What is a Streak?

In 2019 Jon Sutherland celebrated his 50th year of running every single day. In fact, he's done way better than that, averaging 10 miles a day through the duration of his streak. His streak is now the longest in the world, and the second-longest ever, after only Ron Hill's 52+ years (19,032 days).

You may have heard of winning-streaks in sports, but more recently streaks have become a common design tactic that has found its way into websites and mobile apps, from health to social media.

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Streak mechanics are simple: a counter increments by one every time a specific activity is completed (e.g., reaching 10,000 steps in a day). If you fail to complete the activity, then your streak counter resets back to zero and you have to start again.

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The purpose of a streak is to try and encourage you to create and sustain a new habit. In this way, streaks can be a useful tactic to add when you’re trying to introduce a new behaviour that you want to become regular and ingrained.

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Why it works

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Here are three reasons why streaks can be motivating:

1. Streaks reinforce behaviours and represent progress

The streak counter provides a granular sense of progress. Seeing a number tick up every time you achieve your goal reinforces the behaviour (makes it more likely to want to do it again). And in the long run, a larger number can fill you with a sense of pride and achievement in that you’ve managed to maintain a streak for so long.

2. Streaks are something we own

A streak represents effort and investment into an activity we value. In other words, streaks are as susceptible to the endowment effect — the psychological perception by which we think anything in our possession is worth more than it actually is. Because we build a sense of ownership another important psychological mechanism follows: aversion.

3. Losing a big streak is terrifying

The bigger a streak becomes, the greater we want to avoid losing it. Each time it ticks up by one, that’s one extra day needed to achieve it again if it resets. This feeling can be attributed to loss aversion, which is a cognitive bias where you feel the pain of loss twice as intensively than the equivalent pleasure of gain

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Notable examples

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Duolingo

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One of the most well-known implementations of streaks can be found in the language learning platform Duolingo. Simply practice each day and your streak will increase. Does it work to encourage learners to be consistent? Well, consider that  over 6 million people have a streak of 7 days or more and some Duolingo users have managed to maintain a streak longer than 3,000 days (which is over 8 years)!

Apple Fitness

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You can also find streaks being used in exercise apps, such as the Apple Fitness app, where you can earn streaks for completing your Move, Exercise or Stand goals each day. In this app each goal is represented by a different coloured ring that closes when it’s completed for the day.

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Snap Inc.

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Streaks are even being used in social media apps as a way to encourage regular interaction. For example, Snapchat will give you a Snapstreak when you and your friend send a Snap to each other within 24 hours for more than three consecutive days. The streak increases as long as a Snap is sent back and forth every day.

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Streaksapp

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Streaksapp is an app built from the ground up to help users build various types of good habits, from walking the dog to flossing your teeth. It enables users to choose or create up to twelve tasks.

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How To Design a Streak:

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Streaks work when the behaviour you want to promote has three key traits:

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1. It has the potential to become habitual.

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2. It should be performed at a regular interval (e.g., daily, weekly)

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3. It’s driven by some intrinsic motivation (whether that’s simply a need for progress or a need for social connection)

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Once you have an activity that fulfils that criteria then a simple method to design a streak is as follows:

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1. Clear Goal:

‍Identify a clear goal that requires consistency.

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2. Behaviour:

Identify the regular and specific behaviour you want to encourage (or discourage) which with repetition, leads to that goal.

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3. Feedback:

Both immediate (completion) and continuous (progress).

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- Completion Feedback:

Immediate feedback that tells the user what does, and does not, contribute to the streak.

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- Progress Feedback:

Provides a sense of progress towards completing, and continuing the streak.

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4. Triggers and Reminders:

adding cues and reminding users to take action is crucial. These should be timely, to leverage the moment a user is more likely to act, and obvious, by making sure they are visible.

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To maximise engagement here are 4 pro-tips:

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1. Celebrate milestones:
Identify milestones worthy of additional celebrations (e..g, first 7-day streak, 365 days etc.).

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2. Make them as satisfying and exciting as possible:
this can be accomplished with attractive animations, as Duolingo does. When Duolingo added the  animation on select milestone days the likelihood a brand new learner was still using Duolingo 7 days later increased by +1.7%.

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3. Add tangible benefits:
Whether or not your system already provides tangible benefits (e.g., monetary incentives) longer streaks could unlock additional (external) benefits. A great example is, once again, Duolingo. Who has created “A Streak Society” described as their “most exclusive club only for those with 365+ day streaks!”

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4. Make it social:
when a streak requires to “win” against someone one else (aka. “Winning streaks”) they already have a social component driven by competition. For example in Call of Duty: Heroes a Win Streak! is an achievement which requires the player to win 5 Offensive PvP (Player versus Player) matches in a row. Sometimes games use winning streaks as a criteria to rank players in leaderboards.

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If your experience doesn’t have any competition or collaboration elements, however, you can tap into our social nature by simply making it easy to share. When we are proud of our achievements we are compelled to share them with people we seek validation from. For example, Duolingo allows you to easily save, post, or #humblebrag your achievements with friends, family, and social media.

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Keep in mind

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Streaks can be a very effective gamification tactic, but it needs to be designed thoughtfully. When they are applied in non.game contexts, streaks can become an extrinsic motivator.

Behavioral science can help us predict behavioural responses and outcomes and thus mitigate risks including: our need for autonomy, flexibility and control, the consequences of losing progress, the over-justification effect, as well as several internal barriers to habit formation.

Lack of Autonomy: for behaviour changes to sustain is crucial to make people feel in control of such changes.

A sense of autonomy and agency  is threatened every time designers default people into certain states (for example when people are automatically defaulted into using a certain feature and/or can’t opt out of it).

Adam Alter, a professor of marketing at NYU Stern School of Business and author of Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked, suggests building streak breaks into one’s streak. Similarly to building a cheat day into a diet, you need an outlet and the ability to be imperfect from time to time, otherwise streaks and other goals take over your life and inspire a very damaging sort of compulsive behaviour.

Progress loss: if a large streak is lost it may have a negative effect on the underlying behaviour.

If you have been on a diet, you might have experienced something like this when you fail to stick to it: "Well, my diet plan today is already broken anyway... what the hell, I'll just get some more of those donuts!" Then the next day, you find even more excuses to not resume your no-carb diet - after all, your streak is currently zero already, so what the hell, you feel like indulging some more. You'll get back to your no-sugar streak later (⚠️ Barrier Alert! "What-the-hell" effect - the rationalisation that makes you indulge even more, after breaking a goal or metric by just a little, which then triggers a vicious cycle of breaking that metric even more, and before you know it, you are in a far worse position than BEFORE you even started your no-carb diet).

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There are ways to mitigate the effects of a loss like this, which are all about making people feel in control by giving them flexibility.

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For example, Duolingo has experimented with this where initially they charged people money to return a lost streak, but have since added a "streak freeze" option that can be bought with enough of the virtual currency to protect a streak.

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Goal Setting VS Habit formation: While setting goals is a crucial step to behaviour changes, at times, this stops people from building habits.

Since by definition a habit requires doing a simple action (in anticipation of a reward), this conflict usually happens when people set goals that are difficult to achieve (⚠️ Barrier Alert!: Overconfidence).

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This is exactly what many Duolingo users experienced. When digging into the data, Product Managers at Duolingo noticed that the actual number of users on a streak was highly dependent on their daily goal (a certain number of lessons to complete each day as set in the onboarding phase).

Based on this insight, the Duolingo design team made a simple change: it made it easier to stay on a streak by splitting the two mechanics so learners could extend their streak by completing just a single lesson each day.

This led to millions more people learning on Duolingo every day for at least a week compared to the previous design.

Another way is introducing weekly streaks. This way, while your users may miss one day (or more) over a week, they can still feel a sense of accomplishment if they do the desired action at least once a week. This is for example what the health app Peloton does.

The over-justification effect: When the rewards offered are tangible (e.g., discounts, cash rewards) there is a risk of ending up reducing the intrinsic motivation to perform the desired behaviour.

In this case the focus should be on changing how the rewards are experienced. There are two main paths to create an intrinsic experience:

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1) Provide tangible rewards that help users achieve their goal faster. In games, milestones often result in an extra life or unlocking power-ups or boosters (e.g., weapons) that help players strategise and level up faster. Rewards that increase choice boost our feelings of autonomy and competence.

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2) Add blockers to create a sense of anticipation and delight users: give your users a preview of what’s coming tomorrow, or the next week, or after a certain milestone is achieved and/or delight them with unexpected rewards.

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The combination of curiosity, impatience, and surprise will create a more enjoyable experience and give them a reason to stick to the streak and mitigate the overjustification effect.

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Alternatively, you could decouple the tangible rewards and the streak. This is the path the financial literacy app Zogo took. Every time a module is successfully completed, the user earns points (called “pineapples”). Once enough pineapples are earned, they can be redeemed for gift cards. So in the end, keeping the streak can lead to a reward, but the reward isn’t really dependent on the streak itself. Even if the streak is broken, pineapples earned remain in users’ stores, waiting to be redeemed.

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Don’t forget to do this

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The success of any behavioural design and gamification intervention is very much dependent on the context and audience, so to test ideas and mitigate risks an iterative design process is crucial.

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If you are thinking about introducing a streak or optimising an existing one, we recommend building a Behavioral Design Hypothesis (BDH) that clarifies what of the 15 Behaviour Change Strategies are at play. This will help you be more systematic and better understand the results of experimentation.

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