User Engagement and Expert Intuition (with Rob Haisfield)
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.
Deep Dive Analysis
14 Topic Outline
Designing for User Failure in Product Development
Rethinking Streak Counters and Loss Aversion
Tightening Feedback Loops to Mitigate Failure
Adaptive Difficulty and Scoring-Based Engagement
Importance of Self-Efficacy in Learning New Skills
Upfront vs. Continuous Onboarding Strategies
Information Search Behaviors: Focused, Exploratory, Browsing
Learning from Game Design for Behavior Change
Critique of Naive Gamification and Its Deeper Drivers
Beyond Foursquare: New Genres of Gamification
Social Components and Fundamental Desires in Games
Signaling and Second-Order Effects in Behavior Change
Developing Expert Intuition Through Experience and Reflection
Interplay of Theory and Intuition in Skill Development
6 Key Concepts
Designing for Failure
This approach involves intentionally planning what happens when a user makes a mistake or struggles within a product. The goal is to make failure less discouraging, increase self-efficacy, and make users more likely to try again with a higher chance of success.
Continuous Onboarding
Unlike upfront tutorials, continuous onboarding integrates learning into ongoing product usage, allowing users to discover features and functionalities over time. This is crucial for highly capable applications where users cannot learn everything in an initial short tutorial.
Information Search Behavior
This categorizes how users look for information within an app. Focused search is for known items, exploratory search is for generally known but specifically unknown items, and exploratory browsing is for discovering the landscape without a specific target.
Gamification Genres
This concept suggests that gamification is not a monolithic approach of just adding points, badges, and leaderboards ('foursquare genre'). Instead, there are many different 'genres' of gamification, each with specific structures and boundary conditions for different problems, focusing on deeper psychological drivers like mastery, exploration, or social comparison.
Expert Intuition
This refers to the ability of individuals to consistently make correct decisions quickly and thoughtlessly in a given domain. It's an expression of built-up experience and pattern recognition, allowing for rapid assessment and decision-making without extensive comparison of options.
Naturalistic Decision-Making
A model of intuition suggesting that experts develop rich repertoires of patterns, make fine discriminations, possess sophisticated mental models, and adapt to complex situations. Intuition is seen as a rapid sizing up of situations based on accumulated experience.
8 Questions Answered
Designers should intentionally plan for user failure to make it less discouraging, increase self-efficacy, and motivate users to try again with a higher likelihood of success. This can involve providing opportunities for redemption, immediate feedback, or adaptive difficulty.
Traditional streak counters can be highly discouraging because missing a single day resets all progress to zero, leading to a sense of finality and loss that can demotivate users from starting again.
Feedback loops can be tightened by allowing users to see the results of their actions immediately and side-by-side with their input, making it easier to identify and correct errors, thereby increasing a user's sense of capability.
Apps can use adaptive difficulty, where the challenge adjusts based on user performance, or scoring-based difficulty, where advanced players can opt for higher scores by engaging with more challenging aspects, while less skilled players can still complete tasks easily.
Upfront onboarding provides a short tutorial at the beginning of app usage, while continuous onboarding integrates learning throughout the user's journey, helping them discover new functionalities and uses over time, especially for complex applications.
Game designers create an entire environment and set of rules that shape player agency, making them inherently designers of behavior change. They focus on providing feedback loops that allow users to dynamically respond to success and failure, progressively learn, and gain mastery.
Many gamification attempts fail because they naively apply superficial game mechanics like points, badges, and leaderboards without understanding the deeper psychological drivers. These mechanics only work if they signal progress on something the user intrinsically cares about, such as skill improvement, social comparison, or competition.
Developing expert intuition requires gaining a varied set of experiences, reflecting on those experiences to synthesize patterns and prototypes, and consistently making deliberate decisions that eventually become quick and accurate reactions. This process is accelerated by high-quality, immediate feedback and sufficient practice.
13 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’.
7 Key Quotes
If we want people to continue using an app after they fail, then the lowest hanging fruit for retention there is to intentionally design failure.
Rob Haisfield
The problem there is it has to do with how intense the failure is. Right. It's, it's, it's interesting that example from Snapchat, because it's achieving its goal of like getting people to use Snapchat, but it's also having this negative second order effect of like causing distress and creating these like weird social situations.
Spencer Greenberg
If people don't think they're good at something and they don't think they're able to improve, then they just won't do it.
Rob Haisfield
Behavioral economics sets up a choice architecture so that people are most likely to pick one specific option. Game designers aim to give users meaningful choices where all of the options are equally valuable.
Javier Velasquez (quoted by Rob Haisfield)
If gamification is well designed, then the user should care about it. Because it's helping them know whether they're doing well on something that they've already bought into, you know, like on something that they already want.
Rob Haisfield
The game mechanics should probably signal to the user some sort of progress on their goals. You know, like a point is good. It's good to earn points if those points mean that you are improving at something that you want to improve at.
Rob Haisfield
I think that that sense that we want to present ourselves a certain way to other people is just one of the most powerful forces influencing human behavior.
Spencer Greenberg
1 Protocols
Roguelike-style Training for Error Handling
Rob Haisfield- Show a series of code snippets, each with an error.
- User attempts to fix the code within a short time limit (e.g., 10-15 seconds).
- If the user is incorrect, they start over at the beginning of the series.
- The order of obstacles (error codes) is rearranged each time to prevent rote memorization and encourage intuition development.