Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products - Nir Eyal

Overview

Offers a practical framework for designing products that keep users engaged through habit formation. The book presents the "Hook Model," a four-step process that includes Trigger, Action, Variable Reward, and Investment. External and internal triggers prompt the user to engage with a product, while actions are driven by ease and motivation.

Notes

• Habits are defined as "behaviors done with little or no conscious thought."

• The convergence of access, data, and speed is making the world a more habit-forming place.

• Businesses that create customer habits gain a significant competitive advantage.

Chapter: The Habit Zone

• Amazon by addressing shoppers' concerns earns loyalty even if it doesn't make the sale and comes across as trustworthy in the process. The tactic is backed by a 2003 study, which demonstrated that consumers' preference for an online retailer increases when they are offered competitive price information By allowing users to comparison shop from within the site, Amazon provides tremendous perceived utility to its customers. 

• For some businesses, forming habits is a critical component to success, but not every business requires habitual user engagement.

• When successful, forming strong user habits can have several business benefits including: higher customer lifetime value (CLTV), greater pricing flexibility, supercharged growth, and a sharper competitive edge.

• Habits cannot form outside the Habit Zone, where the behavior occurs with enough frequency and perceived utility.

• Habit-forming products often start as nice-to-haves (vitamins) but once the habit is formed, they become must-haves (painkillers).

• Habit-forming products alleviate users' discomfort by relieving a pronounced itch.

• Designing habit-forming products is a form of manipulation. Product builders would benefit from a bit of introspection before attempting to hook users to make sure they are building healthy habits, not unhealthy addictions (more to come on this topic in chapter

Questions to Answer

• What habits does your business model require?

• What problem are users turning to your product to solve?

• How do users currently solve that problem and why does it need a solution?

• How frequently do you expect users to engage with your product once they are habituated?

• What user behavior do you want to make into a habit?

Chapter: Triggers

• Triggers cue the user to take action and are the first step in the Hooked Model.

• Triggers come in two types-exteral and in-ternal.

• External triggers tell the user what to do next by placing information within the user's environment

• Internal triggers tell the user what to do next through associations stored in the user's memory.

• Negative emotions frequently serve as internal triggers.

• To build a habit-forming product, makers need to attach the use of their solution to a frequently felt internal trigger and know how to leverage external triggers to drive the user to action.

Questions to Answer 

• Come up with three internal triggers that could cue your user to action.

• Which internal trigger does your user experience most frequently?

• Finish this brief narrative using the most frequent internal trigger and the habit you are designing: "Every time the user (internal trigger), he/she (first action of intended habit)."

• Refer back to the question about what the user is doing right before the first action of thehabit. What might be places and times to send an external trigger?

• How can you couple an external trigger as closely as possible to when the user's internal trigger fires?

• Think of at least three conventional ways to trigger your user with ourrent technology (e-mails, notifications, text messages, etc.). Then stretch yourself to come up with at least three crazy or currently impossible ideas for ways to trigger your user (wearable computers, biometric sen-sors, carrier pigeons, etc.). You could find that your crazy ideas spur some new approaches that may not be so nutty after all. In a few years new technologies will create all sorts of currently unimaginable triggering opportunities

Chapter: Action 

• The scarcity effect: The appearance of scarcity affected their percoption of value,

• The framing effect: The mind takes shortcuts informed by our surroundings to make quick and sometimes erroneous judgments.

• The anchoring effect: People often anchor to one piece of information when making a decision.

• The edited progress effect : The study demonstrates the endowed progress effect, a phenomenon that increases motivation as people believe they are nearing a goal.

• The second step in the Hooked Model is action.

• The action is the simplest behavior in anticipation of reward.

• As described by Dr. B. J. Fogg's Behavior Model:

  • For any behavior to occur, a trigger must be present at the same time as the user has sufficient ability and motivation to take ac-tion.

  • To increase the desired behavior, ensure a clear trigger is present; next, increase ability by making the action easier to do; finally, align with the right motivator.

• Every behavior is driven by one of three Core Motivators: seeking pleasure and avoiding pain; seeking hope and avoiding fear; and seeking social acceptance while avoiding social rejection.

• Ability is influenced by the six factors of time, money, physical effort, brain cycles, social deviance, and non-routineness. Ability is dependent on users and their context at that moment.

• Heuristics are cognitive shortcuts we take to make quick decisions. Product designers can utilize many of the hundreds of heuristics to increase the likelihood of their desired action.

Questions to Answer 

• Walk through the path your users would take to use your product or service, beginning from the time they feel their internal trigger to the point where they receive their expected outcome. How many steps does it take before users obtain the reward they came for? How does this process compare with the simplicity of some of the examples described in this chapter? How does it compare with competing products and services?

• Which resources are limiting your users' ability to accomplish the tasks that will become habits?

• Brainstorm three testable ways to make intended tasks easier to complete.

• Consider how you might apply heuristics to make habit-forming actions more likely.

Chapter: Variable Reward 

• The study revealed that what draws us to act is not the sensation we receive from the reward itself, but the need to alleviate the craving for that reward.

• Rewards of the Tribe: Our brains are adapted to seek rewards that make us feel accepted, attractive, important, and included.

• Recently, gamification defined as the use of gamelike elements in nongame environments has been used with varying success. Points, badges, and leaderboards can prove effective, but only if they scratch the user's itch. When there is a mismatch between the customer's problem and the company's assumed solution, no amount of gamification will help spur engagement. Likewise, if the user has no ongoing itch at all-say, no need to return repeatedly to a site that lacks any value beyond the initial visit-gamification will fail because of a lack of inherent interest in the product or service offered. In other words, gamification is not a "one size fits all" solution for driving user engagement.

• Research studies show using the phrase - “but you are free to accept or refuse” doubles people’s willingness to give

• Technique demonstrates how we are more likely to be persuaded to give when our ability to choose is reaffirmed 

• Experiences with finite variability become less engaging because they eventually become predictable.

• Variable reward is the third phase of the Hooked Model, and there are three types of variable re-wards: the tribe, the hunt, and the self.

• Rewards of the tribe is the search for social rewards fueled by connectedness with other people.

• Rewards of the hunt is the search for material resources and information.

• Rewards of the self is the search for intrinsic rewards of mastery, competence, and completion.

• When our autonomy is threatened, we feel constrained by our lack of choices and often rebel against doing a behavior. Psychologists refer to this as reactance. Maintaining a sense of user autonomy and trust is a requirement for sustained engagement.

• Experiences with finite variability become increasingly predictable with use and lose their appeal over time. Experiences that maintain user interest by sustaining variability with use exhibit infinite variability.

• Variable rewards must satisfy users' needs while leaving them wanting to reengage with the product.

Questions to Answer 

• Brainstorm three ways your product might heighten users' search for variable rewards using:

1. rewards of the tribe-gratification from others.

2. rewards of the hunt-material goods, money, or information.

3. rewards of the self-mastery, completion, competency, or consistency.

Chapter: Investment 

• Unlike its competitors who sell reassembled merchandise, IKEA puts its customers to work. It turns out there's a hidden benefit to making users invest physical effort in assembling the product—by asking customers to assemble their own furniture, believes they adopt an irrational love of the furniture they built, just like the test subjects did in the origami experiments. Businesses that leverage user effort confer higher value to their products simply because their users have put work into them. The users have invested in the products through their labor.

• We seek to be consistent with our past behaviours

  • Groups that agreed to put a small sign in their front yard 76% agreed to put a bigger more unsightly sign in the front yard compared to 17% of the control group 

  • We avoid cognitive dissonance 

• The stored value users put into the product increases the likelihood they will use it again in the future and comes in a variety of forms.

• The company found that the more information users invested in the site, the more committed they became to it.

• Once users have invested the effort to acquire a skill, they are less likely to switch to a competing product.

• Habit-forming technologies leverage the user's past behavior to initiate an external trigger in the future.

• Unlike the action phase, which delivers immediate gratification, the investment phase concerns the anticipation of rewards in the future.

• Investments in a product create preferences because of our tendency to overvalue our work, be consistent with past behaviors, and avoid cognitive dissonance.

• Investment comes after the variable reward phase, when users are primed to reciprocate.

• Investments increase the likelihood of users returning by improving the service the more it is used. They enable the accrual of storedvalue in the form of content, data, followers, reputation, or skill.

• Investments increase the likelihood of users passing through the Hook again by loading the next trigger to start the cycle all over again.

• Creating a product that the designer does not believe improves users' lives and that he himself would not use is called exploitation.****

• Community emails can serve as a nudge to open the app

• To help you, as a designer of habit-forming technology, assess the morality behind how you manipulate users, it is helpful to determine which of the four categories your work fits into. Are you a facilitator, peddler, entertainer, or dealer?

• Facilitators use their own product and believe it can materially improve people's lives. They have the highest chance of success because they most closely understand the needs of their users.

• Peddlers believe their product can materially improve people's lives but do not use it themselves.They must beware of the hubris and inauthenticity that comes from building solutions for people they do not understand firsthand.

• Entertainers use their product but do not believe it can improve people's lives. They can be successful, but without making the lives of others better in some way, the entertainer's products often lack staying power.

• Dealers neither use the product nor believe it can improve people's lives. They have the lowest chance of finding long-term success and often find themselves in morally precarious positions.