosing the right profile picture and completing work histories, getting skills endorsement and gaining references from colleague. With the profile that you build, the connection that you gain, the references that you earn, you develop a stronger sense of ownership with the product. Now that you have a sense of ownership, it will be harder to just stop using or deleting your account.

Adding level can increase user’s sense of ownership, as it will harder to stop using the product with the collected rewards.

Many companies rely on extrinsic motivators to attract and retain their user. However, many studies have shown that once you stop offering the motivator (or in this case, rewards) it will decrease user’s motivation. So you will need to continuously reward your users. That’s why it is important to adds the Right Brain Core Drives.

Right Brain Core Drives

Right Brain Core Drives are Intrinsic Motivators, you don’t need a goal or reward to use your creativity, hangout with friends, or feel the suspense of unpredictability — the activity itself is rewarding on its own.

Unlike the Left Brain Core Drives, you don’t motivates user through rewards. Besides rewards, the sense of empowerment, social influence and relatedness can provide motivation to user.

The ubiquity of social media has drives more and more companies to working on adding Social Influence & Relatedness during the Discovery and Onboarding Process. Almost every consumer app these days urges you to “Invite Your Friends” upon joining their service. The most famous example of this practice is being applied on the Clubhouse App. Being invite-only, an existing Clubhouse user has to send an invite from their app to give you an access to set up an account.

ClubHouse using social influence to leverage their product

Designing for the Left Brain and Right Brain Core Drives

To create an effective design, we have to take both considerations into account. Designing only for the Left Brain Core Drives will decrease user’s motivation over time. On the other hand, designing only for the Right Brain Core Drives might not as attractive for the user.

There are many ways to combine both drives. The most frequently used method is combining the social influence and reward system, for example, by referral system (yes, I am talking about you, Medium).

The other method can be combining the sense of empowerment with reward or badges. Instead of just giving challenges and reward, you give the user a sense of contributing for something that is bigger than themselves.

The Body Shop provides rewards while providing sense of empowerment by helping our planet.