Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products

by Nir Eyal

Sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook utilize this heuristic to encourage people to divulge more information about themselves when completing their online profiles. On LinkedIn every user starts with some semblance of progress (figure 19). The next step is to “Improve Your Profile Strength” by supplying additional information. As users complete each step, the meter incrementally shows the user is advancing. Cleverly, LinkedIn’s completion bar jump-starts the perception of progress and does not include a numeric scale. For the new user, a proper LinkedIn profile does not seem so far away. Yet even the “advanced” user still has additional steps she can take to inch toward the final goal.