The Science Behind Nurturing Habits

When thinking about a ‘reward’, you might consider something literal—like a ‘free coffee’ loyalty scheme, or Duolingo’s Gems.

They’ve gamified the process of learning, by dishing out gems as a type of scorecard.

But the type of products that can actually implement a scoring system like this is limited.

What happens if your service is content (or features), without a clear goal or way of “feeling” like you’re getting better?

Well, sometimes you can bundle tasks into a bigger challenge.

Headway (a library of book summaries) will bundle items, setting a target of one per day, into a challenge.

This allows you to track something, and cleverly gives a sense of progression (even though the books are somewhat unrelated).

These challenges might not even need to have a clear cut ‘end’, and are more like ongoing processes.

For example, the email app Superhuman have gamified the (fairly dull) process of answering emails, by giving achievements.

i.e., the challenge is to answers lots of unrelated emails, and the reward is this streak.

Even better, high performers on Superhuman will get badges and learn how they compare socially.

I encourage you to consider what else could be a ‘reward’.

For example, Duolingo have breaks during lessons, to celebrate correctly answering a series of questions in a row.

They’re using animations as a form of reward. There’s no objective value to them.

Similarly, if you stop using the app for a while, and then come back, you’ll see this dancing for joy animation.

Watching this character be proud of you, and celebrate in reaction to your actions, gives you a moment to feel proud.

That moment (and feeling) is the reward.

i.e., the animation isn’t important, but the feeling it creates is.

With any habit, you want to make the actual process (routine) as frictionless as possible.

Sometimes this is obvious. Social media companies make it easy to scroll forever, instead of paginating content.

i.e., another TikTok video is just one tiny swipe away.

But often it’s more nuanced than that, and you can reduce friction in really clever ways.

Mindllama relies on audio for guided meditation, so it offers a toggle to choose whether to respect or ignore the system-wide silent setting.

This makes it slightly easier every time you use the app (rather than having to mute and unmute every time).

Stoic allow you to modify when a “day” starts, to accommodate night owls.

This removes the friction of having to actually change your sleep pattern.

Or, consider the value of Apple forcing you to select the shape of a pill, in your medication reminders.

It reduces the friction of seeing “take your Berocca”, and having to remember what that medication looks like.

People like a challenge, but not too much of a challenge.

Getting the difficulty within the right range (and progressively pushing it up), can be really influential in maintaining habits over a long period of time.

(e.g., habitually exercising wouldn’t be as easy if you never got better, faster or stronger).

The most literal approach is to ask the user to complete a test, or answer a few questions, and then set the difficulty.

Duolingo will offer to ‘find your level’ when starting a new course.

Or, if you start nailing lessons too quickly, they’ll ramp it up automatically.

They understand that without doing this, you’ll lose interest.

This is really impossible for most businesses though—there might not even be this kind of ‘difficulty setting’.

e.g., Built for Mars articles don’t get ‘harder’, so what should I do? How can I encourage a reading habit?

Luckily, there are a bunch of innovative ways other companies have helped identify and set difficulties.

For example, Readwise will let you recover streaks (i.e., it’s really forgiving).

It’s retrospectively making the target easier to achieve.

Stoic will let you actually avoid these “infinite” challenges, in favour of a shorter and more achievable one.

It’s not less difficult day-by-day, but it reduces the overall challenge.

Cues are essential when building habits.

For instance, leaving your running shoes in sight (as apposed to hidden in a cupboard), can help you keep to your daily exercise target.

You’ll see the shoes, remember the commitment you made, and it acts as a reminder to take an action.

This happens in product design all the time—you may not even notice them.

Tiimo has a “Tune in” button that offers a selection of radio tunes to provide background music as you go about planning your day.

You may begin to associate the music, with the act of planning your day.

Superlist (the to-do app) will play a random chime (as in, it changes slightly each time) when you mark a task as complete.

This is very similar to the famous ‘Pavlov’s Dog’ experiment, where they conditioned dogs to associate a noise with food.

Except, you’re being conditioned to get a small hit of dopamine from the chime, and it’s a feeling of satisfaction you start to crave.

As anyone who’s ever tried to stick to a New Year’s resolution will attest to; consistency is everything.

There are a few useful ways to consider consistency when designing an experience.

One way is to offer flexibility that makes it easier to actually be consistent (see ‘Removing Friction’ from earlier).

For example, Stoic will remind the user about the importance of consistency, and then offer flexible notification options.

And sometimes companies even take actions to prioritise consistency over binge-activity.

For example, Ahead don't want you to binge all of their lessons in one day.

Instead they force you to take breaks, in the hope that you’re building more sustainable usage habits.

Duolingo will actually stop sending you notifications if you stop reacting to them.

This lowers the commitment, without you disabling them entirely (or deleting the app).

It makes it possible to maintain the habit consistency, but at a lower pace, without such an active push.

• Variable rewards
  • Asana occasionally shows a flying unicorn as a mini celebration for completing a task.
  • Amie’s ‘emoji burst’ sometimes appears when completing to-dos.
• Progress towards something
  • Xbox will track points towards a gift card.
  • Radicant Bank lets you earn environmental rewards
• Intrinsic rewards (like getting better at something)
  • Sarwa shows a plant, that grows as you invest more money.
  • You can unlock reading achievements on Headway.