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Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products

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Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products

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Highlights & Notes

Forming habits is imperative for the survival of many products.

Instead of relying on expensive marketing, habit-forming companies link their services to the users’ daily routines and emotions.

Through consecutive Hook cycles, successful products reach their ultimate goal of unprompted user engagement, bringing users back repeatedly, without depending on costly advertising or aggressive messaging.

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

Introducing variability multiplies the effect, creating a focused state, which suppresses the areas of the brain associated with judgment and reason while activating the parts associated with wanting and desire.

When harnessed correctly, technology can enhance lives through healthful behaviors that improve our relationships, make us smarter, and increase productivity.

Management’s job, in the eyes of shareholders, is to implement strategies to grow future profits by increasing revenues or decreasing expenses.

habits are a competitive advantage. Products that change customer routines are less susceptible to attacks from other companies.

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

The nontransferable value created and stored inside these services discourages users from leaving.

Companies that succeed in building a habit-forming business are often associated with game-changing, wildly successful innovation.

Like flossing, frequent engagement with a product—especially over a short period of time—increases the likelihood of forming new routines.

For an infrequent action to become a habit, the user must perceive a high degree of utility, either from gaining pleasure or avoiding pain.

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).

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 pain.

Habit-forming products often start as nice-to-haves (vitamins) but once the habit is formed, they become must-haves (painkillers).

External triggers are embedded with information, which tells the user what to do next.

Internal triggers manifest automatically in your mind. Connecting internal triggers with a product is the brass ring of consumer technology.

Products that successfully create habits soothe the user’s pain by laying claim to a particular feeling. To do so, product designers must know their user’s internal triggers—that is, the pain they seek to solve. Finding customers’ internal triggers requires learning more about people than what they can tell you in a survey, though. It requires digging deeper to understand how your users feel.

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.

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.

To initiate action, doing must be easier than thinking. Remember, a habit is a behavior done with little or no conscious thought. The more effort—either physical or mental—required to perform the desired action, the less likely it is to occur.

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.

Let’s walk through an example Fogg uses to explain his model. Imagine a time when your mobile phone rang but you didn’t answer it. Why not? Perhaps the phone was buried in a bag and therefore difficult to reach. In this case your inability to easily answer the call inhibited the action. Your ability was limited. Maybe you thought the caller was a telemarketer or someone else you did not want to speak to. Your lack of motivation influenced you to ignore the call. It is possible that the call was important and within arm’s reach, but the ringer on your phone was silenced. Despite having both a strong motivation and easy access to answer the call, it was completely missed because you never heard it ring—in other words, no trigger was present.

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.

In his book Something Really New: Three Simple Steps to Creating Truly Innovative Products,4 author Denis J. Hauptly deconstructs the process of innovation into its most fundamental steps.

Consequently, any technology or product that significantly reduces the steps to complete a task will enjoy high adoption rates by the people it assists.

“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.”

As recent history of the web demonstrates, the ease or difficulty of doing a particular action affects the likelihood that a behavior will occur. 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.

There are many counterintuitive and surprising ways companies can boost users’ motivation or increase their ability by understanding heuristics—the mental shortcuts we take to make decisions and form opinions.

The appearance of scarcity affected their perception of value.

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

People often anchor to one piece of information when making a decision.

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

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.

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

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

Rewards must fit into the narrative of why the product is used and align with the user’s internal triggers and motivations.

Although influencing behavior can be a part of good product design, heavy-handed efforts may have adverse consequences and risk losing users’ trust.

The turn of phrase has not only proven to increase how much bus fare people give, but has also been effective in boosting charitable donations and participation in voluntary surveys. In fact, a recent meta-analysis of forty-two studies involving over twenty-two thousand participants concluded that these few words, placed at the end of a request, are a highly effective way to gain compliance, doubling the likelihood of people saying yes.24 The magic words the researchers discovered? The phrase “But you are free to accept or refuse.”

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. 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.

To change behavior, products must ensure the users feel in control. People must want to use the service, not feel they have to.

Experiences with finite variability become less engaging because they eventually become predictable.

The commitments we make have a powerful effect on us and play an important role in the things we do, the products we buy, and the habits we form.

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.

The more effort we put into something, the more likely we are to value it; we are more likely to be consistent with our past behaviors; and finally, we change our preferences to avoid cognitive dissonance.

Rationalization helps us give reasons for our behaviors, even when those reasons might have been designed by others.

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

Habit-forming technologies leverage the user’s past behavior to initiate an external trigger in the future.

The more users invest in a product through tiny bits of work, the more valuable the product becomes in their lives and the less they question its use.

  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)

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.

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

Building a habit-forming product is an iterative process and requires user-behavior analysis and continuous experimentation.

First, define what it means to be a devoted user. How often “should” one use your product?

You are looking for a Habit Path—a series of similar actions shared by your most loyal users.

Tracking users by cohort and comparing their activity with that of habitual users should guide how products evolve and improve.

“Instead of asking ‘what problem should I solve?’ ask ‘what problem do I wish someone else would solve for me?’”

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.

Wherever new technologies suddenly make a behavior easier, new possibilities are born.

Many companies have found success in driving new habit formation by identifying how changing user interactions can create new routines.

Be aware of your behaviors and emotions for the next week as you use everyday products. Ask yourself: What triggered me to use these products? Was I prompted externally or through internal means? Am I using these products as intended? How might these products improve their on-boarding funnels, reengage users through additional external triggers, or encourage users to invest in their services?

(NirAndFar.com),

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