Stickiness and Retention Span in HCI

Stickiness and user retention are critical constructs in understanding human engagement with digital platforms, particularly in social media, e-commerce, and entertainment contexts. From a psychological perspective, stickiness reflects users’ sustained attention, repeated engagement, and behavioral commitment to an interface over time. This paper examines how cognitive, emotional, and behavioral mechanisms influence retention, integrating insights from Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and psychology. Specifically, it reviews strategies such as minimalistic design, emotional engagement, gamification, adaptive interfaces, and artificial intelligence personalization, illustrating how these approaches exploit principles of cognitive load, decision-making biases, and affective processes. Through case studies of Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, and Facebook, this review demonstrates how interface simplicity, emotionally resonant design, and personalized content reinforce habitual use. By Positioning design strategies within psychological frameworks such as loss aversion, the endowment effect, sunk costs, and probability misjudgment, this work highlights the interplay between digital architecture and human cognition. The paper concludes with implications for ethically designing engaging systems and directions for future research on long-term behavioral retention in digital environments.