Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Shashwat Pradhan

Build addictive, engaging user interactions in your product

Feedback loops can be addictive like Froot Loops

Millennials are trying hundreds of apps every year on their mobile phones. With a lower attention span and lesser brand loyalty than ever, mobile apps have really high uninstallation rates and very low engagement rates. Many apps don’t even last a day on the user’s phone and even if they do, they are opened couple of times a week for a few seconds. What’s going wrong with millions of mobile apps on the App Stores?

Feedback loops are incomplete

While designing a product, human behavior should be the guiding principle for experience. So, what is a feedback loop? A feedback loop can be an interaction in your product where the user is rewarded with feedback when they perform an action. When you post a picture on Instagram, people view it and you are rewarded with likes and comments making you want to post more pictures. It is the secret sauce that makes apps addictive.

Breaking it down, a user performs an action in your app, the action leads to various effects, the effects are conveyed back to your user and then this loop repeats again and again… These interactions in your product control user attention & behavior. Generally apps & services lacking these feedback loops lose user attention after couple of times of use. This is because it isn’t engaging enough for the user to want to spend time on it.

Notifications 🔑

Notifications are a key component of the feedback loop. It is essential to present back the user with the results of their actions performed in your app. Facebook likes is probably the best example. Users get instant gratification when people like their photos or posts. This makes them want to come back to the Facebook app and post more content. But it is important that notifications are used with caution. Amongst notifications of the user’s photo getting 100 likes or them completing their steps target they don’t want to see notification giving them a 5% off on your service. That’s why it is key to balance out your notification strategy and only provide notifications that offer genuine value to your users.
The quicker the user engages in your feedback loop can lead to a significant uptake in the app’s retention. You can use your on-boarding process to get your users acquainted with repeated tasks in your app that have these loops.

Feedback loops that you might have come across 📲

Good feedback loops make your product or service addictive. The can give users an actual FOMO.

Instagram uses likes and comments as the key feedback loop for users to post more content.

Twitter uses follower count & retweets to keep users posting engaging content and interacting with the community.

Fitbit uses the incomplete graphs to help users complete their steps goal.

Product Hunt has engaging up-votes and comments with a daily leaderboard making people want to post their products.

Foursquare/Swarm used the mayorship title to get users to check-in at places.

Your phone has unread notifications to make you come back to it.

In our Quantified Self app Instant, we used a bot coach to passively analyze user data and send notifications with correlations like, ‘You have been sleeping less and been using your phone longer for a few days’. This brought an increase of user engagement by about 35%.

These pieces of data feedback of how many people saw my snap story, how many people liked my photo, how many steps away from my goal am I or even on what level is my Pokemon, are common ways to build feedback loops with instant gratification. You can think of feedback loops as a way to gamify your product or service.

Keeping track of your product analytics for actions and user engagement is the best way to see if your feedback loops are healthy and working. Tweaking these loops in terms of time of the loop & context provided will help you build more engaging user experiences.

Closing the feedback loop in your product was originally published in prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Closing the feedback loop in your product

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