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Seventy-nine percent of smartphone owners check their device within fifteen minutes of waking up every morning.
“automatic behaviors triggered by situational cues”: things we do with little or no conscious thought.
In order to win the loyalty of their users and create a product that’s regularly used, companies must learn not only what compels users to click but also what makes them tick.
Companies that form strong user habits enjoy several benefits to their bottom line. These companies attach their product to internal triggers. As a result, users show up without any external prompting.
The first-to-mind solution wins.
Through consecutive Hook cycles, successful products reach their ultimate goal of unprompted user engagement, bringing users back repeatedly, without depending on costly advertising or aggressive messaging.
Feedback loops are all around us, but predictable ones don’t create desire. The unsurprising response of your fridge light turning on when you open the door doesn’t drive you to keep opening it again and again. However, add some variability to the mix—suppose a different treat magically appears in your fridge every time you open it—and voilà, intrigue is created.
Research shows that levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine surge when the brain is expecting a reward.
Rather, the investment implies an action that improves the service for the next go-around.
the world will get more addictive in the next 40 years than it did in the last 40.”
Choice architecture, a concept described by famed scholars Thaler, Sunstein, and Balz in their same-titled scholarly paper, offers techniques to influence people’s decisions and affect behavioral outcomes. Ultimately, though, the practice should be “used to help nudge people to make better choices (as judged by themselves).”
Hooks connect the user’s problem with a company’s solution frequently enough to form a habit.
Neuroscientists believe habits give us the ability to focus our attention on other things by storing automatic responses in the basal ganglia, an area of the brain associated with involuntary actions.
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.
Users who continuously find value in a product are more likely to tell their friends about it.
Viral Cycle Time is the amount of time it takes a user to invite another user, and it can have a massive impact. “For example, after 20 days with a cycle time of two days, you will have 20,470 users,” Skok writes. “But if you halved that cycle time to one day, you would have over 20 million users!
User habits are a competitive advantage. Products that change customer routines are less susceptible to attacks from other companies.
A classic paper by John Gourville, a professor of marketing at Harvard Business School, stipulates that “many innovations fail because consumers irrationally overvalue the old while companies irrationally overvalue the new.”
QWERTY keyboard
users also increase their dependency on habit-forming products by storing value in them—further
While user habits are a boon to companies fortunate enough to engender them, their existence inherently makes success less likely for new innovations and start-ups trying to disrupt the status quo.
the habits you’ve most recently acquired are also the ones most likely to go soonest.
The enemy of forming new habits is past behaviors, and research suggests that old habits die hard. Even when we change our routines, neural pathways remain etched in our brains, ready to be reactivated when we lose focus.
For an infrequent action to become a habit, the user must perceive a high degree of utility, either from gaining pleasure or avoiding pain.
the complexity of the behavior and how important the habit was to the person greatly affected how quickly the routine was formed.
one aspect is common to all successful innovations—they solve problems.
“Are you building a vitamin or painkiller?”
Let’s consider a few of today’s hottest consumer technology companies: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. What are they selling—vitamins or painkillers?
My answer to the vitamin versus painkiller question: Habit-forming technologies are both. These services seem at first to be offering nice-to-have vitamins, but once the habit is established, they provide an ongoing pain remedy.
HABITS ARE NOT CREATED, THEY ARE BUILT UPON
Habits are like pearls.
Types of External Triggers
Without owned triggers and users’ tacit permission to enter their attentional space, it is difficult to cue users frequently enough to change their behavior.
after successive cycles, they do not need further prompting from external triggers. When users form habits, they are cued by a different kind of trigger: internal ones.
Internal Triggers
Internal triggers manifest automatically in your mind. Connecting internal triggers with a product is the brass ring of consumer technology.
Emotions, particularly negative ones, are powerful internal triggers and greatly influence our daily routines.
In the case of internal triggers, the information about what to do next is encoded as a learned association in the user’s memory.
product designers must know their user’s internal triggers—that is, the pain they seek to solve. Finding customers’ internal triggers requires learning more about people than what they can tell you in a survey,
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.
What would your users want to achieve by using your solution? Where and when will they use it? What emotions influence their use and will trigger them to action?
we spend a lot of time writing what’s called user narratives.”
In addition to Dorsey’s user narratives, tools like customer development,11 usability studies, and empathy maps12 are examples of methods for learning about potential users.
One method is to try asking the question “Why?” as many times as it takes to get to an emotion.
Whys Method.” Ohno wrote that it was “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.
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.
B = MAT,
defines motivation as “the energy for action.”2
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.
