What drives users to set your product down, and how to get them to pick it back up again.

Overview

With the sheer volume of apps, products, and experiences available to the everyday user, it’s no wonder that many companies experience issues with keeping their users engaged.

Today, we’ll be looking at what drives users to set your product down, and how to get them to pick it back up again.

Value, Effort, & Outcomes

In order to understand engagement, we have to first understand what makes a user get engaged in the first place.

Value is essentially a user’s real outcomes divided by the effort required to get there. As an example, one of the reasons that Facebook has stayed so popular is that a user can just scroll and get a near infinite amount of novel content that is in line with their interests.

Now that we understand the equation, let’s talk about the implications. Crucially, as effort increases, value decreases, until the user no longer cares about the outcomes.

This is normally the time where a user will give up in frustration or get so bogged down in the process that they walk away.

Yeah, there’s some nice outcomes waiting for them on the other side of the process, but it’s so onerous to get there that they just don’t care. This quickly becomes a problem, and one that we can solve by evaluating the value-to-effort ratio of our experiences.

The value-to-effort relationship

We can reasonably infer from the equation above that outcomes are the main driver of what people consider quality experiences. This comes in the form of emotional, utility, and convenience outcomes, which are valued by the user in relation to how much effort they had to put in to get them.

Knowing that, we can take it a step further and say that by increasing the outcomes, and decreasing the effort, we can essentially create more value.

This is key because the inverse of our graph is also true: as effort goes down, value goes up.

Overcoming Inaction

As we move forward, armed with this information, our job essentially becomes to increase the desirability and positive scope of our outcomes while attempting to drastically limit effort on the user’s part wherever possible.

We can do this in several ways. For outcomes we can:

• Increase the tangible outcomes (what the user gets in exchange for their time and money).
• Increase social and emotional outcomes (celebrate the user and make them feel good about what they’re doing).
• Increase ongoing benefits (recurring benefits that a user can receive for taking action previously).

and for effort, we can:

• Lower barriers to entry
• Make the process more accessible
• Reduce the number of steps in the process
• Reduce the number of distractions
• Reduce bottlenecks and points of friction
• Reduce required input

Taking these steps to both increase the outcomes that a user can expect and receive, while simultaneously decreasing the level of effort which a user has to put in to get them, is a recipe for higher engagement.

Bringing it all together

So what does all of this mean for you?

1. A user’s inaction is based on their perception of value, outcomes, and effort associated with your product or service.
2. A user will interact with your product or service to get their desired outcome until the effort becomes high enough that perceived value drops to zero.
3. We can increase both the perceived and real vale of a product or service by increasing the positive scope of the outcomes, and by decreasing the effort required to get them.

Nick Lawrence Design
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