How to Increase User Activation With Streaks

A Streak is a feature commonly implemented by consumer apps that uses human psychology to increase retention and activation. Anyone who's ever used Duolingo, Strava, or a whole host of other massively successful consumer apps knows exactly what I'm talking about.

In this article I'm going to dive into exactly what a Streak is, how the best platforms are using them to increase user retention and reduce churn, and how you can build them into your own platform.

What is a streak?

Streaks work by keeping a running log of user interactions over time and setting achievable goals that users can complete every day, week or month. For every consecutive period the user achieves the goal, their streak goes up. If by the end of just one day, week or month a user fails to hit their goal, they have to start over.

A streak can be infinitely long, and so in a way is never complete. This constant strive for achievement creates a deep sense of accountability between a user and a platform, and forms the building blocks for creating robust usage habits.

Perhaps the most famous example of a streaks feature is Duolingo. Every day users complete at least one lesson, they increase their learning streak. Over time, users invest a lot of mental capital in maintaining a streak, and so it feels harder and harder to simply let it end.

“One of the hardest things about language learning is that it’s slow. You don’t wake up one day and suddenly feel fluent. But a streak is really powerful because it lets users see progress even when language learning itself is slow.”

—Jackson Shuttleworth, Retention Team Lead at Duolingo

What makes a great streak?

The key reason that streaks work so well for Duolingo is all down to having well-aligned incentives.

In order to make a streak work as well as possible it's helpful to answer two questions:

For Duolingo, the core reason people use it is to learn a language, and the single action users could take that would help them most in achieving that is to complete a lesson.

This seems obvious now, but the team at Duolingo experimented with lots of different goals before they decided completing lessons was the thing that keep users coming back time and time again.

“People ask, ‘Do you optimize for engagement or learning?’ And the answer is simple: we focus on engagement because you will not learn anything if you’re not coming back to the app.”

—Jackson Shuttleworth, Retention Team Lead at Duolingo

For other platforms, users might be trying to write a book, stay healthy, run their business or for entertainment. In each case the action users can take to achieve this can differ. But whatever it may be, it must be habitual and something users can complete multiple times, on a regular basis.

How to increase accountability

So we're convinced that streaks can help users build usage habits and keep them using a platform, but how do you ensure they keep to their streak for as long as possible?

The best way to do this is to make users more accountable to their streaks by letting them set their own milestones. For example, Duolingo lets you choose how many lessons you want to complete each week. This turns the user-app relationship on it's head from streaks feeling like an obligation, to a personal commitment.

Psychologically this is a much stronger bond that's harder for users to break. And what's more, users recognise the platform as helping them and view them as an accountability partner to help them achieve their goals.

How to build a streaks feature

Streaks aren't just a quick-fix add-on feature, they represent a different way of building products that gamification at the centre of the user experience.

If you're not using a gamification platform like Trophy, here's what you'll need to do to truly see the retention and activation benefits:

• Write code to:
  • Continually track user interactions
  • Measure user interactions and determine how long a users streak is
• Build APIs to serve streak data to your applications
• Write code to display streaks in your platform
• Set up internal tools to
  • Determine the most likely causes of streak loss
  • Experiment and A/B test optimizations
  • Summarize all this in terms of user activation and retention

What's more, depending on the size of your platform, you'll need to make sure all this will stay performant and reliable for millions if not billions of user interactions every month.

How to cut development costs by 90%

Instead of taking months to build all of that from scratch, you can save up to 90% of development costs by using Trophy.

Out of the box Trophy gives you:

• Reliable, scalable APIs for automatically tracking any user interaction across mobile and web apps in just a few lines of code.
• Purpose-built APIs to integrate streak data directly into your applications.
• Out-of-the-box analytics tools to measure and optimize retention and activation at a granular level.