Most of the time you scroll through your feed, either it’s Twitter, Instagram or TikTok — a new post , reel or video will spark your interest. As a matter of fact, more than a few posts will spark your interest, just enough for you to keep swiping.
There is a reason why social platforms can become so addictive — it’s in their recipe to always give you something new, something personalised and unexpected.
Besides personalisation, high variability is what keeps us on our toes — since we cannot predict what we ‘re going to see, we always have the drive to get that surprising reward, either it’s knowledge, inspiration or entertainment. Aka, the slot machine effect.
Not all apps are made for variability. Think about your Weather app — you definitely don’t need a different warning each time you read about extreme weather conditions in the daily forecast. In fact, the more familiar the keywords, the faster you will scan through and get on with your day. To define define which apps tend to be more variability-friendly I divided them up into 3 categories:
❏ One-time use, task-driven apps — like weather or language translator apps. Here the focus is on easy task completion, therefore variability tends to be kept at a minimum.
❏ Continuous use, content-driven apps — like social media or music player apps. Here the focus is on content sharing, and since there’s always a pool of engaged users to produce new ideas, high variability is inherent.
❏ Repetitive or long-term use, goal-driven apps — like habit tracking apps. Here the focus is on forming a routine in order for the user to achieve an intended goal later down the road. Most of the time the content and prompts are finite, and therefore the variability can range from low to medium.
For the last type, it might not be possible to get variability from the content itself. At least not to a great amount. And since those apps tend to be used for a higher purpose rather than the enjoyment of the use itself, keeping users engaged after a long time can be tricky.
As a product designer, I used to almost drool over keywords like habit-forming, addictive, immersive — fine, I still do. Not because I want people to be enslaved to technology, but because it seems like the purest compliment of engaging products. Unsurprisingly — the first times I tried implementing those principles into customer journey mapping and blueprinting, the process was… a mess — or better yet, I should go for the word inadequate.
After some failed attempts to structure the “blueprinting ops” for engagement in repetitive or long-term apps, here’s a list of aspects to run through if you are considering boosting your customer journey mapping and blueprinting.
Understand that the person who used an app for the first time, is not going to have the same context or psyche levels compared to having used the app for 2 days, 1 month or 1 year. Here are 4 core user segments you should take into account when blueprinting for repetitive or long-term use, goal-driven apps.
In some cases, it might be necessary to tailor content and flow down to specific user segments. Fun fact: Duolingo found out that after a user resurrects, they’re roughly 20% less likely than a new user to be retained (that is, to still be using the app). So make sure to consider that based on the engagement levels of a user, there may be different aha! or fragile moments into the customer journey.
Even though maintaining familiar and consistent structures is very important to help users navigate with confidence through your app, repetitive content in messages and nudges strips down the potential for surprising variability. On the contrary, highly diverse prompts create the illusion of a conversation-like experience. Tinder applies this principle with finesse in their push notifications.
Of course, setting variable messaging framework is going to be a hustle and may not be priority no.1 from the jobs to be done in the next five to ten sprints. However, adding a few diverse prompts and nudges here and there, can go a long way. Keep in mind that people value things more, when they sense the effort behind them.
Newsletters flooding the inbox, and apps innocently “checking-in” time and time again are bullet-proof ways to cause reactance. Your users will either learn to blindly ignore content — at best, or get annoyed enough to turn their notifications off “forever”. (And if they do, good luck getting people to reactivate them).
When blueprinting the customer journey, it’s important to consider how frequency and timing can affect the engagement. Time variability is also a key aspect so that users don’t learn to expect (or fear) for new notifications. Visualising the actual timeline of your notifications being sent, will help you gauge if you are being too intrusive and predictable. And always — use prompts only if you really need to.
Understand that mappings are linear, whereas engagement comes after an accumulation of experiences for the user, most of which come from repeating the same tasks. So in order to implement variability into mapping and blueprinting, you need to structure how to utilise its aspects through your process.
1. Create your lens by defining the engagement levels you want to focus on.
2. Select the scenarios you are going to map.
3. Blueprint the customer journey maps based on each engagement level.
4. Pinpoint specific touch-points that are bound to get repetitive.
5. Rate them in terms of how repetition will affect user psyche.
6. Identify opportunities for variability in content and timing.
8. Create sub-structures and rules to implement variability.
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