Want To Hook Users? Drive Them Crazy.

<i>"At the heart of the desire engine is a variable schedule of rewards: a powerful hack that focuses attention, provides pleasure, and infatuates the mind."</i><p>In other words, a casino. We've known about these for ages. Now we're going to repackage the idea as a 'desire engine'?

Or, build a product that they'll want to use, and do away with the psyche tricks altogether. The simplest "desire engine" is a product that people both want and need.

Use this knowledge to trick yourself into doing what you want. Or said another way, to make yourself enjoy doing what you already need to do.

I really enjoyed and feel inspired by this article. It's given me specific ideas for my next project that I'm excited about. So I was surprised to see mostly negative comments here. But I suppose it's because the ideas and conclusions in this article seem to have been derived more anecdotally than experimentally, and HN is a very scientific-minded audience. But I absolutely recognize the power of variable and unpredictable rewards as a hook in my own behavior. So that's just more anecdotal evidence, but in my opinion, applying this idea to your product will make it more fun for the user (assuming others feel the same).<p>On a sidenote, I disagree with the common aversion to applying psychology in the design of your product. Applying psychology to the user is a means of manipulating them, but so is interacting with people in any sense. It doesn't automatically make it a "bad" thing. Better understanding people's desires and making products that meet those desires seems to me like a pretty worthwhile goal.

Great article! Reminds me of OkCupid and other dating sites - variable rewards (occasionally finding matches) and you have users coming back every single day.

[citation needed]<p>But seriously, B.F. Skinner is hardly considered mainstream psychology anymore. The part about drawing conclusions about people that half pay attention while they are playing video games seems to strain too hard to arrive at the desired explanation.<p>Maybe there is something to this, I don't know. There aren't many human examples. I think you could probably make a lot of money <i>telling</i> people this is true though. Maybe that's the point? :)

Oh gosh, I wonder how many upvotes this comment will get. <i>crosses fingers</i>