(2018-10-28) Miles Apps To The Future Self Improvement

Jeni Miles: Apps to the Future. I was drawn towards the self-improvement apps space because their persuasive influence transcends screen-level interactions.

Read on to discover how these companies are harnessing behavioral insights to bridge people’s intention-action gap and work towards the "future self" they seek to be.

1. Make the first session a success

2. Plan for the next session

Let’s imagine someone installs a language learning app because they really want to learn French. They are far more likely to actually learn French if they willingly set a plan of how/where/when they will carry out the behaviors that help achieve this goal

The healthy habits app The Fabulous has taken on board this growing body of behavioral science research and implemented a Commitment Contract feature accordingly. People are asked to fill in a commitment contract where they indicate exactly when and where they will accomplish the desired action, for example taking a walking meeting to exercise more during the day

Another powerful technique is to encourage new users to set up a daily reminder so that they actually use the app a second time at a time/day of their choosing.

3. Make the Benefits Tangible

This is particularly challenging for self-improvement apps, as when it comes to investing in your future self, benefits are typically not experienced for months

4. Maintain the Behavior

The extrinsic reward of building up a usage streak can be super powerful but can backfire if implemented incorrectly

punished their largest segment of class attendees, who would attend 1–3 time a week

continued maintenance of an adopted pattern of behavior is contingent on people being satisfied with the outcomes they have obtained

dashboard helps people see that they are making progress toward their smoke free goal by providing feedback on time smoke-free, money saved, health improvements made and so on.

5. The Path Isn’t Linear

nutrition and lifestyle app Lifesum wanted to know, “What does it take for a person to change something?” To do this, they conducted a huge research effort, interviewing people who had recently succeeded or failed in a behavior-change attempt

People move through a series of stages when modifying their behavior. These stages (Contemplation, Preparation, Action, Maintenance) lie at the heart of the Trans-theoretical Model of Behavior Change.

These stages correlate with how different people interact with different features in the app

People arrive at different points of their journey when they first install Lifesum, but the research also confirmed that that people moved through the stages in different ways. Importantly, lapsing to an “earlier” stage wasn’t a sign of failure but an almost inevitable part of achieving long-term, behavior change.

Prior to the research effort, onboarding emails weren’t tailored to a users’ readiness for change. However, by presenting each stage of change in the email and its related features, their onboarding email rates more than doubled. For users who were clearly in the "action stage," these targeted emails increased open rates by a further 37% and doubled click-through rates.