Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products

by Nir Eyal

As the Zynga story demonstrates, an element of mystery is an important component of continued user interest. Online games like FarmVille suffer from what I term finite variability—an experience that becomes predictable after use.

With the plot lines known and the central mysteries revealed, the show just won’t seem as interesting the second time around.

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

FarmVille is played mostly in solitude, but World of Warcraft is frequently played with teams; it is the hard-to-predict behavior of other people that keeps the game interesting. While

For companies like Google and Uber, adding more variability to an inherently variable user experience makes no sense. Can you imagine what would happen if your Uber driver decided to take you for a spin around the block just for fun?

Therefore, the job of companies operating in conditions of inherent variability is to give users what they desperately crave in conditions of low control—a sense of agency.

The important thing is to give the user a sense of agency over something nobody has control over, namely, the flow of traffic.

Fundamentally, variable reward systems must satisfy users’ needs while leaving them wanting to reengage. As described, the most habit-forming products and services utilize one or more of the three variable rewards types: the tribe, the hunt, and the self. In fact, many habit-forming products offer multiple variable rewards.

Checking e-mail informs us of opportunities or threats to our material possessions and livelihood (rewards of the hunt).

Lastly, e-mail is in itself a task—challenging us to sort, categorize, and act to eliminate unread messages. We are motivated by the uncertain nature of our fluctuating e-mail count and feel compelled to gain control of our in-box (rewards of the self).

Understanding what moves users to return to habit-forming products gives designers an opportunity to build products that align with their users’ interests.

The power of commitment makes some people play video games until they keel over and die.

It is used to influence people to give more to charity.2 It has even been used to coerce prisoners of war into switching allegiances.3 The commitments we make have a powerful effect on us and play an important role in the things we do, the products we buy, and the habits we form.

The more users invest time and effort into a product or service, the more they value it. In fact, there is ample evidence to s...

The results showed that those who made their own origami animals valued their creation five times higher than the second group’s valuation, and nearly as high as the expert-made origami values (figure 25).

The homeowners’ greater willingness to place the large, obtrusive sign on their lawns after agreeing to the smaller one demonstrates the impact of our predilection for consistency with our past behaviors.

Consider your reaction the first time you sipped a beer or tried spicy food. Was it tasty? Unlikely. Our bodies are designed to reject alcohol and capsaicin, the compound that creates the sensation of heat in spicy food. Our innate reaction to these acquired tastes is to reject them, yet we learn to like them through repeated exposure.

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players justify their purchases to help convince themselves of something they want to be true—namely, that they are not foolish. The only solution is to keep paying to keep playing.

But how are habit-forming products designed for user investment? How can a product keep users committed to a service until it becomes a habit?

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The last step of the Hooked Model is the investment phase, the point at which users are asked to do a bit of work. Here, users are prompted to put something of value into the system, which increases the likelihood of their using the product and of successive passes through the cycle.

investments are about the anticipation of longer-term rewards, not immediate gratification.

investment comes in the form of following another user. There is no immediate reward for following someone, no stars or badges to affirm the action.

This certainly breaks conventional thinking in the product design community that all user experiences should be as easy and effortless as possible.

In the investment phase, however, asking users to do a bit of work comes after users have received variable rewards, not before.

after the reward, the company has an opportunity to leverage a central trait of human behavior.

The results showed that reciprocation is not just a characteristic expressed between people, but also a trait observed when humans interact with machines.

we humans evolved the tendency to reciprocate kindness because it improved our species’ ability to survive.

The big idea behind the investment phase is to leverage the user’s understanding that the service will get better with use (and personal investment). Like a good friendship, the more effort people put in, the more both parties benefit.

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.

Spotify uses the small investment of songs played in order to assemble a selection of tunes users haven’t previously heard but are likely to enjoy, called “Discover Weekly”

The collection of memories and experiences, in aggregate, becomes more valuable over time and the service becomes harder to leave as users’ personal investment in the site grows.

“If we could get users to enter just a little information, they were much more likely to return.” The tiny bit of effort associated with providing more user data created a powerful hook to bring people back to the service.

Collecting people to follow on Twitter, as well as collecting followers, provides tremendous value and is a key driver of what keeps Twitter users hooked (figure 28).

Investing in following the right people increases the value of the product by displaying more relevant and interesting content in each user’s Twitter feed. It also tells Twitter a lot about its users, which in turn improves the service overall.

Reputation makes users, both buyers and sellers, more likely to stick with whichever service they have invested their efforts in to maintain a high-quality score (figure 29).

They also achieve a sense of mastery (rewards of the self, as discussed in chapter 4). Unfortunately for the design professional, most of this acquired knowledge by users does not translate to competing applications.

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.

26 percent of mobile apps were downloaded and used only once.

Through successive cycles of the Hooked Model, users increase their affinity for the experience.

They increasingly come to rely on the product as the solution to their problems until finally, the new habit—and routine—is formed.

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.

after the variable reward phase,

primed to reciprocate.

building products that solve user needs through long-term engagement.

What do users really want? What pain is your product relieving? (Internal trigger) What brings users to your service? (External trigger) What is the simplest action users take in anticipation of reward, and how can you simplify your product to make this action easier? (Action) Are users fulfilled by the reward yet left wanting more? (Variable reward) What “bit of work” do users invest in your product? Does it load the next trigger and store value to improve the product with use? (Investment)

Remember, this framework is for creating habit-forming products, not one-time-use goods.