Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products

by Nir Eyal

When successful, forming strong user habits can have several business benefits including: higher customer lifetime value (CLTV), greater pricing flexibility, supercharged growth, and a sharper competitive edge.

Habit-forming products often start as nice-to-haves (vitamins) but once the habit is formed, they become must-haves (painkillers).

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DO THIS NOW If you are building a habit-forming product, write down the answers to these questions: 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? What user behavior do you want to make into a habit?

the chain reaction that forms a habit always starts with a trigger.

new habits need a foundation upon which to build. Triggers provide the basis for sustained behavior change.

Habit-forming technologies start changing behavior by first cueing users with a call to action.

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.

1. Paid Triggers

2. Earned Triggers

3. Relationship Triggers

4. Owned Triggers

The ultimate goal of all external triggers is to propel users into and through the Hook Model so that, after successive cycles, they do not need further prompting from external triggers.

Internal Triggers

When a product becomes tightly coupled with a thought, an emotion, or a preexisting routine, it leverages an internal trigger.

you can’t see, touch, or hear an internal trigger.

Internal triggers manifest automatically in your mind. Connecting internal triggers with a product is the brass ring of consumer technology.

hypothesis is that those with depression experience negative emotions more frequently than the general population and seek relief by turning to technology to lift their mood.

In the case of internal triggers, the information about what to do next is encoded as a learned association in the user’s memory.

New habits are sparked by external triggers, but associations with internal triggers are what keeps users hooked.

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.

learn the drivers behind successful habit-forming products—not to copy them, but to understand how they solve users’ problems.

talking to users to reveal these wants will likely prove ineffective because they themselves don’t know which emotions motivate them.

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.

Dorsey believes a clear description of users—their desires, emotions, the context with which they use the product—is paramount to building the right solution.

“the basis of Toyota’s scientific approach … by repeating ‘why?’ five times, the nature of the problem as well as its solution becomes clear.”

To initiate action, doing must be easier than thinking.

a habit is a behavior done with little or no conscious thought.

Fogg posits that there are three ingredients required to initiate any and all behaviors: (1) the user must have sufficient motivation; (2) the user must have the ability to complete the desired action; and (3) a trigger must be present to activate the behavior.

given behavior will occur when motivation, ability, and a trigger are present at the same time and in sufficient degrees.

While a trigger cues an action, motivation defines the level of desire to take that action.

defines motivation as “the energy for action.”

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.

While internal triggers are the frequent, everyday itch experienced by users, the right motivators create action by offering the promise of desirable outcomes (i.e., a satisfying scratch).

Denis J. Hauptly deconstructs the process of innovation into its most fundamental steps. First, Hauptly states, understand the reason people use a product or service. Next, lay out the steps the customer must take to get the job done. Finally, once the series of tasks from intention to outcome is understood, simply start removing steps until you reach the simplest possible process.

any technology or product that significantly reduces the steps to complete a task will enjoy high adoption rates by the people it assists.

the ease or difficulty of doing a particular action affects the likelihood that a behavior will occur.

ability is the capacity to do a particular behavior.

Fogg describes six “elements of simplicity”—the factors that influence a task’s difficulty.

Time—how

Money—the

Physical eff...

Brain cyc...

Social deviance—how

Non-routine—according

simplicity increases the intended user behaviors.

which should you invest in first, motivation or ability?

the greatest return on investment generally comes from increasing a product’s ease of use.

Influencing behavior by reducing the effort required to perform an action is more effective than increasing someone’s desire to do it.

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