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Have you ever noticed how the More Helpful your 15 step toolkit is, the faster people close the tab? That's what we call cognitive friction. But if you know, if you know how to turn that into a human focused journey, you turn a bounce into a lifelong advocate. Picture this, you have just invested $100 in acquiring a user. They log in, they get hit by a bunch of pop ups and they feel like they're being being drawn into some form of a tax audit. It feels like work. They leave and your acquisition budget is not coming back. Statistics show us how 77% of apps lose their users within the first three days. Through my work in gamification and now the octalysis group, I see this constantly. The drop off isn't a technical failure, it's not technology. It has to do with motivation and the core drives it. In the next few minutes, I'm going to show you how to go from function focused design into human focused design to guarantee how your users are actually wanting to come back. On day two, we will look at the Christmas magic mistake, the hello world principle and the Miyagi method of scaffolding. But before we fix the psychology, you need to look at how this works in the real world. You might think this is a UI problem, but it's often a a missing core drive. If you want to see exactly how top companies are using these psychological levers, you need to check out our free guide core drives in the wild. It's where we break down real world examples of gamification and behavioral design being used to build massive retention. Just go to the link in the description right now to get access. Let's look at what actually works. Recently I went to a Christmas experience in Madrid. The storytelling was absolutely amazing. You can check that out in a previous episode. Characters were perfect, but we couldn't even get started because it was so confusing when you. When you arrived, the onboarding to the magic was actually painful. It was difficult to pass from discovery where you found out about it. You got your tickets and you started going in. What do I do now? It was really painful. This is the UI tour mistake. You are leaving your users literally, in this case, out in the cold. You're ignoring coredrive one epic meeting and calling. By the time they get to the magic of your app or the experience, they or we in that case are too exhausted to really care. Where's that Beginner's luck mechanic to make the users feel like everything just goes their way? Beginner's luck is when you use this mechanic to make the Users feel like they're a natural at performing these actions, that getting better at doing all these things. It's like, wow, I'm naturally talented at doing this thing. So the question here is, is your software a warm welcome or is it a cold line in the middle of winter? So let's talk about this hello, World principle. When somebody learns to code, they don't start with setting up a very complex and deep database. They start with a simple line that says hello, World, and they print it, or we print it onto the screen. I know this because I studied software engineering and I did this for so many coding languages. It's a tiny but instant win. It makes you feel like you're a genius for five seconds. But those five seconds, that very quick initial win that you get by just saying, wow, I told this, the. This machine here to tell me hello, World, and I actually managed really, really quick, is a very, very strong hack. This is represented in CoreDrive to Development and accomplishment in your app, hello World is the first major victory. If you're a project management tool, you don't ask them to set up a whole workspace. Ask them to win their first task. You don't always need what you typically see in terms of digital badges or even progress bars, which most of the time for me, are a big improvement. To show development, you do want to make it such that they feel that they achieved it and you can feel the actual win. And let me stop here for a second, because when we talk about gamification in terms of behavioral design, people tend to go to badges and leaderboards and those things. And specifically about badges, badges can be used to a very good extent. They can be very useful, and they can be very powerful as well, if you know how to do that. But keep in mind that a badge, especially in an app, is literally a collection of pixels. If you don't have meaning behind those badges, they lose completely on any motivational power. And you can get a lot of that power even without the badge. Like in this case, if you're able to do hello World, you don't need a badge to tell you you are able to say, hello, World. You already feel that win. How can you look for that win exactly in that moment? Remember that that first major victory is the exact second that your user is realizing, why are they even on this app they just bought or they just registered for? So what is the hello World moment for your project? How can we get there in under 30 seconds? Now, let's completely move away from the digital world. Remember karate kid and Mr. Miyagi, he didn't put Daniel San right, remember Daniel San, the way he called him, right into the ring on day one to set up for this great fight. Essentially, he didn't want him to just get punched in the face. It all started with wax on, wax off. Daniel thought he was doing chores, but he was actually building the muscle memory to be able to block the attacks. This is scaffolding. You're hiding the fighting or the very complex feature until the user has mastered waxing, which are the core actions that they need to be able to use that feature. We see this in games all the time. Once people have acquired those skills, all you need to do, or a very clever thing to do, is introduce them to some form of core drive. Three, empowerment of creativity and feedback so they can discover their own skills, what they're now able to do, and use it in a way that they didn't imagine before and that they can come up with. Leave them some creativity on the ground so that they can actually express their ways and their strategies to do these things. When this complexity is now here and they're able to do. We were talking about before, a project management app. When they need to manage a whole project, they don't feel overwhelmed. They actually feel ready. It doesn't mean that the task doesn't exist and they don't have to put in the work. They're ready to put in the work. Remember the Daniel San Wax on, Wax off. Then he got to the big combat. It's not that he was not going to do the combat. It was not he going to do the fight, but he now felt ready. He had to put all that effort, but now he was ready to face that big challenge. He now has the muscle memory of wax on, wax off that allows him, in his own way and in the heat of the moment, quite literally during that fight, to be able to defend himself from these other masters of Karate vi. Well, this doesn't mean that Daniel wasn't frustrated. At some point, Miyagi made him wash cars. But when the punch finally came in, his reflex was already trained. Are you throwing your users, your users into the ring a bit too early? What are the wax on, wax off activities that you can throw in to build their confidence and their skills before you throw them out into the ring? Remember that onboarding, as we've seen, is not a checklist. It goes well beyond checklist. Checklist is functional thinking. They have to do this, this, this and that. And that's fine. You need the checklist, but it goes well beyond the checklist. There is an element of seduction here. You want to motivate your users into taking certain actions. You want to sell the meaning, provide an immediate win, and then, only then, when they're starting to be ready, is when you start unlocking, little by little, all of that complexity. If you don't master wax on and wax off, you'll never be able to stay or even really compete in the championship. So stop guessing why your users are churning and start looking at the behavioral signs behind the ones that actually do stay. Head over to the link in the description and check out our free core drives. In the Wild guide, we break down the exact gamification strategies that are working right now. Grab your axes and let's start designing for humans. And as we always say, at least for now and for today, it is time to say that it's game over.