Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products

by Nir Eyal

Relationship Triggers One person telling others about a product or service can be a highly effective external trigger for action.

As long as the user agrees to receive a trigger, the company that sets the trigger owns a share of the user’s attention.

“For example, participants with depressive symptoms tended to engage in very high e-mail usage . . . Other characteristic features of depressive Internet behavior included increased amounts of video watching, gaming, and chatting.”

“We often think the Internet enables you to do new things . . . But people just want to do the same things they’ve always done.”

You’ll often find that people’s declared preferences—what they say they want—are far different from their revealed preferences—what they actually do.

As Erika Hall, author of Just Enough Research writes, “When the research

focuses on what people actually do (watch cat videos) rather than what they wish they did (produce cinema-quality home movies) it actually expands possibilities.”9 Lo...

One method is to try asking the question “Why?” as many times as it takes to get to an emotion. Usually, this will happen by the fifth why. This is a technique adapted from the Toyota Production System, described by Taiichi Ohno as the “5 Whys Method.” Ohno wrote that it was “the basis of Toyota’s scientific approach . . . by repeating ‘why?’ five times, the nature of the problem as well as its solution becomes clear.”

Fogg states that all humans are motivated to seek pleasure and avoid pain; to seek hope and avoid fear; and finally, to seek social acceptance and avoid rejection.

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.

To hold our attention, products must have an ongoing degree of novelty.

Variable rewards can be found in all sorts of products and experiences that hold our attention. They fuel our drive to check e-mail, browse the web, or bargain-shop. I propose that variable rewards come in three types: the tribe, the hunt, and the self

Rewards of the tribe keep users coming back, wanting more.

In particular Bandura determined that people who observe someone being rewarded for a particular behavior are more likely to alter their own beliefs and subsequent actions.

The uncertainty of what users will find each time they visit the site creates the intrigue needed to pull them back again.

Stack Overflow devotees write responses in anticipation of rewards of the tribe.

Stack Overflow works because, like all of us, software engineers find satisfaction in contributing to a community they care about.

Yet on Stack Overflow, points are not just an empty game mechanic; they confer special value by representing how much someone has contributed to his or her tribe.

Finally, there are the variable rewards we seek for a more personal form of gratification. We are driven to conquer obstacles, even if just for the satisfaction of doing so. Pursuing a task to completion can influence people to continue all sorts of behaviors.

Their self-determination theory espouses that people desire, among other things, to gain a sense of competency. Adding an element of mystery to this goal makes the pursuit all the more enticing.19

Codecademy seeks to make learning to write code more fun and rewarding.

Quora’s social rewards have proven more attractive than Mahalo’s monetary rewards.

Variable rewards are not magic fairy dust that a product designer can sprinkle onto a product to make it instantly more attractive. Rewards must fit into the narrative of why the product is used and align with the user’s internal triggers and motivations.

Although influencing behavior can be a part of good product design, heavy-handed efforts may have adverse consequences and risk losing users’ trust.

The magic words the researchers discovered? The phrase “But you are free to accept or refuse.”

However, when a request is coupled with an affirmation of the right to choose, reactance is kept at bay.

Unfortunately, too many companies build their products betting users will do what they make them do instead of letting them do what they want to do.

The cycle of conflict, mystery, and resolution is as old as storytelling itself, and at the heart of every good tale is variability.

The more effort we put into something, the more likely we are to value it; we are more likely to be consistent with our past behaviors; and finally, we change our preferences to avoid cognitive dissonance.

that anything you spend time on, you start to believe, ‘This must be worthwhile. Why?

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.

I recommend that you progressively stage the investment you want from users into small chunks of work, starting with small, easy tasks and building up to harder tasks during successive cycles through the Hook Model.

In this chapter we have learned how an investment in the product serves as the string that pulls the user back.

After seven and a half years of active duty, Harriman realized that guns alone could not stop terrorists intent on harming Americans. “Desperate people commit desperate acts,” Harriman says.

I encouraged you to align your work with a purpose that provides you with meaning and helps cultivate meaning for others. This is not only a moral imperative, it’s good business practice.

The most highly regarded entrepreneurs are driven by meaning, a vision for greater good that drives them forward.

YouVersion lets religious leaders input their sermons into the app so their congregants can follow along in real time—book, verse, and passage—all without flipping a page. Once the head of the church is hooked, the congregation is sure to follow.

Does your users’ internal trigger frequently prompt them to action? Is your external trigger cueing them when they are most likely to act? Is your design simple enough to make taking the action easy? Does the reward satisfy your users’ need while leaving them wanting more? Do your users invest a bit of work in the product, storing value to improve the experience with use and loading the next trigger? By identifying where your technology is lacking, you can focus on developing improvements to your product where it matters most.

The Hook Model can be a helpful tool for filtering out bad ideas with low habit potential as well as a framework for identifying room for improvement in existing products. However, after the designer has formulated new hypotheses, there is no way to know which ideas will work without testing them with actual users.

Building a habit-forming product is an iterative process and requires user-behavior analysis and continuous experimentation.

Step 1: Identify The initial question for Habit Testing is “Who are the product’s habitual users?”

Studying your own needs can lead to remarkable discoveries and new ideas because the designer always has a direct line to at least one user: him- or herself.

Careful introspection can uncover opportunities for building habit-forming products. As you go about your day, ask yourself why you do or do not do certain things and how those tasks could be made easier or more rewarding.

Behaviors that start with a small group of users can expand to a wider population, but only if they cater to a broad need.

and newspapers over the Internet. When technologies are new, people are often skeptical. Old habits die hard and few people have the foresight to see how new innovations will eventually change their routines. However, by looking to early adopters who have already developed nascent behaviors, entrepreneurs and designers can identify niche use cases, which can be taken mainstream.

As discussed in the first chapter, many habit-forming technologies begin as vitamins—nice-to-have products that, over time, become must-have painkillers by relieving an itch or pain.

Identifying areas where a new technology makes cycling through the Hook Model faster, more frequent, or more rewarding provides fertile ground for developing new habit-forming products.

Once a product is built, Habit Testing helps uncover product devotees, discover which product elements (if any) are habit forming, and why those aspects of your product change user behavior. Habit Testing includes three steps: identify, codify, and