Habit Forming Apps
The success of many technology companies and digital content creators depends on their ability to establish and maintain the engagement of their users on their web and mobile apps. Our own experiences show that the dominant companies in this field have succeeded in creating a user base that voluntarily spends hours each day engaged with their apps. Indeed, these companies have been so successful that there are widespread concerns about the negative effects of digital dependency. Ofcom estimate that British people on average spend 24 hours a week online, twice as long as ten years ago, with one in five of all adults spending 40 hours online each week. On average, the British check their phone every 12 minutes of the waking day. Two in five adults first look at their phone within five minutes of waking up, climbing to 65% of those aged under 35.
The importance of user engagement has spawned new areas of research. A whole playbook of techniques has been identified that can be used to get users engaged with mobile apps and web-based products for as long as possible9 . One of the easier techniques to quickly understand is the Hook Model10 . This model calls for app developers to create a looping cycle that consists of a trigger, an action, a variable reward and continued investment. The objective is to create habit-forming products: habits being an acquired mode of behaviour that has become nearly or completely involuntary.
Instagram is a good example. Users are triggered to start an account to tap into an online social network to see what their friends or celebrities are doing. Once they have joined, they are encouraged to act, in the form of posting photographs and updates, a relatively quick and intuitive process. After they have accomplished an action, they are rewarded with likes and comments from other users. Crucially, these rewards vary depending on the post. Finally, users are encouraged to invest in their profiles by adding autobiographical details and collecting new followers. Together, these elements create a loop that keeps users coming back, eventually making Instagram a daily habit.
At the heart of the Hook Model is a powerful cognitive quirk described by B.F. Skinner in the 1950s called a variable schedule of rewards. In the Instagram example above the variable reward is the number of likes that a photograph provokes. Skinner identified that variability is the brain’s cognitive nemesis and that our minds make a deduction of cause and effect a priority over other functions like self-control and moderation.
The risk for online gamblers is clear in our view. If the operators adopt the techniques that have been successfully used by the technology companies and digital content creators to stimulate engagement and habit forming gambling apps, there is a substantial risk that they will create a huge cohort of gamblers with a stronger and potentially compulsive gambling habits, and some of those users will inevitably become problem gamblers. Since this likelihood will be amplified by the easy and anytime gambling opportunity presented by mobile technology, the result could be an epidemic.
The question is how the Gambling Commission should respond to this new risk. This matter needs more research. However, the first clues come from looking at reversing the advice to app developers on how to create app habit forming apps.
Take the Fogg Behavioural Model11 developed by Stanford behavioural scientist B.J. Fogg that identifies how to organise an app to get users to transact. Users must be simultaneously motivated, able and prompted to take action. One way to impact on the second parameter ‘able’ is to simplify the user’s journey through the app. That is why successful developers have been so invested in recent years in the simplicity of their customer interface. In the jargon of the industry, their objective is to make their app ‘frictionless’.
Gambling operators are working on the simplicity of their apps. One way the GC could reduce the engagement of gamblers with a gambling app would be to insist on further steps in the process that create ‘friction’. In this way, the users would have additional time to reflect on a bet and should be less likely to make impulsive bets.
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Last updated: 6 April 2021
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