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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.
The four steps of the Hooked Model
Variable Reward What distinguishes
Variable rewards are one of the most powerful tools companies implement to hook users;
retention.
The investment occurs when the user puts something into the product of service such as time, data, effort, social capital, or money.
cornucopia,
malaise
palpable,
“You can determine the strength of a business over time by the amount of agony they go through in raising prices.”
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.”
Gourville writes that products that require a high degree of behavior change are doomed to fail even if the benefits
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).
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.
If you are building a habit-forming product, write down the answers to these questions: What habits does your business model require? What problem are users turning to your product to solve? How do users currently solve that problem and why does it need a solution? How frequently do you expect users to engage with your product once they are habituated? What user behavior do you want to make into a habit?
External triggers are embedded with information, which tells the user what to do next.
Internal triggers manifest automatically in your mind. Connecting internal triggers with a product is the brass ring of habit-forming technology.
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.
The study demonstrated that people suffering from symptoms of depression used the Internet more. Why is that? One hypothesis is that those with depression experience negative emotions more frequently than the general population and seek relief by turning to technology to lift their mood.
In the case of internal triggers, the information about what to do next is encoded as a learned association in the user’s memory.
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.
As Evan Williams, cofounder of Blogger and Twitter said, the Internet is “a giant machine designed to give people what they want.”8 Williams continued, “We often think the Internet enables you to do new things … But people just want to do the same things they’ve always done.”
Triggers cue the user to take action and are the first step in the Hooked Model. Triggers come in two types—external and internal. External triggers tell the user what to do next by placing information within the user’s environment. Internal triggers tell the user what to do next through associations stored in the user’s memory. Negative emotions frequently serve as internal triggers. To build a habit-forming product, makers need to attach the use of their solution to a frequently felt internal trigger and know how to leverage external triggers to drive the user to action.
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.
The Fogg Behavior Model is represented in the formula B = MAT, which represents that a given behavior will occur when motivation, ability, and a trigger are present at the same time and in sufficient degrees.
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.
While internal triggers are the frequent, everyday itch experienced by users, the right motivators create action by offering the promise of desirable outcomes (i.e., a satisfying scratch).
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.”
ELEMENTS OF SIMPLICITY Fogg describes six “elements of simplicity”—the factors that influence a task’s difficulty.6 These are: Time—how long it takes to complete an action. Money—the fiscal cost of taking an action. Physical effort—the amount of labor involved in taking the action. Brain cycles—the level of mental effort and focus required to take an action. Social deviance—how accepted the behavior is by others. Non-routine—according to Fogg, “How much the action matches or disrupts existing routines.”
The appearance of scarcity affected their perception of value.
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.
REMEMBER & SHARE The second step in the Hooked Model is action. The action is the simplest behavior in anticipation of reward. As described by Dr. B. J. Fogg’s Behavior Model: For any behavior to occur, a trigger must be present at the same time as the user has sufficient ability and motivation to take action. 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 quick decisions. Product designers can utilize many of the hundreds of heuristics to increase the likelihood of their desired action.
DO THIS NOW Refer to the answers you came up with in the last “Do This Now” section to complete the following exercises: Walk through the path your users would take to use your product or service, beginning from the time they feel their internal trigger to the point where they receive their expected outcome. How many steps does it take before users obtain the reward they came for? How does this process compare with the simplicity of some of the examples described in this chapter? How does it compare with competing products and services? Which resources are limiting your users’ ability to
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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.
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.
Experiences with finite variability become less engaging because they eventually become predictable.
they
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.
The stored value users put into the product increases the likelihood they will use it again in the future and comes in a variety of forms.
The collection of memories and experiences, in aggregate, becomes more valuable over time and the service becomes harder to leave as users’ personal investment in the site grows.
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
Habit-forming technologies leverage the user’s past behavior to initiate an external trigger in the future.
The investment phase is the fourth step in the Hooked Model. Unlike the action phase, which delivers immediate gratification, the investment phase concerns the anticipation of rewards in the future. Investments in a product create preferences because of our tendency to overvalue our work, be consistent with past behaviors, and avoid cognitive dissonance. Investment comes after the variable reward phase, 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
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What do users really want? What pain is your product relieving? (Internal trigger) What brings users to your service? (External trigger) What is the simplest action users take in anticipation of reward, and how can you simplify your product to make this action easier? (Action) Are users fulfilled by the reward yet left wanting more? (Variable reward) What “bit of work” do users invest in your product? Does it load the next trigger and store value to improve the product with use? (Investment)
Creating habits can be a force for good, but it can also be used for nefarious purposes. What responsibility do product makers have when creating user habits?
