Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products

by Nir Eyal

Businesses that create customer habits gain a significant competitive advantage.

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

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.

For now, the important thing to remember is that habit-forming products create associations in users’ minds—and that the solution to their pain may be found in your product’s use.

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.

fear of missing out,

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

“Take a human desire, preferably one that has been around for a really long time … Identify that desire and use modern technology to take out steps.”

Sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook utilize this heuristic to encourage people to divulge more information about themselves when completing their online profiles.

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

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.

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

The more users invest time and effort into a product or service, the more they value it. In fact, there is ample evidence to suggest that our labor leads to love.

Reputation makes users, both buyers and sellers, more likely to stick with whichever service they have invested their efforts in to maintain a high-quality score

Once users have invested the effort to acquire a skill, they are less likely to switch to a competing product.

Just as in the action phase described in chapter 3, to achieve the intended behavior in the investment phase, the product designer must consider whether users have sufficient motivation and ability to engage in the intended behavior. If users are not doing what the designer intended in the investment phase, the designer may be asking them to do too much.

The investment comes next. Newcomers are instructed to connect the app to their calendar service, granting Any.do access to the user’s schedule. In doing so, users give the app permission to send a notification after the next scheduled meeting ends. This external trigger prompts users to return to the app to record a follow-up task from the meeting they just attended. In the Any.do scenario the app sends an external trigger to users at the moment when they are most likely to experience the internal trigger of anxiety about forgetting to do a task after a meeting. The Any.do app has anticipated a need and sets users up for success.

How to setup external triggers to form habits.

Pinterest clearly demonstrates the four stages of the Hook Model. It is a seamless flow: from the itch of the internal trigger that moves users to the intended action, through the variable reward, and finally to the investment, which also loads the next external trigger. Pinterest users move through the Hook cycle from beginning to end, then happily return to the starting point for another go-round.

Pintrests habit forming cycle

when users are primed to reciprocate. Investments increase the likelihood of users returning by improving the service the more it is used. They enable the accrual of stored value in the form of content, data, followers, reputation, or skill.

“It’s OK to deceive people if it’s in their best interests, or if they’ve given implicit consent to be deceived as part of a persuasive strategy.”

enough? My rule of thumb is 5 percent. Though your rate of active users will need to be much higher to sustain your business, this is a good initial benchmark. However, if at least 5 percent of your users

5% is the amount of users who must be actively engaged in your platform for it to be deemed decent. Note that this is just an initial number and the goal is to increase this over time.

Tracking users by cohort and comparing their activity with that of habitual users should guide how products evolve and improve.

identify, codify, and modify.