How to Innovate Addictive Tech Products

Being an innovator I extensively use Design Thinking and Business Model Canvas. Design Sprint (developed at Google) provides a step by step system for solving big problems and testing big ideas for building better products. But I always felt that something still is missing from the innovation process-and that’s Social Psychology. My Prof at Hult, Dr Mark Esposito introduced us to Behavioral Economics and Social Psychology. After working with hundreds of startups in last 4 years it’s my considered opinion now that Social Psychology needs to be part of the Design Thinking & Design Sprint Process in-order to innovate products that stick!

So let’s build this. Starting from Cognitive & Social Psychology all the way to Design Sprint and Behavioral Design. In-effect I am proposing a marriage between Design Sprint & Behavioral Design. Before we dive into Design & Behavior, let’s understand how human mind functions. (Warning boring biology explanation of human brain 😀)

Humans are thinking machines & social animals designed to “Seek pleasure & Avoid pain”. So we see-saw between happiness & stress. Dr. Loretta Breuning, Professor Emerita of Management at California State University has done great research on happiness hormones. There are four major chemicals in the brain that influence our happiness (DOSE) and three major chemicals that causes stress.

Happy Hormones are (DOSE):

• Dopamine-I can get it-When you Find a new way to fulfil a Need/Desire
• Oxytocin-I Trust you-Touch of Trusted ones (Cuddle)
• Serotonin-I’m top gun-When you gain a social advantage
• Endorphin-I’m feeling no Pain-Laugh and exercise to get painkiller

Stress Hormones are (CAN):

• Cortisol-Delayed response to a prolonged stress-Turns on the survival mode
• Adrenaline-Fight or Flight hormone-Immediate reactions when stressed
• Norepinephrine-Senses Arousal-More aware, awake, focused

Happy Hormones (DOSE) is human path to Seek pleasure & to Avoid pain of getting a shot of Stress Hormones (CAN). Let’s get back to Behavioral Design.

Technology startups aspire to innovate an addictive product to influence retention behaviour. Customer retention and LTV/CAC is the cornerstone of sustainable growth. Nir Eyal, the author of book Hooked developed a model to form habits for Tech Products. The Hook Model, consists of 4 phases: trigger, action, variable reward and investment. Dr. BJ Fogg, Behavioral Psychology professor at Stanford established that it takes 3 things for someone to take any action: Motivation, Ability, and a Trigger. Motivation can be to Seek Pleasure & Avoid Pain, Seek Hope & Avoid Fear, and Seek Acceptance & Avoid Rejection. Human mind tries to conserve energy therefore Make your product easier to use-to provide ability to act. Their needs to be a clear Trigger that appears to be path towards Dopamine. And action would result in a shot of Dopamine (I can do it & you Found a way to fulfil the Desire).

Human brain conserves its happy chemicals for new rewards called Habituation. Therefore the rewards need to be variable. There needs to be an element of surprise to keep the reward interesting-enough. If rewards are gamified to provide a social advantage, it can provide a shot of Serotonin (I’m top gun-When you gain a social advantage). Nir Eyal says, “we figured out the user’s itch in the trigger phase. Then comes the simplest behavior in anticipation of reward, the action phase. Then comes the reward and finally the investment”. Investment is effort for future reward or continuity of reward.

Coming back to Design Sprint-a proven methodology (at Google) for solving problems through designing, prototyping, and testing ideas with users-all that in 3. Integrating Social Psychology and Behavioral Design into Design Sprints can revolutionize innovation landscape-helping us to solve biggest challenges faced by humanity. Design sprint is an intensive, highly-structured 3-day innovation cycle. Teams deep dive into a specific innovation challenge by prototyping, testing, and validating with end users. Design sprint involves up to 7 team members from multi-disciplinary backgrounds. Diverse executives from Client are critical to successful sprints. Design sprints help innovators choose the right problems to solve and give first hints of possible solutions. Sprints enable you to set a better path to achieve your long-term goals.

Ian Bogost says, “Our technologies are quite possibly becoming the cigarettes of this century.” So our responsibility as designers, and entrepreneurs, is to shape people’s lives using these addictive technologies. I agree with Nir Eyal that it’s time to use the psychology of habit design for good. Our world is full of problems and by Innovating Addictive Products, we can build a better world for our future generations.

My Big Dream is to make Pakistan Top-50 Innovative Nation

About the Author: Imran Jattala is Co-Founder of Center for Global Innovators (CGI)-Innovation Consulting with the design thinking mindset of IDEO, and the business capability of McKinsey, all of that combined with the entrepreneurial spirit of the best startups. With a mission to build Knowledge Economy & to make Pakistan Top-50 Innovative Nation. He tweets at: @ImJattala

Published By: Imran Jattala

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.