Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products

by Nir Eyal

Variable rewards are one of the most powerful tools companies implement to hook users;

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

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.

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 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.

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.

Imagine a time when your mobile phone rang but you didn’t answer it.

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.

First, Hauptly states, understand the reason people use a product or service. Next, lay out the steps the customer must take to get the job done. Finally, once the series of tasks from intention to outcome is understood, simply start removing steps until you reach the simplest possible process.

“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.”

ability is the capacity to do a particular behavior.

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.”

Identify what the user is missing. What is making it difficult for the user to accomplish the desired action?

Make your product so simple that users already know how to use it, and you’ve got a winner.

Although the cookies and jars were identical, participants valued the ones in the near-empty jar more highly.

The appearance of scarcity affected their perception of value.

The study showed that a product can decrease in perceived value if it starts off as scarce and becomes abundant.

The mind takes shortcuts informed by our surroundings to make quick and sometimes erroneous judgments.

This study demonstrates how perception can form a personal reality based on how a product is framed, even when there is little relationship with objective quality.

The study demonstrates the endowed progress effect, a phenomenon that increases motivation as people believe they are nearing a goal.

Sex, delicious food, a bargain, and even our digital devices all tap into this deep recess of the brain, providing the impetus for many of our behaviors.

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.

Our brains are adapted to seek rewards that make us feel accepted, attractive, important, and included.

In particular Bandura determined that people who observe someone being rewarded for a particular behavior are more likely to alter their own beliefs and subsequent actions.

Notably, Bandura also demonstrated that this technique works particularly well when people observe the behavior of people most like themselves or who are slightly more experienced (and therefore, role models).

We know our ancestors handcrafted spears and arrows for hunting, but evidence shows that these weapons were only invented five hundred thousand years ago,13 whereas we’ve been eating meat for over 2 million years.14 How, then, did we hunt during the first 75 percent of our existence?

The need to acquire physical objects, such as food and other supplies that aid our survival, is part of our brain’s operating system.

As the user scrolls to the bottom of the page, some images appear to be cut off. Images often appear out of view below the browser fold. However, these images offer a glimpse of what’s ahead, even if just barely visible. To relieve their curiosity, all users have to do is scroll to reveal the full picture (figure 24).

The rewards of the self are fueled by “intrinsic motivation” as highlighted by the work of Edward Deci and Richard Ryan. Their self-determination theory espouses that people desire, among other things, to gain a sense of competency. Adding an element of mystery to this goal makes the pursuit all the more enticing.

For many, the number of unread messages represents a sort of goal to be completed.

Mailbox cleverly segments e-mails into sorted folders to increase the frequency of users achieving “inbox zero”—a near-mystical state of having no unread e-mails (figure 26).

Mailbox delivers something other e-mail clients do not—a feeling of completion and mastery.

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

The magic words the researchers discovered? The phrase “But you are free to accept or refuse.”

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.

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.

But in fact, studies reveal that our past is an excellent predictor of our future.

Our bodies are designed to reject alcohol and capsaicin, the compound that creates the sensation of heat in spicy food.

In the investment phase, however, asking users to do a bit of work comes after users have received variable rewards, not before.

Conceivably, we humans evolved the tendency to reciprocate kindness because it improved our species’ ability to survive.

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.

The company found that the more information users invested in the site, the more committed they became to it.

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 (figure 32).

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

If you find yourself squirming as you ask yourself these questions or needing to qualify or justify your answers, stop! You failed. You have to truly want to use the product and believe it materially benefits your life as well as the lives of your users.

To take liberties with Mahatma Gandhi’s famous quote, facilitators “build the change they want to see in the world.”

But after the app’s usage exploded and some people became frighteningly obsessed with the game, Bogost shut it down, bringing on what he called the “Cowpocalypse.”12

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