Is your product a Hafta or Wanna?

In his insightful article, Why Behavior Change Apps Don’t Work, Nir Eyal brings up a crucial point about the habits we form (or fail to form) around the products we use.

“Unfortunately, too many well-intentioned products fail because they feel like “haftas,” things people are obligated to do, as opposed to things they “wanna” do. Schell points to neuroscience research showing “there are different channels in the brain for seeking positive consequences and avoiding negative consequences.”

When faced with “haftas,” our brains register them as punishments so we take shortcuts, cheat, skip-out, or in the case of many apps or websites, uninstall them or click away in order to escape the discomfort of feeling controlled.

I think this explains a lot about products in general, and specifically why app categories like todo list apps mostly go unused…they inevitably end up feeling like “haftas”. I distinctly remember that feeling the first time I used a todo list (Remember the Milk) that carried over undone todo items from one day to the next. At first it seems like a thoughtful touch…to automatically bring items from one day to the next. But after a day or two it becomes a burden…your list grows and grows because other tasks inevitably crop up during the day. It quickly became a management situation…I had to manage my todos rather than just keeping light track of them. It turned my todo list from a wanna to a hafta.

Note that any product person would love their product to become a “hafta”. That’s the lock-in you want…that your product is so valuable that it becomes something that people feel like they have to use to be successful. That’s why this is counter-intuitive and important. You want the product to be a “hafta” but feel like a “wanna”…to have your product be essential to their daily use while following the important design principle: keeping people in control.

Nir sums this up nicely:

“When our autonomy is threatened, we feel constrained by our lack of choices and often rebel against doing the new behavior. Psychologists call this “reactance.””

So people don’t resist a new behavior just because it’s hard to do (in fact new behaviors are often easy to do) It may be more about autonomy…by forcing a new behavior on people we suggest to them that they have less control over the situation than they had previously, creating a “hafta” situation where there was none previously.

Read the whole thing: Why Behavior Change Apps Don’t Work