Getting Over The Decision Hill 🏔
Hello and welcome to this week’s subscriber-only *free* growth newsletter, delivered straight to your inbox. If you found this helpful - share it with your friends. Cheers✌️
As growth professionals, we often focus on metrics like growth rate, conversion rate, and lifetime value of a customer. And that's great!
But what’s even more important is asking user-centric questions like, ”Why should they come back tomorrow?”, "Why should they upgrade?" and "Why should they share this with their friends?".
Creating a seamless experience that takes users beyond the "Aha moment" and into a lasting habit with our product requires a deep understanding of how they think and make decisions.
So, how do users make decisions?
Have you heard of the decision hill analogy? It will help you understand how users make decisions.
Every action a user takes in your product is like climbing a hill.
For example, a user:
Clicked on an ad on Facebook
Read a blog post
Signed up as a free account
Formed a habit & came back to your product on a weekly basis
Upgraded their account
But what makes them get over the hill and do that action?
It all starts with an emotion. We make decisions starting with an emotional fuel that drives us towards that action. We are going for things that increase desire (+) or help us avoid pain (-).
Then, we use logic to justify and rationalize our emotions.
Once we start climbing that hill, we need motivation to get us to the top. There are motivational boosts such as urgency, scarcity, bargain, and belonging that can help us clicm to hill.
And finally, there is a reward.
There are 3 types of rewards:
Intrinsic (completion, mastery, happiness)
Extrinsic (time, money, information)
Social (recognition, validation)
It sounds like motivation can make or break a user's journey up the decision hill.
So how do we keep their motivation tank full?
Use 👉 User Psych Framework
Psych is a unit of measurement for user motivation.
There are things that consume fuel from the fuel tank (negative psych elements), and things that add fuel to the fuel tank (positive psych elements).
The more psych someone has, the more motivation they will have to do the work in your product. Once the psych tank gets to 0, they bounce.
You ask for a smaller investment that leads to a small reward. Then you ask for a bigger investment, that leads to a higher reward.
How do we tap into emotion in order to add fuel to the emotional fuel tank?
To tap into emotions, there are four key elements:
Selfishness. People care about themselves and those close to them, so make the experience all about them.
Sensory. People need to visualize the experience, so use all five senses - sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste - to create a full picture.
Specific. Experiences are more impactful when they are specific and not vague.
Simple. If an experience is too complicated, it will engage the logical part of the brain instead of the emotional side. Keep it simple!
Getting over the decision hill will involve reducing cognitive & physical load, and adding motivational boosts.
With these user psychology frameworks in mind, you can tap into your user’s core emotion and design a seamless experience around it in your product.
Credit for frameworks: Reforge Growth Series Course.