User Stickiness: How to Create Products that Stick

What’s Stickiness?

Stickiness refers to how effectively a product retains users over time by keeping them engaged. A sticky product makes users return frequently, enhancing loyalty and long-term engagement.

The term stickiness doesn't have a clear, single origin or an attributed individual who coined it. It emerged organically within the early days of the internet and marketing as companies sought ways to measure user engagement on websites. By the late 1990s, it was commonly used in digital marketing and analytics to describe how compelling a site or product was at retaining users and encouraging them to return.

Stickiness vs Retention

These two terms are close in meaning, though not identical. Stickiness is about how often users return to the product within a given time frame. It measures engagement rather than simply whether users stay subscribed or keep the product installed.

While retention focuses on whether users continue to use a product over a longer time, stickiness emphasizes frequency of use in a shorter period, such as daily or weekly engagement.

Let’s take a closer look side-by-side.

How to Create a Sticky Product

Now that we've covered what stickiness is, let's focus more on the principles you need to keep in mind to create a sticky product.

Understanding User Needs

The foundation of stickiness is meeting users’ real needs. This requires deep research into the pain points and motivations of your target audience.

A great activity to boost your understanding are deep unstructured interviews. They help uncover the problems people face, without you supplying your biases with the way you guide that conversation. A great deep interview has the respondent speaking as much as possible with the least amount of guidance.

Another suitable framework for this purpose are jobs-to-be-done interviews. This framework stipulates that the fundamental reason people use any product is that it serves a specific job. Identifying that job will help you do it better. For instance, on the example below you can see that even though a skateboard has lots of little parts, it's not what most people are paying for. What they are paying for is looking cool while doing tricks.

Focusing on Value Delivery

The product should continuously deliver value, providing compelling reasons for users to return. Whether it's unique features, convenience, or personalized experiences, value drives repeat use.

It's worth noting that not every product is able to deliver constant value. For instance, it's typical for people to buy just one house in a lifetime. Therefore, once the purchase is made, there's little extra value in a house listing product. In other words, you need to supply people with compelling reasons to come back.

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Building Intuitive Interfaces

Simplicity and ease of use encourage users to stick around. Products with intuitive designs reduce friction, making it easier for users to accomplish tasks without frustration.

To ensure optimal usability, the primary activity is usability testing. Typically, it's conducted on the most important user flows using a clickable prototype. Here's an example of a prototype we did below.

How to Measure Stickiness

Having covered the principles behind building sticky products, let's talk about how to measure stickiness.

The Formula for Stickiness

A common formula for this UX metric is Daily Active Users (DAU) divided by Monthly Active Users (MAU). This ratio shows how many of your monthly users are coming back on a daily basis, giving a direct sense of engagement.

As we've talked before, not every product has the potential to be used daily.

The Complementary Metrics to Consider

Beyond DAU/MAU, consider tracking engagement metrics such as session duration, frequency of specific feature use, or the churn rate. Together, these metrics provide a fuller picture of stickiness.

Additionally, all quantitative metrics are better understood when combined with qualitative interviews. It's typical to use numbers to form hypotheses, and then do further qualitative research.

Stickiness Benchmarks

Stickiness varies by industry. For example, social media platforms typically aim for a high DAU/MAU ratio, while e-commerce sites may have lower ratios but still be successful. Understanding the benchmarks in your industry helps gauge where you stand.

As you may see, this graph is fairly intuitive. People make purchases every day. Therefore, fintech products are fairly sticky. Same goes for social media.

Don't get discouraged though if your product does not meet the benchmark. What matters more is the dynamic. Having an upward metric trajectory is more valuable than fitting into a somewhat arbitrary bracket.

How to Boost Stickiness

We've talked about principles, but let's now focus on more specific activities for boosting stickiness.

Onboarding Best Practices

A well-designed onboarding process ensures that users understand the value of your product from the start. Guide users through key features without overwhelming them, and make sure they achieve early wins.

The primary goal of any onboarding experience is to have users reach an aha moment as soon as possible. Are there any features that, once encountered, boost retention? — There probably are. Now you should drive users to that features.

Applying the Fogg Behavior Model

The Fogg model focuses on three factors—motivation, ability, and triggers. To boost stickiness, ensure that users are motivated, can easily use the product, and are prompted at the right moments to take action.

For every product, these three elements will look different. For instance, you may motivate users by prompting them too keep up their streak. As a trigger, you may use a push notification. Within that notification, you may emphasise how easy a certain action is.

Creating Habit Loops

Building habits is key to increasing stickiness. Again, sticky products tend to be used daily. Use the habit loop framework— trigger, action, reward — to keep users returning. For example, a notification (trigger) prompts users to check the app (action), where they are rewarded with personalized content or progress updates.

Whenever you introduce meaningul rewards into a product experience, it's often helpful to think of it as a game. This brings us to gamification. Let's cover that in the next section.

Using Gamification to Enhance Engagement

Gamification elements like points, badges, leaderboards, or challenges can encourage users to engage more deeply with your product. These elements tap into users' desire for achievement and competition, making the experience more enjoyable and interactive.

While the anatomy of a game are pretty simple: you need rules, rewards and possible a competition. These things together make up a huge number of possibilities, but let's focus on the most common tactics:

They include:

• Leaderboards (encoraging people to climb up the ladder)
• Challenges (encouraging people to reach goals)
• Progress bars (helping users complete a task)
• In-app currency (giving users a reward and encouraging them to stay within the eco-system)
• Badges (giving users a reward)
• Collectibles (giving a valuable item as a reward)

Bottom line

Stickiness is a crucial metric that goes beyond simple retention, focusing on how often users engage with your product on a regular basis. By understanding the difference between stickiness and retention, and implementing strategies like creating intuitive designs, delivering continuous value, and leveraging models like Fogg’s Behavior Model or habit loops, you can significantly increase user engagement. 

Remember that stickiness is about building lasting connections with users, and while it requires thoughtful planning, the result is a product that people keep coming back to.

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