Lots of apps don’t rely on users visiting daily and performing lots of actions to get value.

But some that do include:

Games, social media, and news.

Case Studies

League of Legends

At the end of the day, all that really matters is making sure the core game is good. It’s been designed in such a way that players who would play only on occasion (rather than it being a habit) are engaged through other ways to play more depending on their specific personality.

• Core experience - Playing a game of league of legends
  • Instant dopamine
  • emotionally engaging, lots of positive AND negative emotions against team and enemies
  • highly stimulating
• Forms of engaging all types of players
  • Competitiveness - Ranked mode with rewards and a lot of pride
  • Social - Easy to invite friends to play a game, biweekly weekend team events (clash), in-game voice comms
  • Skins and cosmetics - Players play a lot of a specific champion and have a favourite. Want to spend money. New skin = buy it and want to play lots more than usual so they can enjoy their new skin.
  • Battle-pass
    • Players can purchase a battlepass which unlocks a reward track that lasts for 1 month. They are then heavily incentivised to play a lot to progress through the entire reward track before the month ends so they get full value for their money.
    • Battlepass is normally more cost-effective for players than just buying the rewards outright, but they compensate by paying with their time.

Twitter

• Core experience - Scrolling through feed to read tweets OR Creating content and receiving dopamine from likes/rts/comments
  • It’s gratifying knowing you are aware of the most up to date news and trends within the niches you follow on Twitter.
  • Endless content with a good balance of thought-provoking, news/informative, and dopamine inducing memes.
• Forms of engaging all types of people
  • Extremely self-tailored based on who you follow.
    • Honestly it’s mostly just this. You can see memes, industry/work related news, educational threads, personal posts from friends and celebs.
  • Relies very heavily on being habit-forming compared to games
  • Push notifications identifying tweets that are trending that you might be interested in

News

Rely on habits and external triggers “did you hear about x?”, “Oh I haven’t yet, lemme check the news.”

• I think it’s quite telling that a lot of young people absorb most of their news these days from social media etc. due to the news not really having other ways to engage users.

Manifold

• Core experience - Browsing markets to stay up to date with trending events and reading comments OR fun trading on markets/gambling
  • For the first, we lack people posting directly to the site and replying to comments. Why be on Manifold when you can be following all the AI people on Twitter and have them respond to you directly if you comment.
  • Fun trading is good, but less compelling than just playing a video game for most people. Also things like stocks gets pretty boring quickly.