You can track a ton of data on how your users interact with your app: how often they come back, what time of day they’re most active, what characteristics make someone more likely to become an active user. But the end-goal is to know not how often your users are active but how they feel and what they want from your app.

Nothing is more important than these two factors:

• Emotion: Does your app reward its users? Does it make people feel good, or does it bore them? Fundamental to building habitual usage is understanding how to trigger user action, and you do that by tapping into their emotions. Looking at users who are already hooked is the best way to understand how.
• Intent: What are people trying to do with your app? There’s only one way for an app to succeed—it must bring people to something they want faster, more efficiently, more affordably, or simply better than they could before. Understand where people want to go and you can better optimize your machine to take them there.

When you understand the real root cause of a habit—both from a practical (the job-to-be-done) and psychological standpoint—then it becomes possible to break it—or bring that value to an exponential number of new users.

Understanding the emotion and intent of your users sounds like a lofty, mythical aim, but it’s really nothing more than a step-by-step process.

Continue reading →