Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products
Nir Eyal, Ryan Hoover
1: The Habit Zone
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. A classic paper by John Gourville, a professor of marketing at Harvard Business School, stipulates that “many innovations fail because consumers irrationally overvalue the old while companies irrationally overvalue the new.”10 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.
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users also increase their dependency on habit-forming products by storing value in them—further reducing the likelihood of switching to an alternative.
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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.15 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.
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Like flossing, frequent engagement with a product—especially over a short period of time—increases the likelihood of forming new routines.
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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.
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Painkillers solve an obvious need, relieving a specific pain, and often have quantifiable markets.
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Vitamins, by contrast, do not necessarily solve an obvious pain point. Instead they appeal to users’ emotional rather than functional needs.
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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.
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2: Trigger
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.
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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 unconsciously. We’ll explore this further in the next chapter.
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Whether through an electronic invitation, a Facebook “like,” or old fashioned word of mouth, product referrals from friends and family are often a key component of technology diffusion. Relationship triggers can create the viral hyper-growth entrepreneurs and investors lust after. Sometimes relationship triggers drive growth because people love to tell one another about a wonderful offer.
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Proper use of relationship triggers requires building an engaged user base that is enthusiastic about sharing the benefits of the product with others.
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In the case of internal triggers, the information about what to do next is encoded as a learned association in the user’s memory. The association between an internal trigger and your product, however, is not formed overnight. It can take weeks or months of frequent usage for internal triggers to latch onto cues. New habits are sparked by external triggers, but associations with internal triggers are what keeps users hooked.
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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.
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You’ll often find that people’s declared preferences—what they say they want—are far different from their revealed preferences—what they actually do.
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Jack Dorsey, cofounder of Twitter and Square, shared how his companies answer these important questions: “[If] you want to build a product that is relevant to folks, you need to put yourself in their shoes and you need to write a story from their side. So, we spend a lot of time writing what’s called user narratives.”10
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Dorsey goes on to describe how he tries to truly understand his user: “He is in the middle of Chicago and they go to a coffee store . . . This is the experience they’re going to have. It reads like a play. It’s really, really beautiful. If you do that story well, then all of the prioritization, all of the product, all of the design and all the coordination that you need to do with these products just falls out naturally because you can edit the story and everyone can relate to the story from all levels of the organization, engineers to operations to support to designers to the business side of the house.”
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a clear description of users—their desires, emotions, the context with which they use the product—is paramount to building the right solution.
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One method is to try asking the question “Why?” as many times as it takes to get to an emotion. Usually, this will happen by the fifth why. This is a technique adapted from the Toyota Production System, described by Taiichi Ohno as the “5 Whys Method.”
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photos serve as a relationship external trigger, raising awareness and serving as a cue for others to install and use the app. But Instagram photos shared on Facebook and Twitter were not the only external triggers driving new users. Others learned of the app from the media and bloggers, or through the featured placement Apple granted Instagram in its App Store—all earned external triggers.
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It is the fear of losing a special moment that instigates a pang of stress. This negative emotion is the internal trigger that brings Instagram users back to the app to alleviate this pain by capturing a photo. As users continue to use the service, new internal triggers form.
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Instagram also alleviates the increasingly recognizable pain point known as fear of missing out, or FOMO.
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REMEMBER & SHARE
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Triggers cue the user to take action and are the first step in the Hook Model. Triggers come in two types—external and internal.
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3: Action
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.
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Motivation While a trigger cues an action, motivation defines the level of desire to take that action. Dr. Edward Deci, Professor of Psychology at the University of Rochester and a leading researcher on the self-determination theory, defines motivation as “the energy for action.”2
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Fogg argues that three Core Motivators drive our desire to act. 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. The two sides of the three Core Motivators can be thought of as levers to increase or decrease the likelihood of someone’s taking a particular action by increasing or decreasing that person’s motivation.
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While internal triggers are the frequent, everyday itch experienced by users, the right motivators create action by offering the promise of desirable outcomes (i.e., a satisfying scratch).
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Denis J. Hauptly deconstructs the process of innovation into its most fundamental steps. 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.
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Consequently, any technology or product that significantly reduces the steps to complete a task will enjoy high adoption rates by the people it assists.
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In line with Hauptly’s assertion, as the steps required to get something done (in this case to get online and use the Internet) were removed or improved upon, adoption increased.
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“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.” Blogger made posting content online dramatically easier. The result? The percentage of users creating content online, as opposed to simply consuming it, increased.
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To successfully simplify a product, we must remove obstacles that stand in the user’s way. According to the Fogg Behavior Model, ability is the capacity to do a particular behavior.
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Fogg describes six “elements of simplicity”—the factors that influence a task’s difficulty.6 These are: 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.”
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To increase the likelihood that a behavior will occur, Fogg instructs designers to focus on simplicity as a function of the user’s scarcest resource at that moment. In other words: Identify what the user is missing. What is making it difficult for the user to accomplish the desired action?
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While the Facebook login function is useful for time-starved people, it should be noted that for others, the tool doesn’t necessarily ease registration. For example, users who are wary of how Facebook might share their personal information may not find the login button helpful because it could trigger new anxieties (and thus, brain cycles) about the social networking giant’s trustworthiness. Again, the roadblocks confronting users vary by person and context. There is no “one size fits all” solution, so designers should seek to understand an array of possible user challenges.
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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.
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The mind takes shortcuts informed by our surroundings to make quick and sometimes erroneous judgments.
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When Bell performed his concert in the subway station, few stopped to listen. But when framed in the context of a concert hall, he can charge beaucoup bucks.
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After doing some quick math I discovered that the undershirts not on sale were actually cheaper per shirt than the discounted brand’s package. People often anchor to one piece of information when making a decision.
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The study demonstrates the endowed progress effect, a phenomenon that increases motivation as people believe they are nearing a goal. Sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook utilize this heuristic to encourage people to divulge more information about themselves when completing their online profiles. On LinkedIn every user starts with some semblance of progress (figure 19). The next step is to “Improve Your Profile Strength” by supplying additional information. As users complete each step, the meter incrementally shows the user is advancing. Cleverly, LinkedIn’s completion bar jump-starts the perception of progress and does not include a numeric scale.
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For any behavior to occur, a trigger must be present at the same time as the user has sufficient ability and motivation to take action. To increase the desired behavior, ensure a clear trigger is present; next, increase ability by making the action easier to do; finally, align with the right motivator. Every behavior is driven by one of three Core Motivators: seeking pleasure and avoiding pain; seeking hope and avoiding fear; seeking social acceptance while avoiding social rejection.
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Ability is influenced by the six factors of time, money, physical effort, brain cycles, social deviance, and non-routineness. Ability is dependent on users and their context at that moment.
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4: Variable Reward
results showed that the nucleus accumbens was not activating when the reward (in this case a monetary payout) was received, but rather in anticipation of it.
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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. The stress of desire in the brain appears to compel us,
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Instead of providing a pellet every time a pigeon tapped the lever, the machine discharged food after a random number of taps. Sometimes the lever dispensed food, other times not. Skinner revealed that the intermittent reward dramatically increased the number of times the pigeons tapped the lever. Adding variability increased the frequency of the pigeons’ completing the intended action.
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Our brains are adapted to seek rewards that make us feel accepted, attractive, important, and included.
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The need to acquire physical objects, such as food and other supplies that aid our survival, is part of our brain’s operating system.
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In Mahalo’s case, executives assumed that paying users would drive repeat engagement with the site. After all, people like money, right? Unfortunately, Mahalo had an incomplete understanding of its users’ drivers. Ultimately, the company found that people did not want to use a Q&A site to make money. If the trigger was a desire for monetary rewards, users were better off spending their time earning an hourly wage. And
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However, Quora demonstrated that social rewards and the variable reinforcement of recognition from peers proved to be much more frequent and salient motivators. Quora instituted an upvoting system that reports user satisfaction with answers and provides a steady stream of social feedback. Quora’s social rewards have proven more attractive than Mahalo’s monetary rewards.
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Only by understanding what truly matters to users can a company correctly match the right variable reward to their intended behavior.
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Recently, gamification—defined as the use of gamelike elements in nongame environments—has been used with varying success. Points, badges, and leaderboards can prove effective, but only if they scratch the user’s itch. When there is a mismatch between the customer’s problem and the company’s assumed solution, no amount of gamification will help spur engagement. Likewise, if the user has no ongoing itch at all—say, no need to return repeatedly to a site that lacks any value beyond the initial visit—gamification will fail because of a lack of inherent interest in the product or service offered. In other words, gamification is not a “one size fits all” solution for driving user engagement.
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Variable rewards are not magic fairy dust that a product designer can sprinkle onto a product to make it instantly more attractive. Rewards must fit into the narrative of why the product is used and align with the user’s internal triggers and motivations.
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researchers wanted to know if they could influence how much money people handed to a total stranger asking for bus fare by using just a few specially encoded words. They discovered a technique so simple and effective it doubled the amount people gave.
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The magic words the researchers discovered? The phrase “But you are free to accept or refuse.” The “but you are free” technique demonstrates how we are more likely to be persuaded to give when our ability to choose is reaffirmed.
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If you have ever grumbled at your mother when she tells you to put on a coat or felt your blood pressure rise when your boss micromanages you, you have experienced what psychologists term reactance, the hair-trigger response to threats to your autonomy. However, when a request is coupled with an affirmation of the right to choose, reactance is kept at bay.
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Unfortunately, too many companies build their products betting users will do what they make them do instead of letting them do what they want to do. Companies fail to change user behaviors because they do not make their services enjoyable for its own sake, often asking users to learn new, unfamiliar actions instead of making old routines easier.
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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. By maintaining the users’ freedom to choose, products can facilitate the adoption of new habits and change behavior for good.
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Perhaps no company in recent memory epitomizes the mercurial nature of variable rewards quite like Zynga, makers of the hit Facebook game FarmVille.
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It turned out that Zynga’s new games were not really new at all. The company had simply done retreads of FarmVille; players had lost interest and investors followed suit. What was once novel and intriguing became rote and boring. The -Villes had lost their variability and with it, their viability.
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As the Zynga story demonstrates, an element of mystery is an important component of continued user interest.
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Online games like FarmVille suffer from what I term finite variability—an experience that becomes predictable after use.
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Experiences with finite variability become less engaging because they eventually become predictable. Businesses with finite variability are not inferior per se; they just operate under different constraints. They must constantly churn out new content and experiences to cater to their consumers’ insatiable desire for novelty.
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both Hollywood and the video gaming industry operate under what is called the studio model, whereby a deep-pocketed company provides backing and distribution to a portfolio of movies or games, uncertain which one will become the next megahit.
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This is in contrast with companies making products exhibiting infinite variability—experiences that maintain user interest by sustaining variability with use.
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For example, games played to completion offer finite variability, while those played with other people have higher degrees of infinite variability because the players themselves alter the gameplay throughout. World of Warcraft, the world’s most popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game, still captures the attention of more than 10 million active users eight years after its release.31
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While content consumption, like watching a TV show, is an example of finite variability, content creation is infinitely variable.
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As described, the most habit-forming products and services utilize one or more of the three variable rewards types: the tribe, the hunt, and the self. In fact, many habit-forming products offer multiple variable rewards.
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E-mail, for example, utilizes all three variable reward types.
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First, there is uncertainty concerning who might be sending us a message. We have a social obligation to respond to e-mails and a desire to be seen as agreeable (rewards of the tribe). We may also be curious about what information is in the e-mail: Perhaps something related to our career or business awaits us? Checking e-mail informs us of opportunities or threats to our material possessions and livelihood (rewards of the hunt). Lastly, e-mail is in itself a task—challenging us to sort, categorize, and act to eliminate unread messages. We are motivated by the uncertain nature of our fluctuating e-mail count and feel compelled to gain control of our in-box (rewards of the self).
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REMEMBER & SHARE
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5: Investment
A psychological phenomenon known as the escalation of commitment has been shown to make our brains do all sorts of funny things. The power of commitment makes some people play video games until they keel over and die.1 It is used to influence people to give more to charity.2 It has even been used to coerce prisoners of war into switching allegiances.3
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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.
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Unlike its competitors who sell preassembled merchandise, IKEA puts its customers to work. It turns out there’s a hidden benefit to making users invest physical effort in assembling the product—by asking customers to assemble their own furniture, Ariely believes they adopt an irrational love of the furniture they built, just like the test subjects did in the origami experiments.
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Businesses that leverage user effort confer higher value to their products simply because their users have put work into them. The users have invested in the products through their labor.
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To reconcile these two conflicting ideas, the fox changes his perception of the grapes and in the process relieves the pain of what psychologists term cognitive dissonance. The irrational manipulation of the way one sees the world is not limited to fictional animals in children’s stories. We humans do this as well.
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The last step of the Hook Model is the investment phase, the point at which users are asked to do a bit of work. Here, users are prompted to put something of value into the system, which increases the likelihood of their using the product and of successive passes through the Hook cycle.
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Unlike in the action phase of the Hook discussed in chapter 3, investments are about the anticipation of longer-term rewards, not immediate gratification.
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Also in contrast to the action phase, the investment phase increases friction. This certainly breaks conventional thinking in the product design community that all user experiences should be as easy and effortless as possible. This approach still generally holds true, as does my advice in the action phase to make the intended actions as simple as possible. In the investment phase, however, asking users to do a bit of work comes after users have received variable rewards, not before. The timing of asking for user investment is critically important. By asking for the investment after the reward, the company has an opportunity to leverage a central trait of human behavior.
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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.
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Reputation is a form of stored value users can literally take to the bank.
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It can often be the deciding factor in what price a seller gets for an item on eBay, who is selected for a TaskRabbit job, which restaurants appear at the top of Yelp search results, and the price of a room rental on Airbnb.
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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).
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Investing time and effort into learning to use a product is a form of investment and stored value. Once a user has acquired a skill, using the service becomes easier and moves them to the right on the ability axis of the Fogg Behavior Model
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Once users have invested the effort to acquire a skill, they are less likely to switch to a competing product.
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Like every phase in the Hook Model, the investment phase requires careful use. It is not a carte blanche tool for asking users to do onerous tasks. In fact, quite the opposite. Just as in the action phase described in chapter 3, to achieve the intended behavior in the investment phase, the product designer must consider whether users have sufficient motivation and ability to engage in the intended behavior. If users are not doing what the designer intended in the investment phase, the designer may be asking them to do too much.
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triggers bring users back to the product. Ultimately, habit-forming products create a mental association with an internal trigger.
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Habit-forming technologies leverage the user’s past behavior to initiate an external trigger in the future. Users set future triggers during the investment phase, providing companies with an opportunity to reengage the user. We will now explore a few examples of how companies have helped load the next trigger during the investment phase.
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By simplifying the investment of sorting through potential mates, Tinder makes loading the next trigger more likely with each swipe. The more swipes, the more potential matches are made; naturally, each match sends notifications to both interested parties.
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Why are users so in love with Snapchat? Its success can largely be attributed to the fact that users load the next trigger every time they use the service.
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a back-and-forth relay that keeps people hooked into the service by loading the next trigger with each message sent.
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Like many social networks, Pinterest loads the next trigger during the investment phase of the Hook.
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To do this, the habit-forming technology increases the value of the product with each pass through the Hook. Through successive cycles of the Hook Model, users increase their affinity for the experience. They increasingly come to rely on the product as the solution to their problems until finally, the new habit—and routine—is formed.
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6: What Are You Going to Do with This?
You are now equipped to use the Hook Model to ask yourself these five fundamental questions for building effective hooks: 1. What do users really want? What pain is your product relieving? (Internal trigger) 2. What brings users to your service? (External trigger) 3. What is the simplest action users take in anticipation of reward, and how can you simplify your product to make this action easier? (Action) 4. Are users fulfilled by the reward yet left wanting more? (Variable reward) 5. 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)
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The Hook Model is fundamentally about changing people’s behaviors, but the power to build persuasive products should be used with caution. Creating habits can be a force for good, but it can also be used for nefarious purposes. What responsibility do product makers have when creating user habits?
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Ian Bogost, the famed game creator and professor, calls the wave of habit-forming technologies the “cigarette of this century” and warns of their equally addictive and potentially destructive side effects.3 You may be asking, “When is it wrong to manipulate users?”
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According to famed Silicon Valley investor Paul Graham, we haven’t had time to develop societal “antibodies to addictive new things.”5 Graham places responsibility on the user: “Unless we want to be canaries in the coal mine of each new addiction—the people whose sad example becomes a lesson to future generations—we’ll have to figure out for ourselves what to avoid and how.”
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FIGURE 36
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To use the Manipulation Matrix (figure 36), the maker needs to ask two questions. First, “Would I use the product myself?” and second, “Will the product help users materially improve their lives?”
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In building a habit for a user other than you, you cannot consider yourself a facilitator unless you have experienced the problem firsthand.
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First, it is important to recognize that the percentage of users who form a detrimental dependency is very small.
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For the first time though, companies have access to data that could be used to flag which users are using their products too much. Whether companies choose to act on that data in a way that aids their users is naturally a question of corporate responsibility.
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Companies building habit-forming technologies have a moral obligation—and perhaps someday a legal mandate—to inform and protect users who are forming unhealthy attachments to their products. It would behoove entrepreneurs building potentially addictive products to set guidelines for identifying and helping addicted users.
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Even though the world is becoming a potentially more addictive place, most people have the ability to self-regulate their behaviors.
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Peddlers tend to lack the empathy and insights needed to create something users truly want. Often the peddler’s project results in a time-wasting failure because the designers did not fully understand their users. As a result, no one finds the product useful.
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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.
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Creating a product that the designer does not believe improves users’ lives and that he himself would not use is called exploitation.
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7: Case Study: The Bible App
The most highly regarded entrepreneurs are driven by meaning, a vision for greater good that drives them forward.
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8: Habit Testing and Where to Look for Habit-Forming Opportunities
Building a habit-forming product is an iterative process and requires user-behavior analysis and continuous experimentation.
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First, define what it means to be a devoted user. How often “should” one use your product?
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Publicly available data from similar products or solutions can help define your users and engagement targets. If data are not available, educated assumptions must be made—but be realistic
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Once you know how often users should use your product, dig into the numbers to identify how many and which type of users meet this threshold. As a best practice, use cohort analysis to measure changes in user behavior through future product iterations.
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If you have exceeded that bar, though, and identified your habitual users, the next step is to codify the steps they took using your product to understand what hooked them.
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Users will interact with your product in slightly different ways. Even if you have a standard user flow, the way users engage with your product creates a unique fingerprint.
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You are looking for a Habit Path—a series of similar actions shared by your most loyal users.
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Armed with new insights, it is time to revisit your product and identify ways to nudge new users down the same Habit Path taken by devotees. This may include an update to the registration funnel, content changes, feature removal, or increased emphasis on an existing feature.
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Tracking users by cohort and comparing their activity with that of habitual users should guide how products evolve and improve.
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When it comes to developing new products, there are no guarantees. Along with creating an engaging product as described in this book, start-ups must also find a way to monetize and grow.
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Several things must go right for a new company to succeed, and forming user habits is just one of them.
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Paul Graham advises entrepreneurs to leave the sexy-sounding business ideas behind and instead build for their own needs: “Instead of asking ‘what problem should I solve?’ ask ‘what problem do I wish someone else would solve for me?’”2
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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.
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Careful introspection can uncover opportunities for building habit-forming products. 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.
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Observing your own behavior can inspire the next habit-forming product or inform a breakthrough improvement to an existing solution.
| Location: 1948 |
Color: blue |
Nascent Behaviors Sometimes technologies that appear to cater to a niche will cross into the mainstream. Behaviors that start with a small group of users can expand to a wider population, but only if they cater to a broad need. However, the fact that the technology is at first used only by a small population often deceives observers into dismissing the product’s true potential.
| Location: 1951 |
Color: yellow |
The invention of the telephone was also dismissed at first. Sir William Henry Preece, the chief engineer of the British post office, famously declared, “The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys.”6 In 1911 Ferdinand Foch, the future commander in chief of the Allied forces in World War I, said, “Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value.”7 In 1957 the editor of business books for Prentice Hall told his publisher, “I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won’t last out the year.” The Internet itself, and each successive wave of innovation, has continually received criticism for its inability to gain mass appeal. In 1995 Clifford Stoll wrote a Newsweek article, “The Internet? Bah!” in which he declared, “The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper.” Stoll continued, “We’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Internet. Uh, sure.”8
| Location: 1957 |
Color: yellow |
Old habits die hard and few people have the foresight to see how new innovations will eventually change their routines. However, by looking to early adopters who have already developed nascent behaviors, entrepreneurs and designers can identify niche use cases, which can be taken mainstream.
| Location: 1967 |
Color: blue |
As discussed in the first chapter, many habit-forming technologies begin as vitamins—nice-to-have products that, over time, become must-have painkillers by relieving an itch or pain.
| Location: 1974 |
Color: blue |
Mike Maples Jr., a Silicon Valley “super angel” investor, likens technology to big-wave surfing. In 2012 Maples blogged, “In my experience, every decade or so, we see a major new tech wave. When I was in high school, it was the PC revolution. I made my career as an entrepreneur at the end of the client/server wave and in the early phases of the Internet wave. Today, we are at the mass adoption phase of the social networking wave. I am obsessed with these technology waves and have spent a lot of time studying how they develop and what patterns can be observed.”
| Location: 1978 |
Color: yellow |
“They start with infrastructure. Advances in infrastructure are the preliminary forces that enable a large wave to gather. As the wave begins to gather, enabling technologies and platforms create the basis for new types of applications that cause a gathering wave to achieve massive penetration and customer adoption. Eventually, these waves crest and subside, making way for the next gathering wave to take shape.”9
| Location: 1982 |
Color: pink |
Wherever new technologies suddenly make a behavior easier, new possibilities are born. The creation of a new infrastructure often opens up unforeseen ways to make other actions simpler or more rewarding.
| Location: 1987 |
Color: yellow |
Identifying areas where a new technology makes cycling through the Hook Model faster, more frequent, or more rewarding provides fertile ground for developing new habit-forming products.
| Location: 1992 |
Color: yellow |
Whenever a massive change occurs in the way people interact with technology, expect to find plenty of opportunities ripe for harvesting.
| Location: 1996 |
Color: yellow |
A long history of technology businesses earned their fortunes discovering behavioral secrets made visible because of a change in the interface. Apple and Microsoft succeeded by turning clunky terminals into graphical user interfaces (GUI) accessible by mainstream consumers. Google simplified the search interface as compared with those of ad-heavy, difficult-to-use competitors such as Yahoo! and Lycos.
| Location: 1998 |
Color: blue |
To uncover where interfaces are changing, Paul Buchheit, a partner at Y Combinator, encourages entrepreneurs to “live in the future.”10 A profusion of interface changes are just a few years away. Wearable technologies like Google Glass, the Oculus Rift virtual reality goggles, and the Pebble smartwatch promise to change how users interact with the real and digital worlds. By looking forward to anticipate where interfaces will change, the enterprising designer can uncover new ways to form user habits.
| Location: 2009 |
Color: blue |