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Seventy-nine percent of smartphone owners check their device within fifteen minutes of waking up every morning.
Cognitive psychologists define habits as “automatic behaviors triggered by situational cues”:
Forming habits is imperative for the survival of many products.
What were the moral implications of building potentially addictive products?
Triggers come in two types: external and internal.8 Habit-forming products start by alerting users with external triggers like an e-mail, a Web site link, or the app icon on a phone.
Companies leverage two basic pulleys of human behavior to increase the likelihood of an action occurring: the ease of performing an action and the psychological motivation to do it.10
What distinguishes the Hooked Model from a plain vanilla feedback loop is the Hook’s ability to create a craving.
Variable rewards are one of the most powerful tools companies implement to hook users;
Research shows that levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine surge when the brain is expecting a reward.
Although dopamine is often wrongly categorized as making us feel good, introducing variability does create a focused state, which suppresses the areas of the brain associated with judgment and reason while ...
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The images are related to what she is generally interested in—namely
As Barbra enjoys scrolling through the Pinterest cornucopia, she builds a desire to keep the things that delight her. By collecting items, she gives the site data about her preferences. Soon she will follow, pin, repin, and make other investments, which serve to increase her ties to the site and prime her for future loops through Pinterest’s Hook.
“Unless the forms of technological progress that produced these things are subject to different laws than technological progress in general, the world will get more addictive in the next 40 years than it did in the last 40.”
Recently, a blog reader e-mailed me, “If it can’t be used for evil, it’s not a superpower.” He’s right. And under this definition, building habit-forming products is indeed a superpower. If used irresponsibly, bad habits can quickly degenerate into mindless, zombielike addictions for some users.
When harnessed correctly, technology can enhance lives through healthful behaviors that improve our relationships, make us smarter, and increase productivity.
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.
trigger, action, variable reward, and investment.
Fostering consumer habits is an effective way to increase the value of a company by driving higher customer lifetime value
in higher CLTV. Some products have a very high CLTV. For example, credit card customers tend to stay loyal for a very long time and are worth a bundle. Hence, credit card companies are willing to spend a considerable amount of money acquiring new customers. This explains why you receive so many promotional offers, ranging from free gifts to airline bonus miles, to entice you to add another card or upgrade your current one. Your potential CLTV justifies a credit card company’s marketing investment.
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. For example, in the free-to-play video game business, it is standard practice for game developers to delay asking users to pay money until they have played consistently and habitually.
the more is more principle—more
Viral Cycle Time is the amount of time it takes a user to invite another user, and it can have a massive impact.
more daily active users means more people to respond and react to each invitation. The cycle not only perpetuates the process—with higher and higher user engagement, it accelerates it.
But when it comes to shaking consumers’ old habits, these naive entrepreneurs often find that better products don’t always win—especially if a large number of users have already adopted a competing product.
“many innovations fail because consumers irrationally overvalue the old while companies irrationally overvalue the new.”8
keyboard—even if more efficient—would force us to relearn how to type. Fat chance!
Not only does Amazon make money from the ads it runs from competing businesses, it also utilizes other companies’ marketing dollars to form a habit in the shopper’s mind. Amazon seeks to become the solution to a frequently occurring pain point—the customer’s desire to find the items they want.
allowing users to comparison shop from within the site, Amazon provides tremendous perceived utility to its customers. Although shopping on Amazon may not occur as frequently as searching on Google, the company solidifies its place as the default solution to customers’ purchasing needs with each successful transaction.
Your product must ultimately be useful.
A 2010 study found that some habits can be formed in a matter of weeks while others can take more than five months.21 The researchers also found that the complexity of the behavior and how important the habit was to the person greatly affected how quickly the routine was formed.
Painkillers solve an obvious need, relieving a specific pain, and often have quantifiable markets.
Instead they appeal to users’ emotional rather than functional needs.
A habit is when not doing an action causes a bit of discomfort.
user addictions because doing so would mean intentionally hurting people.
Habit-forming products often start as nice-to-haves (vitamins) but once the habit is formed, they become must-haves (painkillers).
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?
Similarly, new habits need a foundation upon which to build. Triggers provide the basis for sustained behavior change. Reflect on your own life for a moment. What woke
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 can also convey implicit information about the next desired user action. For example, we’ve all learned that Web site links are for clicking and app icons are for tapping. The only purpose for these common visual triggers is to prompt the user to action.
placements are all effective ways to gain attention. Companies may be lulled into thinking that related downloads or sales spikes signal long-term success, yet awareness generated by earned triggers can be short-lived.
Owned Triggers
They consistently show up in daily life and it is ultimately up to the user to opt in to allowing these triggers to appear. For example, an app icon on the user’s phone screen, an e-mail newsletter to which the user subscribes, or an app update notification only appears if the user wants it there. As long as the user agrees to see the trigger, the company that sets the trigger owns a share of the user’s attention.
Internal triggers manifest automatically in your mind. Connecting internal triggers with a product is the brass ring of habit-forming technology.
photo app manufactured a predictable response cued by an internal trigger. Through repeated conditioning, a connection was formed between Yin’s need to capture images of the things around her and the app on her ever-present mobile device.
Emotions, particularly negative ones, are powerful internal triggers and greatly influence our daily routines.
Feelings of boredom, loneliness, frustration, confusion, and indecisiveness often instigate a slight pain or irritation and prompt an almost instantaneous and often mindless action to quell the negative sensation. For instance, Yin often use...
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strong, positive associations with the product over time. After continued use, bonds begin to form—like the layers of nacre in an oyster—between the product and the user whose need it satisfies.
The ultimate goal of a habit-forming product is to solve the user’s pain by creating an association so that the user identifies the company’s product or service as the source of relief.
The best place to start is to learn the drivers behind successful habit-forming products—not to copy them, but to understand how they solve users’ problems. Doing so will give you practice in diving deeper into the mind of the consumer and alert you to common human needs and desires.
