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MeditateBot: Creating a Daily Meditation Habit in Facebook Messenger

1/25/2017

 
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Over the past few years, Facebook Messenger has become the go to place for over a billion people worldwide to engage in their daily conversations. Though over the past year, it’s also quickly become the place where these same people are getting their daily news, weather updates, booking travel, style advice and much more. 

This phenomenon began back in April 2016 when Facebook opened up their API for developers to create chatbots — programs to simulate human conversation. The rise of chatbots are giving brands an entirely new way to communicate with their audience at scale, a way that is so innately human…through conversation.

New Habits are Hard
When launching a new technology product, one of the biggest challenges is getting people to use it daily. New apps struggle with this often. Think about all of the times you’ve downloaded an app, used it once or twice, then deleted it or never opened it again. It’s hard to create that stickiness that keeps people coming back.

This same issue product makers face with getting people to use their apps daily, we all face in our lives with trying to creating a new positive habit.

Want to start working out? Ok, you go to the gym three days straight, then something comes up and you can’t make it, then again you miss it. A few weeks later the thought of going to the gym is so far in the back of your mind it never resurfaces.

In my opinion, the key to forming and sustaining any new habit is two fold:
  1. Making the barrier to entry as low as possible. 
  2. Working it into your existing daily routine.

An Idea
As I thought through this with one of my own habit struggles, meditating daily, I decided to test the forming of a new habit by leveraging the power of Facebook Messenger — a place which already had my eyeballs as it was quickly becoming part of my morning routine for news, weather, etc.

The end result of a weekend personal hack-a-thon was MeditateBot — a Messenger chatbot that teaches the benefits of meditation, surfaces a variety of meditations, and even lets you schedule a daily reminder — all for free within Facebook Messenger.

I’m extremely happy to say that after 4 weeks since launch I have successfully meditated daily using MeditateBot. And more importantly, so have over 25,000 other people :)
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Here’s how I made it habit forming enough for me keep it up a daily practice for 4 weeks and counting…

Schedule a Daily Reminder​
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This feature is the linchpin to the entire experience. By asking what time works best for people and sending them a reminder daily at that time, they are empowered to make meditation work for their schedule. At the scheduled time, a simple push notification is sent that gently nudges them to kick off their daily meditation. 

I personally check Messenger in the morning while I’m eating my breakfast, so I schedule my daily practice reminder at 8:00am every day. It fits nicely into my routine and I know I’m not distracted at that time.
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Analyzing the data of scheduling on MeditateBot, it was insightful to see that user’s reminders were almost perfectly distributed across all times throughout the day — morning, afternoon, and evening. This proves that everyone has their own “best” time. Make it work for you!

Showing the Benefits
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Some people needed a little backing as to why daily meditation would be good for them, especially those that may have just stumbled across MeditateBot after it was featured in Messenger (grateful for that!)

Succinctly explaining the benefits of meditation, then having a CTA (call to action) immediately after to meditate has resulted in a >70% conversion to completing a meditation. Priming with benefits is important for driving action. 


Having Options, But Not Too Many
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Too many options is too much, make it simple and don’t let the mind wander when the attention is already there. I’ve seen too many apps that have an endless amounts of options, this makes it hard to select the “right” one — which causes frustration (not a good primer for meditation!).
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For MeditateBot I’ve kept the categories high level and made sure all speak for themselves. No explanation required for the three types:
  1. Breathing 
  2. Body Scan
  3. Self Guided

Time Variations
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Another important option in building a new habit is to not bite off more than you can chew. If you’re forcing yourself to do a 20 minute meditation daily out the gate, you will get frustrated. 
Why is my mind wandering? Is it over yet? Am I doing this right?

Having the option to choose a length that your willing to devote, keeps the barrier to entry low. Even getting 1 minute of that meditative state is shown to bring a heap of benefits.

I continue to believe in the power of technology applications that present themselves in channels where users already live — Facebook Messenger is just one, great, example of this. You can check out all of our creations for: Alexa, Chrome and Messenger — here

Eric Rems
Co-founder, The Mindful Tech Lab - Check out all of our amazing apps to help improve your life here

Humans Are Saying “Thanks!” to Bots; Why This Peculiar Interaction Is Important

10/28/2016

 
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Wanting to understand how humans were engaging with bots, I decided to create a simple Facebook Messenger bot called MotivateBot — which sends motivational quotes every morning, and on demand, to inspire you throughout your day. Oh, it knows a few jokes too.

After just a few days live, I was surprised as to how many people were engaging with it and probably even more surprised that VentureBeat actually featured it as one of their “5 Bots To Try This Week”.

What is super interesting to me with this project is that I’m able to watch users engage with the technology in near real time — kinda like peeking through the looking glass of how humans interact with machines. Most of the interactions I’ve seen were expected, but one thing that has really stuck out is how many people actually say “thanks” to the bot. Never really saw this coming.

As someone who builds technology products for a living, this interaction came off as incredibly peculiar…I mean, have you ever seen anyone thank the Weather app on their iPhone when it provides the daily forecast? Or what about thanking MS Word when it successfully saves a document? I’m guessing the answer is NO.

The fact that conversations are so innate to human beings, gives the chat interface a chance to go beyond what has been done in the past with the standard UI. Perhaps to a place that builds lasting relationships, and maybe most importantly, a sense of trust between the human and the technology (or the brand in front of the tech).

If you think about it, when a human is interacting with a bot in the same way that they would interact with their friends/family, it’s hard not to see it as a deeper type of relationship than when they are just tapping around in an app. For any companies servicing customers through tech, take note.
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While saying “Thanks!” to a chatbot may just seem like a one-off interaction to many, I personally think it’s one of those unique proof points that ultimately foreshadows the success of the conversational interface.

Eric Rems
Co-founder, The Mindful Tech Lab - Check out all of our amazing apps to help improve your life 
here

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