Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products

by Nir Eyal

heuristics—the mental shortcuts we take to make decisions and form opinions.

The appearance of scarcity affected their perception of value.

The study showed that a product can decrease in perceived value if it starts off as scarce and becomes abundant.

The Framing Effect Context also shapes perception.

The mind takes shortcuts informed by our surroundings to make quick and sometimes erroneous judgments.

perception can form a personal reality based on how a product is framed, even when there is little relationship with objective quality.

People often anchor to one piece of information when making a decision.

The study demonstrates the endowed progress effect, a phenomenon that increases motivation as people believe they are nearing a goal.

The action is the simplest behavior in anticipation of reward.

To increase the desired behavior, ensure a clear trigger is present; next, increase ability by making the action easier to do; finally, align with the right motivator.

Every behavior is driven by one of three Core Motivators: seeking pleasure and avoiding pain; seeking hope and avoiding fear; seeking social acceptance while avoiding social rejection. Ability is influenced by the six factors of time, money, physical effort, brain cycles, social deviance, and non-routineness. Ability is dependent on users and their context at that moment.

Heuristics are cognitive shortcuts we take to make...

The third step in the Hook Model is the variable reward phase, in which you reward your users by solving a problem, reinforcing their motivation for the action taken in the previous phase.

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.

Researchers believe laughter may in fact be a release valve when we experience the discomfort and excitement of uncertainty, but without fear of harm.

Without variability we are like children in that once we figure out what will happen next, we become less excited by the experience.

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

Habits help us conserve our attention for other things while we go about the tasks we perform with little or no conscious thought.

Novelty sparks our interest, makes us pay attention,

variability increases activity in the nucleus accumbens and spikes levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine, driving our hungry search for rewards.

Our brains are adapted to seek rewards that make us feel accepted, attractive, important, and included.

The need to acquire physical objects, such as food and other supplies that aid our survival, is part of our brain’s operating system.

Slot machines provide a classic example of variable rewards of the hunt.

Rewards of the Self

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.

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

Only by understanding what truly matters to users can a company correctly match the right variable reward to their intended behavior.

reactance, the hair-trigger response to threats to your autonomy.

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

a recent study found social factors were the most important reasons people used the service

Social acceptance is something we all crave,

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.

they do not make their services enjoyable for its own sake, often asking users to learn new, unfamiliar actions instead of making old routines easier.

Companies that successfully change behaviors present users with an implicit choice between their old way of doing things and a new, more convenient way to fulfill existing needs.

To change behavior, products must ensure the users feel in control.

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

Why does the power of variable rewards seem to fade away?

As the Zynga story demonstrates, an element of mystery is an important component of continued user interest.

finite variability—an experience that becomes predictable after use.

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

infinite variability—experiences that maintain user interest by sustaining variability with use.

The feedback loop of the first three steps of the Hook—trigger, action, and variable reward—still misses a final critical phase.

will learn how getting people to invest their time, effort, or social equity in your product is a requirement for repeat use.

Variable reward is the third phase of the Hook Model, and there are three types of variable rewards: the tribe, the hunt, and the self.

When our autonomy is threatened, we feel constrained by our lack of choices and often rebel against doing a new behavior. Psychologists refer to this as reactance.

they must first invest in the product.

the frequency of a new behavior is a leading factor in forming a new habit.

second most important factor in habit formation is a change in the participant’s attitude about the behavior.

for a behavior to become routine it must occur with significant frequency and perceived utility.