Nir Eyal sets out a framework for building engagement with users of a product, based on repeatedly guiding users through a series of ‘hooks’ to form habits. “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.” Portfolio/Penguin 2014.

People use their smartphones a lot

  • 79% of smartphone owners check their device within 15 minutes of waking up every day.
  • People use their smartphones around 150 times a day, according to industry professionals

What is a habit?

  • A habit is an automatic behavior triggered by situational cues.
  • Habits require little or no conscious thought.
  • A product has high habit-forming potential if it is seen as useful and is used frequently. Fundamentally your product must solve users’ problems.

The four stages of the Hook Model

1. Trigger

A trigger instructs the user to take an action. Triggers can be external or internal.

Habit-forming products start by using external triggers like email, app icons or notifications, but over repeated hook cycles users form associations with internal triggers. Internal triggers are based on existing behaviours or emotions.

  • External – tells the user what to do next by placing information in the user’s environment. e.g paid (unsustainable, earned (media and PR), relationship (peer recommendations), owned (“Owned triggers consume a piece of real estate in the user’s environment. They consistently show up in daily life and it is ultimately up to the user to opt in to allowing these triggers to appear.” e.g. an app icon, email newsletter). “Without owned triggers and users’ tacit permission to enter their attentional space, it is difficult to cue users frequently enough to change their behavior.”
  • Internal – associations in the user’s memory tell them what to do next. Achieved by tightly coupling a product with a thought, emotion or existing routine. e.g. “A need is triggered in Yin’s mind every time a moment is worth holding on to, and for her, the immediate solution is Instagram. Yin no longer requires an external stimulus to prompt her to use the app – the internal trigger happens on its own.” So you need to understand a user’s internal triggers – the pains they seek to solve. Focus on these emotions rather than product features. (“Only an accurate understanding of our user’s underlying needs can inform the product requirements.”) And don’t just ask people what they want “talking to users to reveal these wants will likely prove ineffective because they themselves don’t know which emotions motivate them… 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.” Ask “why” 5 times to arrive at an emotion.

2. Action

Activity undertaken by a user in anticipation of a reward. To increase the likelihood of an action being taken:

  1. Make it easy
  2. Maximise the motivation

Core motivations:

  • Seek pleasure and avoid pain
  • Seek hope and avoid fear
  • Seek social acceptance, avoid rejection

The 6 elements of simplicity:

  • Time
  • Money
  • Physical effort
  • Brain cycles
  • Social acceptance/deviance
  • Whether an action is routine/disruptive of routine

To make action more likely, simplify it with regard to the user’s scarcest resource at that moment.

Utilise heuristics to encourage people to take action:

  • the scarcity effect: items that appear scarce are valued more highly
  • the framing effect: people assess information in context – e.g. ignoring Joshua Bell when he performed in the subway, or enjoying identical wine more if told it cost $90 rather than $5.
  • the anchoring effect: people often fixate on one piece of information when making a decision, e.g. buying something because it’s on sale even though another item is actually better value.
  • the endowed progress effect: people want to continue with progress towards a goal. So make them seem like they are already making good progress – e.g. giving loyalty cards starting part-way through rather than at 0%. In a study, both groups had to purchase 8 further car washes to gain a free one, but one group started with 2/10 completion rather than 0/8. This group had an 82% higher completion rate. Linkedin Profile strength uses this heuristic too.

Respecting people’s autonomy makes them more likely to take the action you want. Telling people “But you are free to accept or refuse” makes them more likely to comply. So when you make a request, affirm their right to choose. Leverage “familiar behaviors users want to do, instead of have to do.” “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 fulfil existing needs.”

3. Variable Reward

Predictable rewards don’t create desire. But variable rewards are compelling. This isn’t because of the sensation from the reward itself, but the need to alleviate the craving for the reward.

e.g. looking through social media and scanning through to find material that might be relevant to you. “The exciting juxtaposition of relevant and irrelevant, tantalizing and plain, beautiful and common, sets her brain’s dopamine system aflutter with the promise of reward.”

Types of variable reward:

  1. The Tribe: feeling “accepted, attractive, important and included”. e.g. people liking your Facebook post or upvoting your Stack Overflow answer. These social rewards, of connectedness to other people, are all variable.
  2. The Hunt: seeking resources to aid survival e.g. material resources or information. e.g. searching through Twitter to find something interesting, or carrying out a Google search to answer a question.
  3. The Self: acquiring a sense of competency. e.g. getting better at a computer game, or improving at codeacademy. In both cases you have feedback on your performance, are improving your self and your skills, and experience variable rewards.

On gamification (“the user of gamelike elements in nongame environments”)

Points, badges and leaderboards only prove effective if there is a fundamental match between the customer’s problem and the company’s solution. Otherwise no amount of gamification will help. “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.”

“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