Rob Alvarez
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You’re Using Streaks Wrong – Here’s What Actually Works | Episode 423

  Exploring useful streaks for your product or org? Let’s chat → professorgame.com/chat

Episode Summary

Examining why streak mechanics (borrowed from Duolingo and meditation apps like Happier) frequently backfire once users miss a day, triggering the abstinence violation effect and rage-quitting. Drawing on his own near-two-year meditation streak that collapsed after one missed day, he argues that rigid daily counters weaponize Core Drive 8 (loss aversion) against the identity they were meant to build, and proposes design fixes including grace days, weekly streaks, heat maps, and adherence percentages.

About the Host

Rob Alvarez is Head of Engagement Strategy, Europe at The Octalysis Group (TOG), a leading gamification and behavioral design consultancy. A globally recognized gamification strategist and TEDx speaker, he founded and hosts Professor Game, the #1 gamification podcast, and has interviewed hundreds of global experts. He designs evidence-based engagement systems that drive motivation, loyalty, and results, and teaches LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® and gamification at top institutions including IE Business School, EFMD, and EBS University across Europe, the Americas, and Asia.

Key Takeaways

  • Streak collapses hurt users not because of the missed session itself but because the binary reset destroys the identity the streak was building, often causing complete abandonment of the product.
  • The abstinence violation effect (“what the heck, I already broke it”) explains why users with longer streaks are more likely to rage-quit than users with short streaks after a single miss.
  • Apps should design explicitly for lapses with grace days, soft landings, and “welcome back” messaging rather than dropping the counter to zero: Finch and the Streaks app already do this through configurable goals and repairs.
  • Daily active users is a vanity metric for investors; quality time, completed lessons, and meaningful actions are better engagement measures because Duolingo users famously gamed streaks without actually learning.

Topics Covered

  • [00:12] Rob’s two-year meditation streak collapse
  • [01:07] How Duolingo uses streaks for daily practice
  • [06:45] Designing flexible consistency for real life
 

Mentioned in This Episode

 

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Rob Looking forward to reading or hearing from you, Rob   Full episode transcription (AI Generated) Rob Alvarez (00:00) If these streaks are so powerful, then why do they often end with rage quitting or ghosting the habit entirely that they’re intended to keep? Rob Alvarez (00:12) I’m Rob and I meditated every single day for over a year. In fact, I think it was near to two years, but the day, the day that I missed everything unraveled instead of a small lapse. I stopped pretty much entirely for nearly two years. And by the way, if this is a problem that your product is facing, let’s find together a way to fix that. You just have to go ahead and click on the link in the description. Rob Alvarez (00:37) and we’ll have a chat because I’m also A consultant, I’m not just the guy who stopped meditating for almost two years. I’m also a consultant at the Octalysis group, the prime consultancy for behavioral design and gamification. I’m also the host of this podcast where in these episodes, we deconstruct how gamification and behavioral strategies can help retention, loyalty, and all these things for products in daily business. And I do this by myself, like on this episode or with fantastic guests that we have every single week. Rob Alvarez (01:07) just dive right in to what these streaks are. By definition, it’s a game technique that was learned from from video games. And a prime example of this is Duolingo. Duolingo uses a streak mechanic to get people to come back every single day. I’m guessing that they figured out and I think the founders talked about this before, that the language learning benefits a lot from continuous regular practice. It’s not about logging, you know, 100 hours at the end of the year. It’s more about spending a little bit of time even every single day. you build in that muscle, you continually practice, you give that practice to the brain so that it can actually dive in and do that stuff. And it makes consistency, early consistency, especially easy. It’s, ⁓ what do I need? I need to come back every single day and do this, do this, do this over and over again. And the String Mechanic visualizes that. And it also gives you that loss aversion, a core drive eight, where you push through the initial resistance of, maybe I’m today having a hard day, maybe I won’t have time, but you know, let me do something. Let those 10 minutes, some point during the day to make sure I keep my streak, which is fine if that happens every now and then, because you, it lets you have those normal days where you’re actually doing most of the exercises, but you want to, don’t want to lose your streak because that’s what happens. You lose your streak and then, I had this thing. I had a 10 days, a hundred days, 300 days. or like in my case almost two years, I think was the exact numbers. And back to my story with meditation. Initially, it was more, more than just not just tracking behavior. It made a definition. do they, what people talk about meditating, One of the things that science says is you don’t need to like, of course there are benefits of meditating for two hours every day, but most of us cannot integrate something like that into our daily lives. So you can still define yourself as a meditator and get something like 80 or 90 % of the benefits just by investing. I don’t know the exact number, but it’s something like seven or nine minutes every day, which you know, you can just average and say, do a 10 minute session of meditation. You do that every day and the benefits of, know, modifying your brain and creating these new neural pathways and all that, that is sufficient to build that in there. And of course it gives you that identity of I am a meditator. I am somebody. who meditates every single day. it actually works. It worked pretty well for me in that sense. from what I was saying at the start, not that streaks themselves are bad. It’s just that if you see them in isolation and you don’t understand everything else that is happening around them, the risks that they have, they can just become something that is incomplete.

[03:45] Why one missed day breaks identity

Rob Alvarez (03:45) Yet, as you can tell from the way I’ve been describing this and what happened at the start, there is a trap and we will be discussing about that trap. What happened in my case, and it is something that happens to many people as well. I missed a day. It sounds like it’s not a big deal, right? But I missed a day and that means a streak is ruined. I ruined my streak. I failed. I failed. I ruined my streak. Can I really make it to 500 days meditating in a row? If I can’t then kind of what’s the point? Typical streaks amplify that shame. I am a meditator. If I am a meditator, how come I miss a day? I am a language learner, Duolingo. How come if I am a language learner, I am consistent. You you build this identity around it. How come I missed a day? How come my streak now says one day or zero? You see the counter big zero, this binary counter snapping just back to zero. I lost everything. there’s other mechanics in Duolingo, the hearts, there’s pressure stacks, there’s leaderboards, there’s all sorts of things around. ⁓ I was at this great position where I had all this super long streak. Now I lost it. Imagine being a person who’s been with the streaks on Duolingo since the streak started. Might be a guy. I should actually research that online. There was probably a guy who, or a gal of course, who has been doing this for almost all of that. Who’s the longest streak holder on Duolingo? Imagine the level of pressure that you get. You are the person who has the longest streak on Duolingo. What happens if you miss a day? You’re no longer the person who has longest streak on Duolingo anymore because you don’t have that streak anymore. You had it historically. You were that person once you once were. You’re no longer that person. There’s also the notifications reminding you of what you lost. you lost your streak. So What happens when people, especially with pretty long streaks, know, years, streaks, if it’s like a 10 day, it’s very feasible. It’s something you can recover from. If it’s, you know, a month, you probably can do that. What happens when it’s 100 days, 300 days, a year, two years? A lot of users end up abandoning the app entirely, rage quitting because of the shame that they’re experiencing, the frustration that comes from, I just make this small mistake. Or they were doing it in the last 10 minutes of the day and then they missed something. It didn’t work out as they expected it to and they lost their streak. Even if they were committing that in terms of Octalysis Design, that desired action. They did the thing they were supposed to, yet they lost their streak. The pain is not really the missed session. It’s the collapse of the identity. In my case, I wasn’t somebody who meditates anymore. From being that person. that thing I wanted to get to, I wasn’t that person anymore right after I lost my streak.

[06:45] Designing flexible consistency for real life

Rob Alvarez (06:45) you’ll be asking yourself, what can we do about this, Rob? You’re just giving us all the problems that these streaks have. Why the streaks don’t eventually work for us. So what can we do? And there are things to do. Remember the contrast, You have that rigid streak every day or nothing. Weekends, long travel. there’s people who, like, I took a flight from Madrid to Santiago de Chile. in Chile and I think if I’m not mistaken, was 16 hours of flight. Imagine if I had a streak on whatever the chances of me losing out on that streak were ginormous. What happens in a day like that? Or I went out to nature. I went on a silent retreat. Imagine I’m a meditator. I’m going to a silent retreat. I’m meditating pretty much every day, but I’m not connected. I’m not looking at my phone. I lose my streak. Where is the flexibility to that? So that’s where the concept of flexible consistency most days over time, of course, with room for your life to actually happen. And I don’t want to, I’m going to mention the app that I was using and honestly, I still use it. You probably saw some of the screens appearing before if you’re watching this on video. It’s not to shame the app because in fact, that single. way of counting streaks on daily, they actually did something that is part of the fix that I propose here. And they do a great job of that. They also have a bunch of other things as compared to other meditation apps who only single focus on that daily streak. What this app, which used to be called when I, when I did this 10 % Happier by Dan Harris, now it’s called Happier or Happier Meditation, something like that. I don’t know. I just click on the button on my phone these days. They have stats. that allow you for not only the daily streak, they still have it, you if you’d still want to have that daily thing, that’s there, but you can also have the weekly streak. Even if you meditate once a week, you can keep your weekly streak. That is a lot more manageable, a lot more achievable. It still feels like you are progressing through. And honestly, you don’t want to lie to yourself and say, I just kept the streak going, which I did once. I have to confess that I did it. One of my streaks, weekly streaks went through and it’s like, oh, it’s Sunday. I need to meditate a little bit. So I just went in and meditated for a little while. Next week happened the same thing and that happened two or three times. So I did this on one of my streaks, but that’s not what you’re looking for. If you’re identifying, if you’re building into your identity, you want to be a meditator, it’s more about keeping that habit going. You can do it five times, six times per week or even seven days a week, but every now and then you miss a day. It is not a big deal, even in the studies like, every day, every day doesn’t mean not losing a single day ever in your life. there are ways in which you can definitely build this in. You can build in your systems. You can have explicit rest days. Recovery is not failure. It’s not when you get the message of. you lost your streak. How about you change that literally a simple change of messaging instead of having the owl being crying over there. You say welcome back. Did you have a day where and you give them some options on how to recover their streak if you still want to keep that daily streak. But you give them you are open. You’re opening the doors to that excuse being valid, valuable and accessible to anyone who needs it. Because here’s the thing with loss and avoidance. Usually you put these consequences very clear, very strong so that people don’t want the consequence to happen. And that’s what the mechanic is there for. The technique is do not lose your streak. It’s intended for you not to lose it. The problem is you might lose it. So what happens when that happens? Nobody, not the developer, not the user wants for the consequence to actually happen. So What do you end up building in to that are ways of recovering your streak, coming back from that and the consequence not being as dire as it might’ve initially sounded. So you, you can open up to that. what happened? He had a sick day. Are you feeling okay? You you saw you didn’t come back. That kind of thing allows you to have those explicit rest days or you set up your, uh, I think it’s a, it’s an app actually called Streaks where you can define, Oh, my streak is doing this three times a week. five times a week, six times a week, not every single day. So your streak is defined in a different way. And Finch also does this. Those type of streaks, they have repairs, they have different kinds of goals. You build that into the system. The idea is that your system, that you’re building your product should assume that the users will miss a day. Eventually, you want to make Their return feel like something normal. You don’t want them. There are stories of kids not wanting to be language learners ever again because they lost their streak on Duolingo. That is exactly the opposite of what you want. You want them to come back and feel welcome, feel happy that they came back. with meditation, with language learning, I said before, of course, daily practice is better than, than cramming at the end of the month. But there’s a lot in between, Having coming back every single day and missing a day here and there is not a big issue for your learning. It’s an issue if by losing a day There’s an effect. They call it, the abstinence violation effect or the, what the H… Effect. what the heck? I already ate that cookie. I might as well eat the whole jar if you’re if you’re dieting I missed a day on Duolingo I might as well never again try to learn a language you want to avoid that and this an effect that is well studied by the way and their effects and all that and that is the consequence of streaks or things that are built in with such rigidity They don’t leave any room for flexibility and you have the, I made a small mistake, and you turn it into a huge mistake for your goals. That’s exactly what you wanna stay away from. Flexible streaks are bendable. You can bend them a little bit without breaking the streak, because again, the consequence, that core drive eight is you’re showing it to motivate people into not feeling the consequence. You don’t really want the consequence to happen.

[12:52] Heat maps and weekly streaks as alternatives

Rob Alvarez (12:52) Let’s make a quick recap. Remember, you want to design for lapses. It’s grace days, pauses, soft landings, never dropped back to zero on a single miss. Keep in mind that this will happen and you don’t want to discourage users from using your solution ever again. And the next one is that you want to normalize them returning. Welcome back. Let’s continue. Rather than you lost your streak, right? That’s the exact opposite of what you want. You can also use the zoom out of the metric instead of daily streaks. can go for weekly streaks, percentages of adherence. Instead of saying you lost your streak, you say you’ve done this for 90 % of your days, 99 % of your days, 80 % of your days, whatever that looks like. There’s another one that they use, which are the heat maps where you can visualize. If you see one of the dots where you missed, it’s like, you missed one, but you see everything else where you’ve been consistent. It just becomes a flip. And it feels okay. That’s what you want actually to happen. And make sure you’re always measuring what happens. The amount of quality time that they’re actually spending, which has become a problem, admittedly, for Duolingo. Some people just keeping the streak for way too long and not really language learning anymore. They’re just doing it for the streak. It’s a retention not about the learning anymore. It’s about keeping the streak and that’s what you want to avoid So the amount of quality time you spend meaningful actions the lessons that you actually do complete new lessons new learning It’s not just that daily active users vanity metric, which only is useful for investors and I’m not saying it’s not important but it’s the The metric that you’re showing your investors to get more money not what your users might actually care about so you can still keep that metric going You can show weekly active users. There are many other metrics that you can also show to showcase activity without losing the power of people coming back pretty much every day. Or you can rationalize daily active users, assuming that these users come in at least four five times a week, for example, depending on what the solution is, it might make sense for people to come every single day or three times a week or every single weekday or twice a week or once a week. That can also be fine. Make sure you account for these in your design. Rob Alvarez (15:03) So I don’t want to blame everything of me breaking that streak for almost two years on the fact that I lost one streak, but it did make have a profound effect on my retention, my engagement with the app. was everyday grinding to make sure I got that. And I had a very strong habit. Other things happened in life as well. And that kind of washed away, but I would probably have been able to push forward better if I had been able to catch back up that streak. a better system at that point, which is it wasn’t still implemented, wouldn’t have erased my identity as a meditator. It would have still said, you’re still a meditator. You just had an off day. And that’s fine in terms of meditation, which was the case there in the case of language learning for Duolingo and many other apps as well. If your users are one missed day away rage quitting forever, your streak is not a habit mechanic. It’s a time bomb. It’s a time bomb. If you’ve ever quit an app before after losing a streak, please go ahead and share the story And if you’re a product lead and you’re rethinking your, your streak system, or you’re looking at creating, building a streak system that actually works, do reach out. I love helping teams design habit techniques that respect human psychology and actually get them the results that they’re looking for. All you have to do is go ahead and click on the link in the description. And as we like to say at the end of our episodes, at least for now and for today, it is time to say that it’s game over. End of transcription

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