User Engagement and Expert Intuition (with Rob Haisfield)

Jun 9, 2021 1h 11m 13 insights Episode Page ↗
Spencer Greenberg and Rob Hayesfield discuss designing for user failure, continuous onboarding, and how to develop expert intuition. They explore lessons from game design, emphasizing tight feedback loops, matching motivation to difficulty, and leveraging social components for behavior change.
Actionable Insights

1. Cultivate Expert Intuition Deliberately

Actively develop intuition by gaining varied experiences, reflecting on patterns, and building abstract prototypes. This process helps transform deliberate decisions into quick, accurate, and thoughtless reactions over time.

2. Practice with Varied Feedback Loops

Accelerate intuition development through extensive trial and error in diverse situations, coupled with tight, immediate feedback. For specific weaknesses, create targeted practice scenarios to strengthen those subdomains.

3. Integrate Theory to Hone Intuition

Learn relevant theories to analyze your actions, comparing them against theoretical guidelines during reflection. This analytical process helps refine your intuitive understanding, even allowing you to strategically violate theory as an expert.

4. Design for User Failure with Redemption

Intentionally design failure states to increase user self-efficacy and retention, offering a path to redemption (like recovering lost progress) rather than outright punishment. This motivates users to try again with a higher likelihood of success.

5. Close Feedback Loops for Clarity

Tighten feedback loops in product design so users immediately see what went wrong and how to fix it when they make a mistake. This reduces frustration and makes users feel more capable in addressing failures.

6. Match Difficulty to User Motivation

Align the challenge level of an app or task with the user’s motivation and skill, adapting difficulty (e.g., making it easier after multiple failures) or offering optional challenges for advanced users. This prevents frustration for novices and boredom for experts.

7. Provide Actionable Improvement Tips

When offering performance scores or feedback, ensure they include clear, valid tips on how to improve. Without actionable guidance, users may ignore scores that they feel they cannot control.

8. Build Early User Self-Efficacy

Design the initial user experience to provide a series of small, achievable wins, especially for complex tasks like programming. This helps users believe they are capable and that the task is doable, fostering continued engagement.

9. Implement Continuous Onboarding

Extend user learning beyond initial tutorials by integrating onboarding directly into the app’s regular usage. This allows users to discover all functionalities and uses over time, rather than relying on a single upfront introduction.

10. Leverage Community for Learning

Recognize that apps have limits in teaching users; foster online communities where expert users can provide guidance and help others learn. This creates a rich, continuous onboarding experience through peer support.

11. Design for Feature Discovery

For every new feature, intentionally plan how users will discover and learn it, whether through hints, toolbars for exploration, or universal search bars for targeted queries. This ensures features are utilized effectively.

12. Gamify with Meaningful Progress Signals

Move beyond superficial gamification (points, badges) by designing mechanics that signal genuine progress towards user goals. Ensure these mechanics tap into intrinsic motivations like skill improvement, social comparison, or self-expression.

13. Consider Second-Order Behavioral Effects

When designing choice architecture or defaults, anticipate that users will interpret the information being sent to them, leading to potentially surprising or counterproductive ‘second-order effects’.