Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products

by Nir Eyal

Many entrepreneurs fall into the trap of building products that are only marginally better than existing solutions, hoping their innovation will be good enough to woo customers away from existing products. But when it comes to shaking consumers’ old habits, these naive entrepreneurs often find that better products don’t always win—especially if a large number of users have already adopted a competing product.

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

Gourville claims that for new entrants to stand a chance, they can’t just be better, they must be nine times better. Why such a high bar? Because old habits die hard and new products or services need to offer dramatic improvements to shake users out of old routines. Gourville writes that products that require a high degree of behavior change are doomed to fail even if the benefits of using the new product are clear and substantial.

QWERTY survives due to the high costs of changing user behavior.

users also increase their dependency on habit-forming products by storing value in them—further reducing the likelihood of switching to an alternative. For example, every e-mail sent and received using Google’s Gmail is stored indefinitely, providing users with a lasting repository of past conversations. New followers on Twitter increase users’ clout and amplify their ability to transmit messages to their communities. Memories and experiences captured on Instagram are added to one’s digital scrapbook. Switching to a new e-mail service, social network, or photo-sharing app becomes more difficult the more people use them. The nontransferable value created and stored inside these services discourages users from leaving.

Ultimately, user habits increase a business’s return on investment. Higher customer lifetime value, greater pricing flexibility, supercharged growth, and a sharpened competitive edge together equal a more powerful bang for the company’s buck.

While user habits are a boon to companies fortunate enough to engender them, their existence inherently makes success less likely for new innovations and start-ups trying to disrupt the status quo. The fact is that successfully changing long-term user habits is exceptionally rare. Altering behavior requires not only an understanding of how to persuade people to act—for example, the first time they land on a web page—but also necessitates getting them to repeat behaviors for long periods, ideally for the rest of their lives.

new behaviors have a short half-life, as our minds tend to revert to our old ways of thinking and doing. Experiments show that lab animals habituated to new behaviors tend to regress to their first learned behaviors over time.

the habits you’ve most recently acquired are also the ones most likely to go soonest.

This helps explain the overwhelming evidence that people rarely change their habits for long. Two-thirds of alcoholics who complete a rehabilitation program will pick up the bottle, and their old habits, within a year’s time.11 Research shows that nearly everyone who loses weight on a diet gains back the pounds within two years.

The enemy of forming new habits is past behaviors, and research suggests that old habits die hard. Even when we change our routines, neural pathways remain etched in our brains, ready to be reactivated when we lose focus.13 This presents an especially difficult challenge for product designers trying to create new lines or businesses based on forming new habits. For new behaviors to really take hold, they must occur often.

the more frequently the new behavior occurred, the stronger the habit became. Like flossing, frequent engagement with a product—especially over a short period of time—increases the likelihood of forming new routines.

Google Search provides an example of a service built upon a frequent behavior that helped create users’ habits. If you’re skeptical that Google is habit forming (and you are a frequent Google user), just try using Bing. In a head-to-head comparison of the efficacy of an incognito search, the products are nearly identical.15 Even if the geniuses at Google have in fact perfected a faster algorithm, the time saved is imperceptible. So why haven’t more Google users switched to Bing? Habits keep users loyal. If a user is familiar with the Google interface, switching to Bing requires cognitive effort. Although many aspects of Bing are similar to Google, even a slight change in pixel placement forces the would-be user to learn a new way of interacting with the site. 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.

whenever the company can identify the user through tracking technology, it improves search results based on past behaviors to deliver a more accurate and personalized experience, reinforcing the user’s connection with the search engine. The more the product is used, the better the algorithm gets, and thus the more it is used. The result is a virtuous cycle of habit-driven behavior resulting in Google’s market domination.16

Sometimes a behavior does not occur as frequently as flossing or Googling, but it still becomes a habit. For an infrequent action to become a habit, the user must perceive a high degree of utility, either from gaining pleasure or avoiding pain.

Amazon is so confident in its ability to form user habits that it sells and runs ads for directly competitive products on its site.17 Customers often see the item they are about to buy listed at a cheaper price and can click away to transact elsewhere. To some, this sounds like a formula for disaster. But to Amazon, it is a shrewd business strategy.

Not only does Amazon make money from the ads it runs from competing businesses, it also utilizes other companies’ marketing dollars to form a habit in the shopper’s mind. Amazon seeks to become the solution to a frequently occurring pain point—the customer’s desire to find the items they want. By addressing shoppers’ price concerns, Amazon earns loyalty even if it doesn’t make the sale and comes across as trustworthy in the process. The tactic is backed by a 2003 study, which demonstrated that consumers’ preference for an online retailer increases when they are offered competitive price information.18 The technique has also been used by Progressive, the car insurance company, to drive over $15 billion of annual insurance sales, up from just $3.4 billion before the tactic was implemented. By allowing users to comparison shop from within the site, Amazon provides tremendous perceived utility to its customers. Although shopping on Amazon may not occur as frequently as searching on Google, the company solidifies its place as the default solution to customers’ purchasing needs with each successful transaction. In fact, people are so comfortable comparison shopping on Amazon that they frequently use the company’s mobile app to check prices when standing in the aisles of real stores—often making a purchase from inside a competing retailer.

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).

Googling occurs multiple times per day, but any particular search is negligibly better than rival services like Bing. Conversely, using Amazon may be a less frequent occurrence, but users receive great value knowing they’ll find whatever they need at the one and only “everything store.”

FIGURE 1 As represented in figure 1, a behavior that occurs with enough frequency and perceived utility enters the Habit Zone, helping to make it a default behavior. If either of these factors falls short and the behavior lies below the threshold, it is less likely that the desired behavior will become a habit. Note that the line slopes downward but never quite reaches the perceived utility axis. Some behaviors never become habits because they do not occur frequently enough. No matter how much utility is involved, infrequent behaviors remain conscious actions and never create the automatic response that is characteristic of habits. On the other axis, however, even a behavior that provides minimal perceived benefit can become a habit simply because it occurs frequently.

Remember, the Hooked Model does not get people to do things they don’t want to do. Your product must ultimately be useful. The Habit Zone is meant to be a guiding theory, and the scale of the illustration is intentionally left blank.

the complexity of the behavior and how important the habit was to the person greatly affected how quickly the routine was formed.

It’s never been easier to launch a new product or service, yet most new endeavors fail. Why? Products fail for a variety of reasons: Companies run out of funding, products enter markets too early or too late, the marketplace doesn’t need what companies are offering, or founders simply give up.

one aspect is common to all successful innovations—they solve problems. That may seem obvious, but understanding the kind of problem a new product solves can be a topic of much debate.

“Are you building a vitamin or painkiller?” is a common, almost clichéd question many investors ask founders eager to cash their first venture capital check. The correct answer, from the perspective of most investors, is the latter: a painkiller. Likewise, innovators in companies big and small are constantly asked to prove their idea is important enough to merit the time and money needed to build it. Gatekeepers such as in...

Painkillers solve an obvious need, relieving a specific pain, and often have quantifiable markets.

Vitamins, by contrast, do not necessarily solve an obvious pain point. Instead they appeal to users’ emotional rather than functional needs.

A habit is when not doing an action causes a bit of discomfort.

The habit-forming products we use are simply there to provide some sort of relief. Using a technology or product to scratch the itch provides faster satisfaction than ignoring it. Once we come to depend on a tool, switching to something else takes work.

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.

Avoiding pain is a key motivator in...

habit-forming products create associations in users’ minds—and that the solution to their pain may be found in your product’s use.

habits are not the same things as addictions. The latter describes persistent, compulsive dependencies on a behavior or substance that harms the user. Addictions, by definition, are self-destructive. Thus, it is irresponsible to make products that rely on creating and maintaining user addictions because doing so would mean intentionally hurting people.

For some businesses, forming habits is a critical component to success, but not every business requires habitual user engagement. When successful, forming strong user habits can have several business benefits including: higher customer lifetime value (CLTV), greater pricing flexibility, supercharged growth, and a sharper competitive edge. Habits cannot form outside the Habit Zone, where the behavior occurs with enough frequency and perceived utility. Habit-forming products often start as nice-to-haves (vitamins) but once the habit is formed, they become must-haves (painkillers). Habit-forming products alleviate users’ discomfort by relieving a pronounced itch. Designing habit-forming products is a form of manipulation. Product builders would benefit from a bit of introspection before attempting to hook users to make sure they are building healthy habits, not unhealthy addictions

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?

The company demonstrates the increasing power of—and immense monetary value created by—habit-forming technology. Instagram is an example of an enterprising team—conversant in psychology as much as technology—that unleashed a habit-forming product on users who subsequently made it a part of their daily routines.3 Yin admits she regularly snaps and posts dozens of pictures per day using the app. “It’s just fun,” she says as she reviews her latest collection of moody snapshots filtered to look like they were taken in the late 1970s. “I just use it whenever I see something cool. I feel I need to grab it before it’s gone.”

habits like Yin’s are formed over time, but the chain reaction that forms a habit always starts with a trigger.

HABITS ARE NOT CREATED, THEY ARE BUILT UPON

Triggers take the form of obvious cues like the morning alarm clock but also come as more subtle, sometimes subconscious signals that just as effectively influence our daily behavior. A trigger is the actuator of behavior—the grit in the oyster that precipitates the pearl. Whether we are cognizant of them or not, triggers move us to take action.

Triggers come in two types: external and internal.

Habit-forming technologies start changing behavior by first cueing users with a call to action. This sensory stimuli is delivered through any number of things in our environment. External triggers are embedded with information, which tells the user what to do next. An external trigger communicates the next action the user should take. Often, the desired action is made explicitly clear.

Online, an external trigger may take the form of a prominent button, such as the large “Log in to Mint” prompt in the e-mail from Mint.com

the user is given explicit instructions about what action to take after reading the e-mail: Click on that big button.

Notice how prominent and clear the intended action is in the e-mail from Mint? The company could have included several other triggers such as prompts to check your bank balance, view credit card deals, or set financial goals. Instead, because this is an important account alert e-mail, Mint has reduced t...

More choices require the user to evaluate multiple options. Too many choices or irrelevant options can cause hesitation, confusion, or worse—abandonment.4 Reducing the thinking required to take the next action increases the likelihood of the desired behavior occurring with little thought.

external triggers can also convey implicit information about the next desired user action. For example, we’ve all learned that Web site links are for clicking and app icons are for tapping. The only purpose for these common visual triggers is to prompt the user to action. As a readily accepted aspect of interface design, these calls to action don’t need to tell people how to use them; the information is embedded.

four types of external triggers to move users to complete desired actions:

Advertising, search engine marketing, and other paid channels are commonly used to get users’ attention and prompt them to act. Paid triggers can be effective but costly ways to keep users coming back. Habit-forming companies tend not to rely on paid triggers for very long, if at all.

Because paying for reengagement is unsustainable for most business models, companies generally use paid triggers to acquire new users and then leverage other triggers to bring them back.