Netflix is in a pickle: after leading the streaming game for a decade, it’s suddenly experiencing its biggest loss in subscribers. During the pandemic, Netflix thrived by getting millions of people through it – at its peak, Netflix had more than 200M subscribers. That’s 2.5% of the global population. The company’s success is in part due to its ability to apply behavioural design tactics to keep users coming back.

How Netflix hooks you in

From your very first interaction with the streaming platform, Netflix starts to build trust with its brand by offering you one month free.

When it first introduced the free month, Netflix wouldn’t send a trial expiration reminder and would receive numerous calls on day 31 with angry members complaining they forgot to cancel.

What it then did was introduce a trial ending reminder on day 28. This actually lost the business customers as 88% of people would end up cancelling the subscription. But those that stayed on turned into loyal customers who trusted the brand.

This results in positive action payback whereby users are compelled to pay back a positive action with another positive action: staying loyal to the brand.

Netflix is also good at tailoring the platform based on the person using it. Personalised recommendations tackle choice overload and keep users watching on the platform. In fact, more than 80% of Netflix shows users watched from 2018-2020 were a direct result of its recommendations.

What Netflix figured out early on in the game is that it’s really hard to predict users’ movie and TV tastes. So they let past behaviour predict future choices.

Knowing someone’s taste seeds the Netflix engine – that’s why it asks you your 3 favourite shows/movies on sign-up. Then, your homepage highlights movies or TV shows that Netflix thinks you’ll like. The more it shows you shows or movies you enjoy, the more you trust the brand to make these choices for you, soon eliminating the need for endless scrolling and positively impacting on your relationship with the brand.

And lets not forget how Netflix practically invented binge watching by introducing auto-play and episodic tv series. This was a conscious decision by the business to help it retain members, ensuring users stay glued to their screens.

Where has it all gone wrong?

Despite all of its successes, the business is facing its toughest year yet. Instead of gaining 2M subscribers in the first quarter of 2022, Netflix lost 200,000. A number of reasons have resulted in the perfect storm – more competition, the increasing cost of living pressures, the loss of 700K subscribers in Russia, and people getting out of lockdowns and back into real life.

Although it seems sudden, there have been signs over the years that have hinted at this downfall: a year ago, Netflix got into video games – a sign that the business feared its streaming services would not be enough. Likewise, Netflix once celebrated account sharing whereas now, it’s aiming to put a stop to it.

As Netflix works to recoup its losses, the negative impacts likely to be felt by its remaining customers are costly: subscription prices might rise and less money might be spent on innovative content.

This poses an interesting challenge for Netflix – how to approach fixing the problem without adding more pressure to its loyal customer base.

There are murmurs of Netflix introducing an ad-supported tier. A cheaper subscription could make Netflix more accessible for households previously unable to afford the service at full price. It’s true, no-one likes ads interrupting their viewing but Netflix can use data to provide targeted advertising tailored to users.

Netflix is also experimenting with stricter controls around account sharing in a bid to turn those households into customers in their own right. This opens up a new realm of customers and revenue streams.

Many great products plateau and we have seen this before with the likes of Peloton, whose increase in competition drove it to add new features and content for its audience.

Netflix too has been pushed into this corner. It has a large amount of content, but its offering is narrow when comparing it to competitors that offer better material in sports and news. Its big focus has always been that enjoyment, not quality, drives retention. But this has resulted in the platform investing in what may be considered as more “low-brow” entertainment to hook and encourage users to binge watch.

What can Netflix do next?

We’re not here to look down on Netflix; it has done great things too.

In terms of personalisation, Netflix was among the first to utilise data to give us better viewing recommendations. It still manages to entertain us: documentaries are now as entertaining as they are educational. It introduced interactive storytelling where we get to choose our own adventure: think Black Mirror’s Bandersnatch, which allows us to decide the story direction. Focusing on providing more of these moments of brilliance will get users back on board.

Between the account-sharing crackdown and an ad-supported option, Netflix can minimise its losses by improving on the things that make it great: a focus on personalisation and innovative content.

In our 21 years of designing digital products and experiences, we’ve used a wide range of different research techniques and methodologies to help enhance our understanding of the opportunities we’re looking to create or the problems we’re trying to solve. A developing field that has caught our attention is behavioural science, which is emerging as a growing discipline in its own right but has some exciting potential for the digital world. Behavioural science provides us with a genuinely differentiating set of considerations, which allows us to elevate experiences and the opportunity to drive long-term product use through behaviour change and the creation of habits.

We recently hosted an event on how to design digital products that stick. The event explored topics around long-term use, brand loyalty and commercial gain, focusing on creating behaviour change in order to keep users returning to a product time and time again.

We spoke about how aspects of behavioural science create user habits and how we applied elements of this to create successful experiences that stick for our own clients, like Domino’s Pizza and FirstGroup. This spurred on some follow-up questions from attendees, mainly around what behavioural design is and how to apply it properly to their brand’s products. So, we once again teamed up with Behavioural Strategist Samuel Salzer to understand behavioural design and how brands can start using behavioural design to deliver digital products and services for long-term use.

So, what on earth are we talking about when we mention behavioural design?

A simplified definition

Behavioural science is the study of how we as human beings make decisions and interact with the world around us. It involved combining insights from lab and field experiments to understand why a person might do a certain behaviour and what influences that behaviour. Behavioural science furthers our understanding of the basic principles that underlie human behaviour. This allows us to discover many things about human behaviour but it doesn’t take into account everything that matters.

Behavioural design is the application of behavioural science with a goal to change human behaviour. It combines applied behavioural science with design thinking. Applied behavioural science explicitly goes beyond the research. It’s distinct from academic behavioural science (mentioned above) – which mainly furthers our understanding of human behaviour – in that it attempts to change behaviour in real-world contexts, rather than just studying it.

“Applied behavioural scientists look at the research presented and think, how can these insights be effectively and ethically put to practice?” explains Salzer.

Behavioural designers use design thinking within the applied work, designing proposed solutions to make a behaviour more likely and always keeping users at the forefront. They might not only perform desk research or collect quantitative data, but will also often look to conduct user interviews and test prototypes.

Although behavioural scientists are really good at desk research and making sense of the data from a behavioural lens, they might struggle with involving users throughout the process. You’ll rarely see academics doing as much user research, testing, or interviews. However, someone that comes from a design background or from a user experience role is really good at considering real-world users throughout the process, using rapid prototyping to ensure a solution works as intended.

Persuasion, not coercion

It’s important to note that although behavioural design is concerned with changing human behaviour, behavioural design interventions are not techniques of coercion.

Once the desired behaviour is mapped and there is an understanding of why it doesn’t yet occur, behavioural designers set to proposing interventions that may change behaviour. They combine behavioural insights – gathered during the research stage of the process – and user testing to see whether the proposed interventions result in the behaviour. The goal is to understand the user’s underlying problem, and then effectively help them solve it.

It’s difficult to talk about behavioural design without touching on habits. Habits are a set of learned behaviours that we perform unconsciously. Because a habit is a learned behaviour, behavioural designers can support users in forming habits by adding the right cues and rewards in the user experience of digital products. In the most basic sense, habits form as users learn to associate cues in their environment with an action (behaviour) which then leads to a rewarding experience. You can read more about habits here and here.

These rewarding experiences can come from either something positive being added to a user’s experience, or something negative or painful is taken away.

Behavioural design toolbox

At Future Platforms, we have developed a Habit Map, similar to a behavioural map, which organises and collects information about a user’s journey and how to get to a desired behaviour change.

It goes beyond a user research map and looks at the psychological factors that might create potential barriers or opportunities for behaviour change. It uses behaviour research and sets the stage for applying the research and designing for change.

It should be the first step in the process of designing a product that sticks because before a solution is designed, you need to truly understand the root of the problem.

It can also be used to improve a product, rather than just at the start of developing one. For example, if users aren’t completing a desired outcome, it can show you why this might be and a different approach to try.

Ready to apply this to your own business? Our Habit Map helps businesses uncover hidden opportunities in creating products that stick. For help in developing yours, get in touch with our team today.

At the core of repeated product use is the formation of a habit that causes us to reach for something with no external trigger or conscious thought. However, the vast majority of brands fail to utilise this opportunity when it comes to their digital products.

We spoke to digital leaders, from Domino’s Pizza to Sky, about how brands can create a sustained need in users to make their products stick long-term. We unpacked user needs to design products that promote ongoing use, increase retention, and deliver lasting business value.

Samuel Salzer is a leading Behavioural Strategist and habit expert. He has worked all over the globe and has helped many people build habits that help them live better lives. He specialises in applying insights from behavioural science and behavioural economics to solve real-world problems. As well as this, he is a keynote speaker, the co-author of Nudging in Practice – How organisations can make it easy to do the right thing, and the curator of the growing newsletter, Habit Weekly.

Salzer recently spoke at our panel discussion, Digital Products that Stick, about the science behind habit forming products and common mistakes brands make when applying behavioural science techniques. We wanted to further explore the field of behavioural science and how brands can apply it to their digital products, so we sat down to pick his brain.

Tell us a bit about what you do and your background…

I’m Samuel Salzer and I’m a Behavioural Strategist. What that means is that I help companies and businesses around the world to apply behavioural science in practice. I’m all about seeing how we can take all the beautiful insights we have in psychology, behavioural science and economics, and use it to make better products and services.

My goal, for a long time, has been to help build 1 million good habits in the world, and I feel I may have succeeded in that…I don’t have a perfect measurement for it, but I’ve worked with a lot of large-scale initiatives; so multimillion users or people have been involved. So that’s what I aim to do; to make the world better, one good habit at a time.

What made you interested in behavioural science?

I studied economics and finance at university. I was lucky to have a professor who I was doing research for, who started to smuggle me books on behavioural economics. I was immediately intrigued and fascinated by the idea that how I saw the world was in this poor resolution quality. When I read these books, I felt like I began seeing things much clearer.

I jumped down the rabbit hole of behavioural science to see where it could take me. The big shift for me was when I started thinking about long-term behaviour changes. So, not only how do we change a decision in a moment, but actually, how do we help people to make long-term changes?

I was personally invested because a lot of people in my life were struggling with making changes and sticking to them. For example, where they wanted to meditate, or they wanted to eat better usually because they were really stressed or were struggling with weight issues, and finding that a ‘nudge’ wasn’t enough. That’s why I started to study habit formation research and how to apply that at scale.

I was really excited to see how we can build products and services that would achieve the same goal to help people create long-term change.

Digital products are a tool that could potentially be really helpful or really harmful and I wanted to know how we could make them as helpful as possible.

Can you please give us a brief background of behavioural science and how it can help us shape habits and digital products?

In some general terms, the most valuable thing about behavioural science is that it encourages us to understand the real problem. We can better understand what the main barriers are that prevent people from achieving their habits. And when you understand that, the solutions are easier to design since you know what the real drivers of what makes or breaks this behaviour are.

The most valuable thing about behavioural science is that it encourages us to understand the real problem.

And with habits, what we need to understand is that first of all, you have cues that are context dependent, which means that if a habit is formed, you have a time, place or situation connected to it. You’re acting automatically based on something you see or feel. And there’s something either in you internally or in your environment that activates that behaviour. For example, if you’re building an app that helps people quit smoking, it’s really important to understand what triggers people to smoke in the first place. It’s about asking “how do we effectively shape the context that triggers people to do the right thing?”.

By understanding this, you begin to understand what you need to remove externally and overcome internally to manage those cravings.

Behavioural science, in this way, helps us deliver products that really support the person. It encourages you to know the people you’re designing for and their context.

Behavioural design is the application of behavioural science with a goal to change human behaviour. It combines applied behavioural science with design thinking. Applied behavioural science explicitly goes beyond the research. It’s distinct from academic behavioural science (mentioned above) – which mainly furthers our understanding of human behaviour – in that it attempts to change behaviour in real-world contexts, rather than just studying it.

“Applied behavioural scientists look at the research presented and think, how can these insights be effectively and ethically put to practice?” explains Salzer.

Behavioural designers use design thinking within the applied work, designing proposed solutions to make a behaviour more likely and always keeping users at the forefront. They might not only perform desk research or collect quantitative data, but will also often look to conduct user interviews and test prototypes.

Although behavioural scientists are really good at desk research and making sense of the data from a behavioural lens, they might struggle with involving users throughout the process. You’ll rarely see academics doing as much user research, testing, or interviews. However, someone that comes from a design background or from a user experience role is really good at considering real-world users throughout the process, using rapid prototyping to ensure a solution works as intended.

Persuasion, not coercion

It’s important to note that although behavioural design is concerned with changing human behaviour, behavioural design interventions are not techniques of coercion.

We’re big fans of your newsletter, Habit Weekly. How do you achieve a fine balance between discussing the science of habits and making your content accessible to a wider audience?

It makes it easier when we’re talking about human behaviour, which is fascinating by itself. I’m just making sure that there is good information and that what I share is backed by a reputable or scientific source.

Like you say, it’s a fine balance because some people that get the newsletter are Behavioural Scientists and others have just heard about something related to the field and want to know more.

What’s exciting to me is that there need not be a difference between something that is really scientific and something that is interesting and fun to read. I try to find something that has a really solid foundation, but is presented in a way that’s fun as well and wanting people to go away feeling like they’ve learnt something as well.

How do you see the field of behavioural science developing in the next 5 years?

I think whereas now we have a lot of Behavioural Scientists and Strategists working as consultants, in the next 5 years I see them moving more in-house. There will be more Behavioural Scientists working in teams, whether that’s the UX, Engineering, or Marketing teams. Right now, that’s quite unusual.

The second big trend I see is I think it’s going to move a little bit away from this cool, exciting toolbox of new buzzwords like nudges, gamification, and habits, and towards how behavioural science can be applied better in the user research stage to have a more granular understanding of the user and the journey.

And lastly, in your opinion, what products are currently killing it when it comes to successfully developing habits for long-term use?

So the first one that comes to mind is the Dreams app in Sweden. They do a phenomenal job at making something dull like saving money fun and easy to do, which is really hard. They’ve combined your saving goal with your dreams and that’s really strong motivation for most users because it urges you to save for a purpose.

The second product that comes to mind is called Shapa, which combines a physical product with a digital intervention. Shapa provides you with a scale but one that doesn’t have numbers – you step on it, and it gives you a weekly average indicator, which is a colour. So for example, yellow if you’re steady or red if you’ve gained weight but it’s a weekly average, not a daily one, so it’s far easier for people to bounce back.

And the last one I’ll mention is Peloton. Peloton does an amazing job and has around 90%+ one year retention, which is honestly unheard of.

Ready to delve deeper into the field of behavioural science and apply it to your own business challenges? We’ve developed a Habit Map that helps businesses uncover hidden opportunities of developing habits, which results in returning customers and increased brand loyalty. For help in developing yours, get in touch with our team today.

In the 21 years we’ve been in business, we’ve seen some significant changes in how brands approach building digital products and services. Ten years ago, we had to convince brands to be customer-centric and think about data to make more informed decisions. Nowadays, most businesses know what good looks like:

• Customer-centric
• Data-driven
• Iterative
• Outcome-driven

However, being good at product doesn’t necessarily guarantee customer retention and long-term product use. The numbers look bleak: a recent report stated that only 31% of users return to an app after they first open it, and only 14% are still engaged after 30 days. Retention is still a massive challenge for most brands. For most brands, this means their digital products deliver value in the short-term but then fall away as the curve of motivation drops. However, if brands impact and change the behaviour of their users, they can significantly improve retention, and increase value for the business and the customer.

This led us to start thinking about what the magic formula is for making a product ‘stick’ and be used long-term. What we found is that the products that stick, create habits in users that keep them coming back for more.

To understand how brands can achieve this, we recently hosted a panel discussion with digital leaders who included: Rod Brooks, Group Head of Architecture previously working with Domino’s Pizza; Roxanne Nejad, VP Marketing at Cleo; Matt Harris, Director of Digital Product at Sky; Remy Brooks, Head of Strategy at Future Platforms; and Behavioural Strategist and Author, Samuel Salzer. The event focused on how brands can achieve long-term digital product use through the creation of digital habits.

Why habits are important

At the core of repeated product use is the formation of a habit that causes us to reach for something with no external trigger or conscious thought. Brands that successfully develop habits through their digital products experience better commercial value, brand loyalty, and happier customers. However, the vast majority of brands fail to utilise this when it comes to their digital products, and a big opportunity is missed.

Samuel Salzer took us through the science of habit formation and how we move through the process of trigger, to action, to reward and through the process again.

Unfortunately, in the real world, it’s not always as simple as it seems.

The challenges of habit-formation

When we spoke with our panel, we found that they were facing challenges that are a common barrier to delivering digital products and services that have long-term impact. It all starts with buy-in and convincing stakeholders to think less traditionally.

One of the key challenges for Sky is “getting buy-in from the wider business and getting people to think in a new way,” said Matt. A new way of thinking might be more user and product centred than its traditional approach.

For Rod, as previous Group Head of Architecture, the challenge lies in getting the digital team to work as one with the IT team. “One of the bigger challenges of buy-in I have is from the digital team, and persuading them [to work with the] input from IT and getting these two to gel together.” When these two teams work together, it benefits the entire ecosystem.

One of the ways Harris has overcome this challenge at Sky is to “start small, iterate often, test concepts, and ensure that [Sky] gets the broader stakeholder buy-in so that people aren’t scared to try digital products.” They work closely with stakeholders to help them along that journey to understand that building digital products with user behaviour in mind is going to have a positive impact. “It’s going to change customer behaviour, and it’s going to move customers away from feeling the need to pick up the phone and explore some of those new channels,” said Matt.

Making experiences memorable

Cleo is a budget-assistant app, with a primarily Gen Z audience. It’s an AI-powered budgeting app that helps people track spending and start saving. At Cleo, they found that an iterative approach to launching new products helps them determine what works best with their audience. “This means that everyone is able to have a very user-centric approach and focus on solutions and new product builds based on a user feedback cycle,” said Roxanne.

One of the ways they put this into practice is through their chat functionality, where they gave Cleo a tone-of-voice that was based on what they saw their audience engage with online:

“When Cleo first launched, we were a card abrogator and budgeting platform. One of the UX writers saw someone Tweet a notification from Cleo that said something like ‘You have £0 balance…good luck with that.’ From this, it could have gone in one of two ways: Cleo could have said that’s a bug or lean into and see what else getting roasted by Cleo could develop into.”

The brand then included the audience by asking them how they like to get roasted and input that feedback as part of Cleo’s chat functionality. This is now part of the onboarding process, where you get roasted by Cleo for your spending habits.”

Roxanne refers to this as an Easter-egg feature that surprises and delights users, and that they can discover. What started out as a small test turned into a feature that their users really love, and now it’s one of Cleo’s most engaging features because it was done in conjunction with its users.

In order to ensure continuous use of your product, beyond delivering all of its core features (whether that’s ordering pizza or banking), your product needs to be memorable.

Evolving with users

Habits come and go. This means that even the most successful products have to change as their users do, in order to address new challenges. The Domino’s Pizza Tracker started off relatively simple and then it grew over time. Rod’s team is always looking ahead for ways to improve a feature, even at launch:

Before we even finish the design, we try to work out when we’re going to get rid of it and what we’re going to replace it with – just a high level view to start with.”

The most exciting part for Rod is seeing something take off after trialling it with users:

“You never know when something will become bigger than you expect. That’s the really exciting bit because that’s where you drive innovation. Pizza Legends from Domino’s, for example, was very driven around creating your own pizza and then you could order it through a code. The original lifespan of that was 3 months but you never know when you will hit on something that is just grabbed by the public. We couldn’t retire it for a long period of time because everyone was just using it. Then we had to come up with a plan of how we were going to retire the promotion because you can’t keep them running for a long time,” said Rod.

For Sky, the business has had to shift their way of thinking to be more user and product-centred in order to allow them to evolve quicker.

“We’ve re-platformed the app and we’re onto our 4th iteration of it in 7 years but [some features have] lasted since the start of time from a digital point of view. So we’re trying to get into the much more product-centered way of evolution, whereby we should be thinking of the next experience, and the next, and so on. We need to be thinking about ‘when are we actually going to rebuild this thing or design this thing?’,” said Matt.

User feedback is gold dust

To develop long-term use in a product, it’s really important to listen to users and their feedback on what works and what doesn’t as they will be the ones using it. Cleo does this by introducing features in an iterative way and listening to feedback before rolling them out to the wider public.

“[We] do a soft launch that [we] test with real users to see if it has market appeal, and then build and improve it over time until it becomes something,” said Roxanne.

Allowing users’ voices to be heard by giving feedback on a product gives them more of a reason to invest in its future. And this ensures they return to see how a product has evolved to better meet their needs. At Sky, this process was sped up due to the pandemic, which made gathering user feedback much quicker and easier than their previous traditional methods:

We used to get into a lab and interview customers physically but now we have digital tools to conduct user research. So, we’re able to get user insight much more quickly, much more compliantly, using new tools and tech that we haven’t previously used and go to a much bigger audience.”

“We have also taken on a community approach whereby we now have Super Users who can give feedback quicker. They’re the ones who are actually using the product so developing this relationship through feedback is massively important.”

Rod agreed that the best way they developed the digital products at Domino’s was through feedback. Even from their own team.

“We were trying to get the Domino’s team to order pizza through the app so that we could get feedback on their experience the next day. The [best] insights we could get was from my own team actually using the app and ordering the products as a customer. We then took that to HR, who were less IT-savvy, to give feedback on how it was working. In the past, they would try to solve problems by looking at the data which often wasn’t helpful in finding out how users came across a certain error.”

To get to the bottom of a problem, [you] need to turn to the users. Once you fix a problem for a customer, they become the biggest brand advocate you can have.”

Knowing what triggers your users

Motivation is a big component of why digital products get used. In order to build a habit, you need to ensure your product is a recurring part of a user’s life. Knowing who your users are and why they want to use your product in the first place will give you insight about their triggers.

Triggers are usually external (a notification or email) or internal (a thought, feeling, or location). Internal triggers are the root of forming habits, because it’s what causes a user to perform an action without thought. These drive users into performing repeated behaviours, so knowing what triggers your users is invaluable. Soft launches, user feedback, and data can help brands determine their users’ triggers.

Key takeaways

Habits are integral to repeated product use. There are certain actions brands can take that help products ‘stick’ and be used long-term. By adopting a more user-centred and product-centred approach, you can increase customer retention and lifetime value.

When designing a habit-forming product, users’ needs and motivations have to be considered first and foremost. As the ones who will be using the product, their experiences should be at the forefront of the product design. During our panel discussion, we discovered that what Cleo, Sky, and Domino’s Pizza have found has led them to developing successful digital products are:

• Embracing collaboration internally as a way to get buy-in from the rest of the organisation to the process.
• Creating memorable experiences and products that let a brand’s personality shine.
• Products that evolve with their users and do so based on user feedback and user experience.
• Brands that acknowledge what triggers users and consider this in the development of a product.

You can watch the full event here. See you at the next one!