Desire Engineering

🔁 Aha Moments on Repeat

Users don’t just want solutions they crave products they can’t quit. We often focus on solving immediate user need. However, the most successful products go beyond mere functionality. They cultivate a sustained desire that keeps users returning.

The challenge? Desire is inherently dynamic and naturally diminishes over time. What excites users today becomes table stakes tomorrow. The sweet spot lies in balancing the comfort of predictability with the excitement of novelty, delivering those “aha” moments over and over.

This brings us to an interesting question: how do we actually make that happen?

The Science of Desire #

Understanding why users stay engaged (or drop off) is key to building sticky products. In my experience, it boils down to two main forces:

Predictability Builds Trust: Users appreciate knowing what to expect from a product, as it reduces the mental energy required to relearn interfaces, building comfort and confidence.
Novelty Sparks Interest: Regularly introducing fresh content or features reignite curiosity and keeps the experience from going stale.

Some examples in action:

Netflix’s Recommended Shows: Uses viewing history (predictable) to suggest new content (novel), making discovery easy and engaging.
Duolingo’s Gamification uses streaks and challenges that keep learning fun but don’t enforce guilt-driven engagement.

Ask yourself:

Which aspects of your product should remain consistent to build trust?
Where could you add a fresh elements (subtle enough not to disrupt the experience) to spark users’ curiosity?

Balancing Predictability & Novelty #

Many products struggle to find the right balance. They either become too predictable, leading to user boredom and churn, or they change too much, too fast, leaving users feeling lost or overwhelmed. The key to achieving a middle ground lies in layered value (benefits that build over time), progressive discovery (gradually revealing advanced features as users are ready), and occasional strategic refreshes (planned updates that keep things feeling new).

Examples of products that strike this balance include:

Notion, which starts simple but gradually reveals advanced functionality as users become more proficient.
Slack’s Workflow Builder, which introduced advanced automation features while preserving the core messaging experience.

Reflect on your own product by asking:

Does it naturally unfold and adapt to user growth?
When you roll out new features, do they enhance the experience instead of disrupting what people already love?

Building an Engagement Playbook #

Move beyond vanity metrics. Instead, focus on building genuine engagement with these techniques:

Reduce Friction: Make it as easy as possible for users to achieve their core goals within your product. Quick wins early on are crucial for initial engagement.
Keep the experience fresh without overloading users with too many changes at once.
Leverage Ecosystem Synergies: if your product is part of a platform or has integrations, are there ways for engagement in one area to provide benefits or unlock features in another? This strengthens the overall value proposition.
Build habit loops ethically by rewarding progress and avoiding dark patterns. You want users to come back because they’re genuinely motivated, not because they feel forced.

Metrics to Track Long-Term Value:

Retention rate (are users sticking around?)
Feature adoption (are they using new tools?)
Time-to-value (how fast do they see benefits?)

Ask yourself:

Are you creating genuine value that naturally drives users want to return on their own?
How do our retention strategies create genuine, long-term value for users rather than relying on short-term engagement tactics?
What metrics will tell you if you’re achieving that long-term value?

Desire isn’t a stroke of luck - it’s engineered. By intentionally balancing predictability with novelty, and by focusing on genuine value creation, you can engineer desire and build products that users love to use, not just today, but for the long term.