Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products

by Nir Eyal

Habit-forming products start by alerting users with external triggers like an e-mail, a Web site link, or the app icon on a phone. For example, suppose Barbra, a young woman in Pennsylvania, happens to see a photo in her Facebook News Feed taken by a family member from a rural part of the state. It’s a lovely picture and because she is planning a trip there with her brother Johnny, the external trigger’s call to action (in marketing and advertising lingo) intrigues her and she clicks. By cycling through successive hooks, users begin to form associations with internal triggers, which attach to existing behaviors and emotions. When users start to automatically cue their next behavior, the new habit becomes part of their everyday routine. Over time, Barbra associates Facebook with her need for social connection.

Following the trigger comes the action: the behavior done in anticipation of a reward. The simple action of clicking on the interesting picture in her news feed takes Barbra to a Web site called Pinterest, a “social bookmarking site with a virtual pinboard.”9 This phase of the Hook, as described in chapter 3, draws upon the art and science of usability design to reveal how products drive specific user actions. Companies leverage two basic pulleys of human behavior to increase the likelihood of an action occurring: the ease of performing an action and the psychological motivation to do it.10 Once Barbra completes the simple action of clicking on the photo, she is dazzled by what she sees next.

What distinguishes the Hook Model from a plain vanilla feedback loop is the Hook’s ability to create a craving. 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.

Variable rewards are one of the most powerful tools companies implement to hook users;

Research shows that levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine surge when the brain is expecting a reward.11 Introducing ...

The investment phase increases the odds that the user will make another pass through the Hook cycle in the future. The investment occurs when the user puts something into the product of service such as time, data, effort, social capital, or money.

As famed Silicon Valley investor Paul Graham writes, “Unless the forms of technological progress that produced these things are subject to different laws than technological progress in general, the world will get more addictive in the next 40 years than it did in the last 40.”

Habits are defined as “behaviors done with little or no conscious thought.”

as customers form routines around a product, they come to depend upon it and become less sensitive to price.

company turns nonpaying users into revenue-generating ones.7 In 2011 Libin published a chart now known as the “smile graph.” With the percentage of sign-ups represented on the y-axis and time spent on the service on the x-axis, the chart showed that, although usage plummeted at first, it rocketed upward as people formed a habit of using the service. The resulting down-and-up curve gave the chart its emblematic smile shape

Products with higher user engagement also have the potential to grow faster than their rivals.

more is more principle—more frequent usage drives more viral growth.

Viral Cycle Time is the amount of time it takes a user to invite another user, and it can have a massive impact.

“many innovations fail because consumers irrationally overvalue the old while companies irrationally overvalue the new.”

for new entrants to stand a chance, they can’t just be better, they must be nine times better.

QWERTY was designed with commonly used characters spaced far apart. This layout prevented typists from jamming the metal type bars of early machines.

users also increase their dependency on habit-forming products by storing value in them—further

Switching to a new e-mail service, social network, or photo-sharing app becomes more difficult the more people use them.

new behaviors have a short half-life, as our minds tend to revert to our old ways of thinking and doing.

To borrow a term from accounting, behaviors are LIFO—“last in, first out.” In other words, 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.

For new behaviors to really take hold, they must occur often.

Adapting to the differences in the Bing interface is what actually slows down regular Google users and makes Bing feel inferior, not the technology itself.

A company can begin to determine its product’s habit-forming potential by plotting two factors: frequency (how often the behavior occurs) and perceived utility (how useful and rewarding the behavior is in the user’s mind over alternative solutions).

There are few rules when it comes to answering “How frequent is frequent enough?” and the answer is likely specific to each business and behavior. However, as the previously mentioned flossing study demonstrates, we know that higher frequency is better.

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.

Habit-forming products alleviate users’ pain by relieving a pronounced itch.

Paid Triggers

companies generally use paid triggers to acquire new users and then leverage other triggers to bring them back.

Earned Triggers

Relationship Triggers

One person telling others about a product or service

Relationship triggers can create the viral hyper-growth entrepreneurs and investors lust after.

Owned Triggers

Owned triggers consume a piece of real estate in the user’s environment.

For example, an app icon on the user’s phone screen, an e-mail newsletter to which the user subscribes, or an app update notification only appears if the user wants it there. As long as the user agrees to receive a trigger, the company that sets the trigger owns a share of the user’s attention.

While paid, earned, and relationship triggers drive new user acquisition, owned triggers prompt repeat engagement until a habit is formed.

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

Emotions, particularly negative ones, are powerful internal triggers and greatly influence our daily routines. Feelings of boredom, loneliness, frustration, confusion, and indecisiveness often instigate a slight pain or irritation and prompt an almost instantaneous and often mindless action to quell the negative sensation.

Once a technology has created an association in users’ minds that the product is the solution of choice, they return on their own, no longer needing prompts from external triggers.

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

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.

As Erika Hall, author of Just Enough Research writes, “When the research focuses on what people actually do (watch cat videos) rather than what they wish they did (produce cinema-quality home movies) it actually expands possibilities.”9 Looking for discrepancies exposes opportunities. Why do people really send text messages? Why do they take photos? What role does watching television or sports play in their lives? Ask yourself what pain these habits solve and what the user might be feeling right before one of these actions.

“[If] you want to build a product that is relevant to folks, you need to put yourself in their shoes and you need to write a story from their side. So, we spend a lot of time writing what’s called user narratives.”

One method is to try asking the question “Why?” as many times as it takes to get to an emotion.

It is the fear of losing a special moment that instigates a pang of stress. This negative emotion is the internal trigger that brings Instagram users back to the app to alleviate this pain by capturing a photo.

Remember, 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.

B = MAT,

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.