Cederic Demoulin

Master Thesis Consequences on Narcos

5 min read

"Let me build one more feature and then I will do marketing ..."

I made a promise to myself that I will only start working on a new feature or improvement on Narcos after I do some marketing (like publishing this blog post).

In the beginning of December I finished my master thesis "Increasing User Satisfaction, Engagement and Retention in Life Tracking Apps for Students: A Case Study of Methods on the App Habits Network" at TU Vienna with Astrid Weiss as supervisor and Rafael Vrecar as co-supervisor.

I wrote about Narcos (called Habits Network for the thesis), a social journaling / habit tracking / personal relationship management app which I started developing in October 2021.

For this thesis, I

  • interviewed four experts in visualization and behavior change from Austrian universities
  • conducted semi-structured interviews with ten users of Narcos (ranging from five to 17 months of usage)
  • analyzed user behavior of those users.
  • did a lot of literature research about behavior change and persuasive technology.

The two most important consequences are to:

  • make things easier
  • focus on the social aspect

Focus on the Social Aspect

The social aspect of Narcos, tracking social interactions together with activities, is new and what makes it unique, according to the experts I interviewed.

With Narcos you build your own social network as it really is which is why I will prioritize features that build on this social aspect like:

  1. Making tracking effortless through collaborative journaling. When users are friends on Narcos and they do an activity together in real life, and one of them creates an entry for this activity, the other user will get a suggestion to add an entry for this activity with the mentioned people and tags already filled in.
  2. The social network graph. I believe that the network graph is the best visualization of the app but it has a big problem. Even on modern smartphones, the animation lags because the phone is not powerful enough to render it (works fine on desktop). To get an idea of what it will look like, feel free to look at Spotivis, which I built this summer.
  3. Gamification of meeting new people in real life. If life is a video game, then people one has heard of but has not met yet are grayed-out or still locked. I want to add those people and integrate them into the social network graph by linking them to the people they know. They will be grey nodes between the colored nodes for people I already mentioned in my journal.

Make Things Easier

According to the theory of B.J. Fogg, there are 3 components that are necessary for behavior to occur:

  • Prompt - what triggers a behavior,
  • Ability - how easy it is to perform a behavior and
  • Motivation

From the interviews and the behavior data I learned that users have already built internal triggers and also have enough motivation to use the app. Users are often missing ability. Therefore, I will radically cut down on complexity by

  1. removing features like the ego-network and tracking one's expenses
  2. simplifying the creation and modification of entries

among other things.

As part of the marketing measures I will publish a list of the planned features and changes with more details.

Thank you for your time.

Now I can start building again.

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