Five-percent Rule for New Habit-forming Products
According to Nir Eyal, when five percent of your target user population use your newly-developed habit-forming product as frequent as you design it to be, then it is a good sign for your new product.
What if my product doesn’t meet the benchmark?
There may be three reasons that cause this:
- You have the wrong target user population.
- You have not conducted UX Research, or you have not done it right.
- Somewhere, somehow, the insights from UX research are not embedded into your product.
Here are some tips if you are in one of the above situations:
1. When you have defined the wrong target user population, you need to go back to a drawing board. Find your product proposition value, and define your target user population.
2. When you have not conducted UX Research, or you have not done it well, it is a negligence. There is nothing much to say if you have not done it at all. You have planned for a failure. Please do UX research urgently.
The difficult one is when you don’t know whether you have done it right or not. If you haven’t got any experience, or it is outside your comfort zone, it is a good idea to attend a UX training how to conduct an excellent UX Research or ask for help to conduct UX Research.
3. When the insights from UX Research are not embedded into your product, you need to evaluate your organizational product design and development process and strategy. One way to do it is by identifying your organizational UX debts and consolidate them.
