Hooked · Nir Eyal · 2013
Products are designed to foster habitual daily use through the Hooked Model, a four-phase process for creating unprompted user engagement. This model consists of a trigger that cues behaviour, an action taken in anticipation of reward, variable rewards that create cravings, and user investment that increases future engagement. By enhancing motivation, simplifying actions, and leveraging dopamine release, companies encourage users to repeatedly engage with their products, forming habits that keep users coming back.
The brain codifies actions in certain situations to reduce unnecessary deliberation. Habits allow us to focus our attention on other things.
If introducing your product requires users dropping old habits beware. New products need to offer dramatic improvements (e.g. 10x) to shake users out of old routines.
The more frequent a new behaviour, the stronger the habit becomes. Often engagement makes algorithms and products more effective resulting in a virtuous cycle.
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.
Triggers
Habits are formed over time, but the chain reaction starts with a trigger.
A trigger can be internal or external.
External triggers are used to propel users into successive cycles of the Hooked Model - they’re a temporary tool to drive people toward habitual usage. There are four main types of external triggers:
- Paid: Advertising to prompt action (less relied on by habit-forming companies)
- Earned: Press mentions or app store features (effective but short-term)
- Relationship: Word-of-mouth referrals
- Owned: Consistent presence in daily life (e.g. app icons)
Internal Triggers are mental cues, including emotions and routines, that prompt action. Negative emotions like boredom, loneliness, and frustration are particularly powerful, often triggering behaviours subconsciously. While external triggers initiate new habits, internal triggers sustain them. To create habit-forming products, designers must deeply understand users' emotional triggers and pain points. By addressing these and creating associations with internal triggers, companies can develop solutions that become an integral part of users' routines.
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. To initiate a behaviour/action the user must have sufficient motivation, have the ability to complete the desired action and a trigger must be present to activate the behaviour.
The right motivators create action by offering the promise of desirable outcomes. To create truly innovative products, follow these three steps:
- Understand the reason people use a product or service.
- Lay out the steps the customer must take to get the job done.
- Start removing steps until you reach the simplest possible process.
To make something simple, think about Fogg’s six elements of simplicity:
- How long it takes
- How much it costs
- How much physical effort it takes
- How much mental effort it takes
- How accepted the behaviours are by others
- How much the action matches or disrupts existing routines
- The scarcity effect - when something seems rare, we want it more.
- The framing effect - when we react differently to a choice depending on how it is presented
- The anchoring effect - we rely heavily on the first piece of information we receive.
- The endowed progress effect - we're more motivated when we feel we've already made some progress.
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
Variable rewards are key to enhancing habit strength. Our brains release dopamine in anticipation of reward, not upon receiving it. This drives us to act to satisfy the craving for the reward. Intermittent rewards are particularly effective, spiking dopamine and increasing the frequency of the intended action.
Variable rewards come in three types:
- Tribe: Driven by our connectedness with other people
- Hunt: Pursuing and capturing something, satisfying our innate desire to acquire resources and information
- Self: Personal gratification and a sense of competency that drive users to overcome obstacles and achieve goals
To maintain user engagement, it's crucial to maintain a sense of autonomy and freedom of choice. Heavy-handed tactics can cause users to lose trust. However, be aware that products with finite variability may suffer from declining power of variable rewards over time, becoming less engaging and more predictable.
Investment
The investment phase of the Hooked Model is crucial for building long-term user engagement. It leverages the principle of escalating commitment: the more time and effort users invest, the more they value the product. This phenomenon, often called "labor leads to love," is driven by three psychological effects:
- The IKEA effect: Users irrationally value their own efforts and creations.
- Consistency bias: People tend to align future actions with past behaviors.
- Cognitive dissonance avoidance: Users gradually change perceptions to justify their investments.
Unlike the action phase, which aims to reduce friction, the investment phase intentionally increases it. This strategy, when applied after a reward, can significantly boost engagement. Investments in a product can take various forms:
- Data: Personal information that enhances the user experience
- Social capital: Followers or connections that add value
- Reputation: Trust and standing within the platform
- Skills: Proficiency that makes the product indispensable
By encouraging these investments, products can adapt to user needs, creating a more personalised and sticky experience that users are less likely to abandon.
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.You have a moral obligation to inform and protect users who are forming unhealthy attachments to your product. Two key questions: Would you use the product yourself? Will the product help people improve their lives?
Habit Testing
Habit Testing is a crucial process for developing habit-forming products, as outlined in the Hooked Model. It involves three key steps:
- Identify: Determine the number of habitual users and define usage benchmarks.
- Codify: Analyse the actions of devoted users to uncover the "habit path".
- Modify: Adjust the user experience to guide new users along this established path.
To assess a product's habit-forming potential, run it through the four phases of the Hooked Model, considering factors such as internal triggers, external cues, ease of action, reward satisfaction, and user investment. This ongoing process should be applied to every new feature and product iteration, with user activity tracked by cohort for comparison.
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Dependencies in a software project can contribute to unsatisfactory progress if they constrain or block the flow of work… this paper develops an initial taxonomy of agile software project dependencies.
There are three classes of dependency: Knowledge, Task and Resource. It breaks down those various classes into 8 types and does a great job at explaining previous work done in the space.
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Book Highlights
“It’s a miracle,” they said. “He’s so calm, so collected. No prepared speeches, slides with almost no words—he just knows what he’s talking about and it all hangs together.” It never felt like a speech. It felt like a conversation. Like a story. And the reason is simple: Steve didn’t just read a script for the presentation. He’d been telling a version of that same story every single day for months and months during development—to us, to his friends, his family. He was constantly working on it, refining it. Every time he’d get a puzzled look or a request for clarification from his unwitting early audience, he’d sand it down, tweak it slightly, until it was perfectly polished. Tony Fadell · Build
Encourage the team members to help you with research, or bring them into the field while you test the products Amber Case · Calm Technology
Locating the crux is the first maneuver in dealing with gnarly challenges. Discovering, or articulating, that solvable problem within the complexity of a gnarly challenge is not easy. Richard Rumelt · The Crux
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Quotes & Tweets
What has to be true for us to do this in half the time? Seth Godin
The best way to get good at something is usually to just practice actually doing the thing. A lot of very capable people outsmart themselves with complex plans that involve working a lot on fake prerequisites. Sam Altman