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The technologies we use have turned into compulsions, if not full-fledged addictions.
Cognitive psychologists define habits as “automatic behaviors triggered by situational cues”: things we do with little or no conscious thought.
Companies increasingly find that their economic value is a function of the strength of the habits they create.
FIRST TO MIND WINS
These companies attach their product to internal triggers. As a result, users show up without any external prompting.
Instead of relying on expensive marketing, habit-forming companies link their services to the users’ daily routines and emotions.7 A habit is at work when users feel a tad bored and instantly open Twitter.
Today, small start-up teams can profoundly change behavior by guiding users through a series of experiences I call hooks. The more often users run through these hooks, the more likely they are to form habits.
Variable rewards are one of the most powerful tools companies implement to hook users;
I'm testing to see if variable pricing works, too.
Recently, a blog reader e-mailed me, “If it can’t be used for evil, it’s not a superpower.”
Hooks connect the user’s problem with a company’s solution frequently enough to form a habit.
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 com...
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The Hook Model describes an experience designed to connect the user’s problem to a solution frequ...
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The Hook Model has four phases: trigger, action, variable rew...
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Such is the nature of ingrained habits—behaviors done with little or no conscious thought—which, by some estimates, guide nearly half of our daily actions.1
Neuroscientists believe habits give us the ability to focus our attention on other things by storing automatic responses in the basal ganglia, an area of the brain associated with involuntary actions.2
Habits form when the brain takes a shortcut and stops actively deliberating over what to do next.3 The brain quickly learns to codify behaviors that provide a solution to whatever situation it encounters.
Habit-forming products change user behavior and create unprompted user engagement.
“You can determine the strength of a business over time by the amount of agony they go through in raising prices.”4 Buffett and his partner, Charlie Munger, realized that as customers form routines around a product, they come to depend upon it and become less sensitive to price.
Buffett and Munger understand that habits give companies greater flexibility to increase prices.
Supercharging Growth Users who continuously find value in a product are more likely to tell their friends about it.
Facebook’s success was, in part, a result of what I call the more is more principle—more frequent usage drives more viral growth.
Viral Cycle Time.”9 Viral Cycle Time is the amount of time it takes a user to invite another user, and it can have a massive impact.
Gourville writes that products that require a high degree of behavior change are doomed to fail even if the benefits of using the new product are clear and substantial.
QWERTY survives due to the high costs of changing user behavior.
The fact is that successfully changing long-term user habits is exceptionally rare.
Experiments show that lab animals habituated to new behaviors tend to regress to their first learned behaviors over time.12 To borrow a term from accounting, behaviors are LIFO—“last in, first out.” In other words, the habits you’ve most recently acquired are also the ones most likely to go soonest.
Even when we change our routines, neural pathways remain etched in our brains, ready to be reactivated when we lose focus.
As one of its findings, the study concluded that the more frequently the new behavior occurred, the stronger the habit became.
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.20
In fact, people are so comfortable comparison shopping on Amazon that they frequently use the company’s mobile app to check prices when standing in the aisles of real stores—often making a purchase from inside a competing retailer.
A company can begin to determine its product’s habit-forming potential by plotting two factors: frequency (how often the behavior occurs) and perceived utility (how useful and rewarding the behavior is in the user’s mind over alternative solutions).
Conversely, using Amazon may be a less frequent occurrence, but users receive great value knowing they’ll find whatever they need at the one and only “everything store.”
Some behaviors never become habits because they do not occur frequently enough.
No matter how much utility is involved, infrequent behaviors remain conscious actions and never create the automatic response that is characteristic of habits. On the other axis, however, even a behavior that provides minimal perceived benefit can become a habit simply because it occurs frequently.
“Are you building a vitamin or painkiller?” is a common, almost clichéd question many investors ask founders eager to cash their first venture capital check. The correct answer, from the perspective of most investors, is the latter: a painkiller.
Painkillers solve an obvious need, relieving a specific pain, and often have quantifiable markets.
Vitamins, by contrast, do not necessarily solve an obvious pain point. Instead
they appeal to users’ emotional rather than functional needs.
consider this idea: A habit is when not doing an action causes a bit of pain.
The habit-forming products we use are simply there to provide some sort of relief. Using a technology or product to scratch the itch provides faster satisfaction than ignoring it. Once we come to depend on a tool, nothing else will do.
By progressing users through the four steps of the Hook Model—trigger, action, variable reward, and investment—hooks form habits.
For some businesses, forming habits is a critical component to success, but not every business requires habitual user engagement.
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’ pain by relieving...
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Triggers come in two types: external and internal.
Habit-forming technologies start changing behavior by first cueing users with a call to action. This sensory stimuli is delivered through any number of things in our environment. External triggers are embedded with information, which tells the user what to do next.
Too many choices or irrelevant options can cause hesitation, confusion, or worse—abandonment.4
