Review

The book details how habit-forming products are created using the Hooked Model. It covers the four phases of the model – Trigger, Action, Variable Reward, and Investment – and provides insights on designing products that capture users’ attention and become habitual. It emphasizes the importance of understanding internal and external triggers, making actions easy to take, providing variable rewards, and encouraging user investment.

The book also highlights the ethical considerations of building persuasive products. The author proposes two questions to assess these considerations: “Would you use it?” and “Is it making people’s lives better?”

Key Takeaways

The 20% that gave me 80% of the value.

• Habits are automatic behaviors triggered by situational cues. They are things we do with little or no conscious thought.
• Products are engineered and designed to tempt us into habitual usage during our daily routines.
• The Hooked Model is a four-phase process that companies use to create unprompted user engagement and habitual usage.
• The Hooked Model
  1. Trigger: A trigger sparks the behavior in habit-forming products. Triggers can be inside or outside the product; they cue your next behavior.
  2. Action: The action is the behavior that’s done in anticipation of a reward. Companies can encourage users to take more actions by enhancing their motivation and simplifying the product so they’re easier to do.
  3. Variable Reward: Variable rewards help hook users by creating a craving. The expectation of reward creates dopamine, suppressing judgment and activating desire.
  4. Investment: If the user makes an investment (e.g. time, data, effort, social capital, or money), it increases the odds they’ll revisit the cycle in the future.

• Half of our daily actions are habitual, done with little or no conscious thought.
• Habits allow us to focus our attention on other things. The brain codifies actions in certain situations so it can reduce unnecessary deliberation.
• Habit-forming products create unprompted user engagement. The behavior occurs as an automatic response to a cue. The user is automatically triggered to use the product during routine events, without overt calls to action.
• Products that leverage your habits are valuable because they… increase customer lifetime value, decrease price sensitivity, supercharge growth and help form a competitive moat.
• Old habits die hard and new products need to offer dramatic improvements (e.g. 10x) to shake users out of old routines.
• The more frequently a new behavior, the stronger the habit becomes. Habits keep users loyal. People don’t think about whether or not to use Google; they just do. Often engagement makes algorithms and products more effective resulting in virtuous cycle.
• Your product has habit-forming potential if it’s used frequently and people are motivated to use it
• Habit-forming technologies can be both vitamins and painkillers. At first they seem like nice-to-have vitamins, but once the habit is established, they provide an ongoing pain remedy.
• Habits can be healthy or unhealthy. Addictions are self-destructive and cause harm. Creating an addictive product would mean you’re intentionally hurting people.

Triggers

• Habits are formed over time, but the chain reaction starts with a trigger.
• Habit-forming products cue users with a call to action.
• Types of External Triggers: Companies can utilize four types of external triggers:
  • Paid Triggers: e.g. paid ads get users attention and prompt an action. Habit-forming companies don’t rely on paid triggers as much as other companies.
  • Earned Triggers: e.g. favorable press mentions or being featured on the app store. Effective at driving awareness but short-lived.
  • Relationship Triggers: e.g. word of mouth referrals.
  • Owned Triggers: e.g. an app icon, consistently show up in daily life.
• The goal of external triggers is to propel users into successive cycles of the Hooked Model so they do not need further prompting from external triggers.
• Internal Triggers manifest in the mind and include emotions and routine.
• Negative emotions (boredom, loneliness, frustration) are powerful internal triggers. They instigate a pain or irritation that prompts action. The discomfort can be below the perceptibility of consciousness.
• New habits are sparked by external triggers, but internal triggers keep users hooked.
• To create habit-forming products, designers must understand the user’s pain and emotional triggers. By creating associations with internal triggers and addressing user pain points, companies can build solutions that become habitual for users.

Actions

• To initiate action, doing must be easier than thinking. The more effort to perform the desired action, the less likely it is to occur.
• Fogg posits three things need to be true to initiate a behavior/action. The user must have sufficient motivation. The user must have the ability to complete the desired action, A trigger must be present to activate the behavior.
• While a trigger cues an action, motivation defines the level of desire to take that action.
• The right motivators create action by offering the promise of desirable outcomes.
• Three Simple Steps to Creating Truly Innovative Products
  1. Understand the reason people use a product or service.
  2. Lay out the steps the customer must take to get the job done.
  3. Start removing steps until you reach the simplest possible process.
• Fogg’s Six Elements of Simplicity:
  1. Time – how long it takes to complete an action
  2. Money – the fiscal cost of taking an action
  3. Physical effort – the amount of labor involved in taking the action
  4. Brain cycles – the level of mental effort and focus required to take an action
  5. Social deviance – how accepted the behavior is by others
  6. Non-routine – how much the action matches or disrupts existing routines
• Google reduced the amount of time and the cognitive effort required to find what the user was looking for.
• Heuristics for boosting motivation:
  • Scarcity Effect: The appearance of scarcity affects our perception of value.
  • Framing Effect: Context also shapes our perception. The mind takes shortcuts informed by our surroundings to make quick and judgments.
  • Anchoring Effect: People often anchor to a piece of information when making a decision.
  • Endowed Progress Effect: our motivation increases if we believe we are nearing a goal.
• Map the user journey from trigger to desired outcome. Count the number of steps it takes before users obtain the reward they came for. Compare with competing products and services. Brainstorm three testable ways to make the intended tasks easier to complete. Consider applying heuristics to make habit-forming actions more likely.

Variable Reward

• Reward your users by solving a problem, reinforcing their motivation for the action taken.
• Our brains release dopamine in anticipation of reward (not when we receive it). We are driven to act not by the reward sensation, but by the need to satisfy the craving for the reward.
• Intermittent reward greatly enhances habit strength, increasing the frequency of the intended action. It spikes dopamine.
• Variable rewards come in three types: the tribe, the hunt, and the self.
  • Tribe: Driven by our connectedness with other people
  • Hunt: Pursuing and capturing something, satisfying our innate desire to acquire resources and information.
    • Humans have always enjoyed chasing and hunting. In the past, we would separate an animal from its herd and exhaust it by running for hours and miles until we caught and killed it. The pursuit was driven by the reward of the pursuit.
    • The need to acquire objects and supplies that aid our survival, is part of our brain’s operating system.
    • Social media feeds are about the hunt.
  • Self: Personal gratification and a sense of competency drive users to overcome obstacles and achieve goals, even when they don’t find enjoyment in the process (e.g. a jigsaw puzzle).
    • Intrinsic motivation drives us to gain a sense of competency.
    • E.g. video games, inbox zero, Wikipedia contribution
• Maintain a sense of autonomy and freedom of choice. Using heavy-handed tactics will cause your audience to lose trust. By allowing users to maintain their freedom, you can disarm their instinctive rejection of being told what to do.
• Products with finite variability suffer from declining power from variable rewards. The products become less engaging and more predictable (e.g. Zynga / Farmville).

Investment

• The escalation of commitment: The more we invest time and effort into something, the more we value it. Labor leads to love.
• This is due to three effects:
  • We irrationally value our efforts – When users invest their own effort and labor, they tend to value the end result more. This is known as the IKEA effect.
  • We seek to be consistent with our past behaviors – Our past is an excellent predictor of our future. A study showed homeowners were more willing to place a large sign on their lawn if they’d already agreed to placing a smaller one.
  • We avoid cognitive dissonance – to avoid the cognitive dissonance of not liking something that others seem to, we slowly change our perception.
• Investments are about the anticipation of longer-term rewards, not immediate gratification.
  • Following people on Twitter is an investment which increases the likelihood of returning in the future.
• In contrast to the action phase, the investment phase increases friction.
• In the action phase make actions as simple as possible BUT ask for an investment after a reward and you can increase engagement.
• Software can adapt to user needs and enhance the experience by utilizing their investments in the product.
• Types of investment:
  • Data: Users invest in a service by adding their personal data, increasing their commitment to the platform.
  • Followers: Collecting and following the right people adds value to the product and keeps users engaged.
  • Reputation: Building a positive reputation on online platforms enhances user experience and increases trust.
  • Skill: Investing time and effort to learn and acquire skills within a product leads to easier usage and reduces the likelihood of switching to a competitor.

• Practical questions to ask about your users and your product:
  • 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)
• The power to build persuasive products should be used with caution.
• Is social media the 21st century cigarette? We haven’t yet developed antibodies to these new addictions.
• Two key questions to guide your moral compass:
  • Do you use the product yourself?
  • Will the product help people improve their lives?
• You have a moral obligation to inform and protect users who are forming unhealthy attachments to your product.

Habit Testing

• Run your idea through the four phases of the model will help you discover potential weaknesses in your product’s habit-forming potential. Practical Questions:
  • Does your users’ internal trigger frequently prompt them to action?
  • Is your external trigger cueing them when they are most likely to act?
  • Is your design simple enough to make taking the action easy?
  • Does the reward satisfy your users’ need while leaving them wanting more?
  • Do your users invest a bit of work in the product, storing value to improve the experience with use and loading the next trigger?
• Habit Testing in three steps
  1. Identify: Find out how many habitual users you have. Define how often a devoted user “should” use your product based on industry benchmarks for different categories.
  2. Codify: Analyze the steps taken by devoted users, understand what hooked them. You’re looking for a habit path → a series of actions shared by your most loyal users.
  3. Modify: Modify the user experience to encourage this behavior. Identify ways to nudge new users down the same Habit Path taken by devotees (e.g. update registration funnel, remove a feature etc)
• Habit Testing is an ongoing process for every new feature and product iteration. Track users by cohort and compare their activity.

Discovering Habit-forming Opportunities

• Build for your own needs, what problem do you wish someone would solve for you?
• Technologies that appear niche can cross into the mainstream if they cater to a broad need. Many world-changing innovations were written off as novelties.
• Enabling Technologies come in waves. They start with infrastructure, then enabling technologies and platforms create the basis for new types of applications that cause a gathering wave to achieve massive penetration and customer adoption. New technologies create new possibilities by making behaviors easier. Look for technologies that make cycling through the Hooked Model faster, more frequent, or more rewarding.