Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products

by Nir Eyal

Seventy-nine percent of smartphone owners check their device within fifteen minutes of waking up every morning.1 Perhaps more startling, fully one-third of Americans say they would rather give up sex than lose their cell phones.2

Instead of relying on expensive marketing, habit-forming companies link their services to the users’ daily routines and emotions.7 A habit is at work when users feel a tad bored and instantly open Twitter. They feel a pang of loneliness and before rational thought occurs, they are scrolling through their Facebook feeds.

Inviting friends, stating preferences, building virtual assets, and learning to use new features are all investments users make to improve their experience.

“If it can’t be used for evil, it’s not a superpower.” He’s right. And under this definition, building habit-forming products is indeed a superpower. If used irresponsibly, bad habits can quickly degenerate into mindless, zombielike addictions for some users.

Hooks connect the user’s problem with a company’s solution frequently enough to form a habit.

Habits form when the brain takes a shortcut and stops actively deliberating over what to do next.

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.

E-mail, perhaps the mother of all habit-forming technology, is a go-to solution for many of our daily agitations, from validating our importance (or even our existence) by checking to see if someone needs us, to providing an escape from life’s more mundane moments.

To combat the problem and give users a sense of progress, Google created “Priority Inbox.”20 Using this feature, Gmail cleverly segments e-mails into sorted folders to increase the frequency of users achieving “in-box zero”—a near-mystical state of having no unread e-mails.

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.

of rationalization, that anything you spend time on, you start to believe, ‘This must be worthwhile. Why? Because I’ve spent time on it!’

Pinterest clearly demonstrates the four stages of the Hooked 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.

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

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

humblebrag.4 A Harvard meta-analysis, “Disclosing information about the self is intrinsically rewarding,” found the act “engages neural and cognitive mechanisms associated with reward.”5 In fact, sharing feels so good that one study found “individuals were willing to forgo money to disclose about the self.”