Healthy Retention: What Makes People Keep Coming Back?
3 principles to make your product stick & last 🍀
This morning I checked my Facebook notifications and realized it was the birthday of an old friend I had lost contact with. I started thinking of all the great memories and sent him a message. We ended up telling each other ‘let’s have a drink!’.
This is Facebook’s mission: to bring the world closer together, and especially to help people stay connected to their closed ones.
It worked that time but, well, it cost me 72 compulsive notifications check a week, incl. 71 useless ones and a constant guilty feeling — why the hell am I still checking this everyday?
Facebook’s retention rate is very impressive — 98% of people stick to it 30 days after install, and almost 70% a year later (*) — but what do people really get from using it over & over again?
This retention doesn’t look very healthy as it seems to create more disempowerment — distraction, privacy issues or even addiction — than empowerment.
So I wondered: how do you build products that stick and last in a healthy way?
Building a product experience that makes people stick around is key to long term success but how do you design for healthy retention?
- Define how you empower people
What do you help people accomplish in their lives? - Have fewer but better interactions
How do you focus on value rather than frequency? - Care
What makes your experience human?
1. Define how you empower people
To make sure your product brings a sufficient reward for people to keep coming back, you need to focus on the level of accomplishment, increased ability and enjoyment that your experience brings to them 🚀
What do people accomplish with your product?
When was the last time you felt empowered? When you were exercising? learning? cooking? coding? meditating? teaching? swarming around with your motorbike gang?
And what was the purpose behind? getting in shape? growing your skills? being healthier? getting a new job? spend quality time with your friends?
A product that empowers you increases your ability to accomplish your goals and makes you enjoy it. This feeling is hard to get, not systematic, but when it happens it changes everything: it makes us stick around with what matters 🌟
It is way more meaningful than getting Facebook likes as it provides a real benefit — not artificial dopamine — which is healthier and makes your product last longer.
Design for empowerment and you will increase your chance to make people naturally keep coming back.
Example
Waze helps people save time on every drive & avoid traffic — a superpower to be on time for dinner 🍽
Yuka helps people improve the way they buy food & cosmetics products by scanning them, to live a healthier life.
Too Good To Go helps people rescue food at great prices, to fight against food waste — which is not just about people but also about the planet 🌍
Shine helps freelancers save time by automating their administrative & financial work, to focus on what matters: client work.
Le Wagon helps people change their lives by learning how to code. You don’t just learn a new skill, you’re also getting a new job. This is a high level of empowerment.
What matters is the level of accomplishment it helps people achieve. What matters is how much people are likely to choose it again & again whenever they are in the same context. It drives long term engagement and referral 💯
2. Have fewer but better interactions
You don’t necessarily build retention by pushing people to use your product every day, you do it by bringing high value every time they need it — even if it means being absent most of the time. So don’t be greedy ☝️
Increase value, not frequency
Which one would you prefer: having 1000 random tweets to read every day or only 3 very interesting ones every week/month?
To design for a sustainable usage, rather focus on increasing the value of every use than the usage frequency. What matters is how much value people get from your product in a specific context, which they will remember next time they are in the same context.
Fewer but more memorable experiences helps you build stronger & deeper relationships with your users, which creates loyalty in the long run.
Example
If you’re on Spotify, have you ever had a wow effect when listening to your Discover Weekly? This feature automatically suggests you new songs based on your tastes, so that you don’t have to spend time looking for them.
It provides higher value faster. Everything is in the background. Magic ✨
Let users in control
Our attention has always been fragile but is getting more and more precious.
Phone vibration, sound alerts, push notifications, marketing emails, etc… products are getting needier, while your good old coffeepot is still doing the job every morning without asking for any more attention.
Great products don’t ask for more attention than they deserve. They let you decide when you need them. They give you back the control.
Example
When you alarm clock rings, it’s because you’ve decided it: you switched it on, set the time, and it rings — that’s it.
With most of digital products, you receive random notifications at any time without even remembering when you actually gave your permission. Headspace — a meditation app — gives you back the control.
- Before anything, it explains why — showing the benefits of notifications
- It shows you exactly what kind of notifications you can receive, making a clear separation between them
- Notifications are setting off by default.
- Then it lets you set up when you want to receive them — and how many
- And above all, this happens only after you’ve experienced the value of the app — after your first meditation session
Giving back the control to users helps make every interaction useful — even if it means reducing their quantity.
3. Care
We — humans — sense care. We feel attention, craft and passion. We can feel when care has been put into something. This is the detail that makes the difference.
We sense attention
When was the last time you’ve experienced awesome customer service? It usually sticks in your mind.
Caring about your audience — who they are, how they feel, what they need, what they care about — helps build trust with them.
Invest in understanding your users & making sure they succeed with your product and you will build strong and durable relationships.
Example
If you have ever booked a train ticket on CaptainTrain — bought by Trainline— you know they were taking your experience seriously. They were especially obsessed with customer service.
Just to give an example, they were personally getting back to some customers years later to tell them the very feature customers suggested long time ago had just been implemented. Wow effect guaranteed 😍
Jonathan Lefèvre, ex-Head of Customer Service, explains everything in this great article.
We sense craft
Yanagi Sōetsu (1894–1978) — a japanese philosopher & founder of the mingei movement — discovered a transcendent beauty in everyday ordinary objects handmade by unknown craftsmen.
When you look at them, you feel the craft, you feel the time & passion that have been put into the object. It feels like enthusiasm has been transferred from the maker to the user.
And it’s not only about objects, it also works with a great meal prepared with love & passion 🍝
Example
The Kisaemon-Ido tea bowl — from the 16h century in Korea — is used for japanese tea ceremony and embodies the symbol of handcrafted beauty and functional design.
When it comes to digital products, Notion — a knowledge management tool — gives a similar feeling of craft. It feels not only powerful as a tool but there are some little details that show how much the team care about user experience.
We sense values
Like in any relationship, what makes us stick in the long run is how much we relate in terms of values.
Ignoring it when building a product experience — and even building something against some values (ex: privacy) — makes it untrustworthy.
Designing a product with deep values in mind increase its chance to be more durable by building deep connections with users.
Example
Too Good To Go is designed to fight against food waste and help save the planet. You don’t only use the app for your individual purpose but share a philosophy with — and act as — a whole community.
Jumbo — a privacy assistant — has been designed to help people take control of their privacy online, so the core of the product is designed for care.
Care is about investing on smaller but longer lasting product experiences.
Conclusion
Retention is the holy grail for most of products but the ones that perform the highest metrics today (Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, etc…) are better at creating unhealthy compulsive behaviors than bringing real value over the long term.
Instead of being about addiction, the stickiness and durability of products seem to be more about their impact on people’s lives, the quality of their interactions and the trustworthy relationships they end up building with users.
It’s hard to accept but being durable sometimes means being less present, which digital products could benefit a lot.
Bonus
- A design movement —about ethical products, by Tristan Harris
- An insightful video — about calm technology, by Amber Case
- A great deck — about mindful apps, by Maxime Braud･ Mozza
