Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products

by Nir Eyal

Investing time and effort into learning to use a product is a form of investment and stored value. Once a user has acquired a skill, using the service becomes easier and moves them to the right on the ability axis of the Fogg Behavior Model

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 Hooked Model.

In the Any.do scenario the app sends an external trigger to users at the moment when they are most likely to experience the internal trigger of anxiety about forgetting to do a task after a meeting. The Any.do app has anticipated a need and sets users up for success.

Pinterest clearly demonstrates the four stages of the Hooked Model. It is a seamless flow: from the itch of the internal trigger that moves users to the intended action, through the variable reward, and finally to the investment, which also loads the next external trigger. Pinterest users move through the Hook cycle from beginning to end, then happily return to the starting point for another go-round.

Invariably, the next big thing will come along and provide a better, more compelling hook. However, by creating habits fueled by investments in a product or service, companies make switching to a competitor difficult. User habits are hard to break and confer powerful competitive advantages to any company fortunate enough to successfully create them.

The investment phase is the fourth step in the Hooked Model. 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 stored value 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.

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.

The Bible App was far less engaging as a desktop Web site; the mobile interface increased accessibility and usage by providing frequent triggers. The Bible App increases users’ ability to take action by front-loading interesting content and providing an alternative audio version. By separating the verses into small chunks, users find the Bible easier to read on a daily basis; not knowing what the next verse will be adds a variable reward. Every annotation, bookmark, and highlight stores data (and value) in the app, further committing users.

Once you know how often users should use your product, dig into the numbers to identify how many and which type of users meet this threshold. As a best practice, use cohort analysis to measure changes in user behavior through future product iterations.

However, if at least 5 percent of your users don’t find your product valuable enough to use as much as you predicted they would, you may have a problem. Either you identified the wrong users or your product needs to go back to the drawing board. If you have exceeded that bar, though, and identified your habitual users, the next step is to codify the steps they took using your product to understand what hooked them.

Tracking users by cohort and comparing their activity with that of habitual users should guide how products evolve and improve.

Paul Graham advises entrepreneurs to leave the sexy-sounding business ideas behind and instead build for their own needs: “Instead of asking ‘what problem should I solve?’ ask ‘what problem do I wish someone else would solve for me?’”2 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.

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. Observing your own behavior can inspire the next habit-forming product or inform a breakthrough

Naturally, now we do read books 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.

Maples believes technology waves follow a three-phase pattern: “They start with infrastructure. Advances in infrastructure are the preliminary forces that enable a large wave to gather. As the wave begins to gather, enabling technologies and platforms create the basis for new types of applications that cause a gathering wave to achieve massive penetration and customer adoption. Eventually, these waves crest and subside, making way for the next gathering wave to take shape.”9 Entrepreneurs looking for windows of opportunity would be wise to consider Maples’s metaphor. Wherever new technologies suddenly make a behavior easier, new possibilities are born.

Many companies have found success in driving new habit formation by identifying how changing user interactions can create new routines.

The Hooked Model helps the product designer generate an initial prototype for a habit-forming technology. It also helps uncover potential weaknesses in an existing product’s habit-forming potential. 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 modify. First, dig into the data to identify how people are using the product. Next, codify these findings in search of habitual users. To generate new hypotheses, study the actions and paths taken by devoted users. Finally, modify the product to influence more users to follow the same path as your habitual users, and then evaluate results and continue to modify as needed. Keen observation of one’s own behavior can lead to new insights and habit-forming product opportunities. Identifying areas where a new technology makes cycling through the Hooked Model faster, more frequent, or more rewarding provides fertile ground for developing new habit-forming products. Nascent behaviors—new behaviors that few people see or do, yet ultimately fulfill a mass-market need—can inform future breakthrough habit-forming opportunities. New interfaces lead to transformative behavior change and business opportunities.