Presented at Product Camp, Bangalore - Sep 2014.

1. Influence of consumer motivations and
behaviors on product usage
Anuradha Sridharan
Independent Products Consultant
Product Camp
Sep 2014

2. How many of you eat healthy meals everyday?
Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/aryaziai/9018429130/ (Creative Commons Attribution License)

3. How many of you “like to eat” healthy meals everyday?
Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/aryaziai/9018429130/ (Creative Commons Attribution License)

4. How many of you check Facebook everyday?

5. My quest begins!
“Can a health & wellness app have as high
an engagement as a social product?
What goes behind creating high
engagement products?”

6. Product
Useful
Design
Usable
Marketing
Reach
Basic understanding of
“Why we do
what we do”

7. Human
Traits
Persuasive
Design
Behavioral
Psychology
Emotional
Design
Captology
Design
Thinking
User-centric
Design
Behavioral
Economics
Various Disciplines and Research

8. Key responsibility of a product manager
Understanding customer’s
pain-points
motivations

9. Core Motivators
We seek
• Pleasure
• Hope
• Social
Acceptance
Source: http://www.behaviormodel.org/
We avoid
• Pain
• Fear
• Social
Rejection

10. Customer Lifecycle
Acquisition Activation Retention Referral Revenue
the higher the usage,
the higher the scope of Word-of-Mouth,
the higher the chances of upgrades/repeat purchases
Adapted from Dave McClure’s startup metrics for pirates - http://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/startup-metrics-for-pirates-long-version

11. Acquisition Activation Retention Referral Revenue
Acquisition
Getting people to your sacred page

12. Competitive, mature markets
Endowment effect - "people ascribe more value to things merely because they own them”
Loss aversion - "people are more motivated by the prospect of losing something than they are by the prospect
of a reward”
Choice supportive bias – “people tend to over attribute positive features to options they chose and negative
features to options not chosen”

13. Position yourself as the
“first” (leader) in a niche
category

14. What’s “new” about your product/service?
Call out to users in the higher end of “novelty-seeking” spectrum

15. Social Proof (also called Bandwagon effect/Group Think/Herd Behavior)

16. Grouping (label your group of customers)

17. Stop creating friction. Remove barriers to entry

18. Acquisition Activation Retention Referral Revenue
Activation
Signup, check it out

19. Cost-Benefit Analysis
“perceived difficulty of a task in relation to the
perceived reward”
We can perform this analysis in a few milliseconds
“Mentally taxing” tasks
Too many decision variables (e-commerce)
Form Fatigue
Asking personal information
Memory Retrieval

20. The scary world of app
permissions!!
Seriously puts off a potential
user, who had the required
motivation to locate your app
and click “Install”

21. System 1 and 2 thinking
System 1 – fast, automatic, unconscious, natural drives and
instincts, general rules and heuristics
System 2 – slow, deliberate, conscious, analysis,
“inherently lazy”
“the more the mental effort, the higher the reluctance to
invest”
- Pupil dilates
- Heartbeat increases
Image Source: http://assets1.bigthink.com/system/idea_thumbnails/54524/headline/BigThink_System_1_2.jpg?1394211473
Parameters of
usability testing in the
future? 

22. Acquisition Activation Retention Referral Revenue
Retention
Perform a certain behavior repeatedly

23. HealthifyMe case study
Health and Wellness App (currently available for
Android)
Helps you to track your lifestyle and make positive
changes in your eating habits and physical activity
Calorie Tracker for Indian foods
Track your meals and exercise
Get analysis and actionable insights on your calorie
intake
Get personalized advice from coaches

24. High initial interest, but not sustaining
Boring
Time
consuming
I’m busy
I’m traveling I’ll log
Tedious Reactions
starting next
Monday
I forget what
I eat
I don’t care
about
calories
Your app is
lying. My food
habits are not
that bad

25. Facilitate behavior change
Constraint for any health & wellness app
Requires consistent usage for atleast 2 weeks to notice
tangible results
Problem Statement
What is the ONE specific behavior that we want our users to
do in our product/app?
“Track their meals and physical activity everyday”

26. BJ Fogg’s behavior model
Full credit: BJ Fogg, Copyright: www.behaviormodel.org

27. Triggers – Day 2 email sample
Social Proof
Grouping

28. Increase Ability (Make it easy to track foods)
Voice tracking / Photo tracking
Quick access to your recent and frequently
entered foods. Use the previously entered
serving sizes as default

29. Increase motivation (using a layer of gamification)

30. Acquisition Activation Retention Referral Revenue
Referral
Spread positive WOM

31. Reciprocity principle
“If you give something of value to your customers,
they feel obligated to reciprocate / return the
favor”
- Robert Cialdini in his book “Influence”
Demonstrate value first, then expect a favor

32. Not the other way around!

33. Acquisition Activation Retention Referral Revenue
Revenue
Journey from “Users” to “Customers”

34. A lot of choices is attractive!
Default view of available
flights, if there weren’t
any direct flights – 1 stop
Perception:
“limited options, site’s
not reliable!”
Learning:
Show all choices, even if
most of them don’t make
sense. Provide the
customer with the
necessary controls(filters)
to narrow down further.

35. Choice paralysis
Hick’s law - “the more options one is exposed to, the longer it takes to make a decision”
Displayed: 24 jams
Tried the jam: 60%
Purchased the jam: 3%
http://sheenaiyengar.com/the-art-of-choosing/excerpt/
Displayed: 6 jams
Tried the jam: 40%
Purchased the jam: 30%
Jam Tasting Experiment

36. The speed breaker of online shopping
Scarcity effect => Information Overload => Decision paralysis => Close the tab and grab a piece of chocolate!

37. For further reading
Influence: The psychology of persuasion by Robert Cialdini
Thinking fast and slow by Daniel Kahneman
Hooked: How to build habit forming products by Nir Eyal
Blink: The power of thinking without thinking by Malcolm Gladwell
Emotional Design by Don Norman
http://www.behaviormodel.org/ by BJ Fogg
http://thenextweb.com/apps/2014/05/14/can-online-apps-change-real-life-behavior/
http://www.nirandfar.com/2012/03/how-to-design-behavior.html
https://www.helpscout.net/consumer-behavior/
http://3.7designs.co/blog/2012/08/10-psychological-principles-to-design-with/

38. Thank you!
Want to continue the conversation? Say hello!
Twitter - @anura
Email – anuradha.sridharan@gmail.com
Blog – http://anusridhar.blogspot.in