Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products

by Nir Eyal

Building an enterprise on ephemeral desires is akin to running on an incessantly rolling treadmill: You have to keep up with the constantly changing demands of your users.

Creating a product that the designer does not believe improves users’ lives and that he himself would not use is called exploitation.

To help you, as a designer of habit-forming technology, assess the morality behind how you manipulate users, it is helpful to determine which of the four categories your work fits into. Are you a facilitator, peddler, entertainer, or dealer? Facilitators use their own product and believe it can materially improve people’s lives. They have the highest chance of success because they most closely understand the needs of their users. Peddlers believe their product can materially improve people’s lives but do not use it themselves. They must beware of the hubris and inauthenticity that comes from building solutions for people they do not understand firsthand. Entertainers use their product but do not believe it can improve people’s lives. They can be successful, but without making the lives of others better in some way, the entertainer’s products often lack staying power. Dealers neither use the product nor believe it can improve people’s lives. They have the lowest chance of finding long-term success and often find themselves in morally precarious positions.

Take a minute to consider where you fall on the Manipulation Matrix. Do you use your own product or service? Does it influence positive or negative behaviors? How does it make you feel? Ask yourself if you are proud of the way you are influencing the behavior of others.

The most highly regarded entrepreneurs are driven by meaning, a vision for greater good that drives them forward.

if at least 5 percent of your users don’t find your product valuable enough to use as much as you predicted they would, you may have a problem.

Studying your own needs can lead to remarkable discoveries and new ideas because the designer always has a direct line to at least one user: him- or herself.

As you go about your day, ask yourself why you do or do not do certain things and how those tasks could be made easier or more rewarding.

Wherever new technologies suddenly make a behavior easier, new possibilities are born.

The Hooked Model helps the product designer generate an initial prototype for a habit-forming technology. It also helps uncover potential weaknesses in an existing product’s habit-forming potential. Once a product is built, Habit Testing helps uncover product devotees, discover which product elements (if any) are habit forming, and why those aspects of your product change user behavior. Habit Testing includes three steps: identify, codify, and modify. First, dig into the data to identify how people are using the product. Next, codify these findings in search of habitual users. To generate new hypotheses, study the actions and paths taken by devoted users. Finally, modify the product to influence more users to follow the same path as your habitual users, and then evaluate results and continue to modify as needed. Keen observation of one’s own behavior can lead to new insights and habit-forming product opportunities. Identifying areas where a new technology makes cycling through the Hooked Model faster, more frequent, or more rewarding provides fertile ground for developing new habit-forming products. Nascent behaviors—new behaviors that few people see or do, yet ultimately fulfill a mass-market need—can inform future breakthrough habit-forming opportunities. New interfaces lead to transformative behavior change and business opportunities.