Should you design for addiction or for loyalty? That depends on whether you want users or an audience.
Users or an Audience
The frame comes from Michelle Manafy's April 2018 piece in 📝Nieman Lab, written for publishers. Design for addiction and you get users: people whose attention is harvested through compulsion loops, counted in clicks and sessions, and monetized by the advertisers who pay for that attention. Manafy points to clickbait as the publishing version — headlines tuned to be clicked rather than to deliver. Design for loyalty and you get an audience: people who come back because the thing is worth coming back to, and who stay in a relationship that holds up over years. The question is not whether a product is sticky. It is what the stickiness is made of — compulsion or trust.
Two Lines in May 2018
I found the piece within a couple of weeks of its publication and saved it here as two sentences and a link, tagged as coming soon. That is the whole record of the encounter. What it sat beside at the time was the playbook of 📝Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, the manual for building the compulsion side, and the opposite economics of 📝1,000 True Fans, where a small audience that chooses to return is the whole business.
A Question Worth Keeping
The frame gave me a question to ask before measuring anything: am I building for people who can't stop, or for people who choose to come back?
Contexts
References
- Designing For Addiction Versus Loyalty, niemanlab.org