Hooked by Nir Eyal

The Book in Three Sentences

Businesses that create customer habits gain a significant competitive advantage. The hooked model describes how to design a product experience that creates a customer habit in four steps. 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.

Summary

The Hooked Model:

• Trigger: An external or internal actuator of behaviour.
• Action: The behaviour done in anticipation of a reward.
• Variable Reward: A reward that activates the parts of the brain associated with wanting or desire.
• Investment: When a user puts something into a product or service such as time, data, effort, social capital or money.

Businesses that create customer habits gain a significant competitive advantage. The hooked model describes an experience designed to connect the user’s problem to a companies product frequently enough to create a habit.

The Habit Zone

Users habits increase how long and how frequently customers use a product, resulting in higher Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV).

As customers form routines around a product they become dependant upon it and become less sensitive to price.

A company can begin to determine it’s products habit forming potential by plotting two factors: frequency of behaviour and how useful/valuable that behaviour is to the user.

Habit forming products often start as nice-to-have’s (vitamins) but once a habit is formed they become must-have’s (painkillers).

Triggers

Triggers come in two forms – external and internal. To build habit-forming product makers must attach the use of their solution to a frequently felt internal trigger and know how to leverage external triggers to drive user action.

• External Triggers – Tell the user what to do next by placing information in their environment.
• Internal Triggers – Tell the user what to do through associations stored in the user’s memory.

Users who find a product that alleviates their pain will form strong, positive associations with the product over time.

Action

Dr B.J Fogg’s Behaviour Model indivates there are three ingredients required to initiate any and all behaviours:

1. The user must have sufficient motivation.
2. The user must have the ability to complete the desired action.
3. A trigger must be present to activate the behaviour.

Motivation: 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.

Ability: Any product that significantly reduces the steps to complete a task will enjoy high adoption rates by the people it assists. There are six elements of simplicity that influence the difficulty of a task:

• Time – How long it takes to complete an action.
• Money – The cost of taking action.
• Physical Effort – The amount of labour involved.
• Brain Cycles – The level of mental effort and focus required.
• Social Deviance – How accepted the behaviour is by others.
• Non-routine – How much the action disrupts existing routines.

When deciding whether to focus on increasing motivation or ability, always start with ability. For companies building technology solutions the greatest ROI generally comes from increasing the products ease of use.

Heuristics are cognative shortcuts that we take to make quick decisions. Product designers can utilise these heuristics to increase the likelihood of a user taking the desired action. Examples of these hueristics include:

• The Scarcity Effect – The appearance of scarcity affects the perception of value. For example, perception of limited supply can increase sales, this is used by Amazon and Booking.com.
• The Framing Effect – The mind takes shortcuts informed by our surroundings to make quick judgements. Perception can form a personal reality on how the product is framed, even when there is a limited relationship with the objective quality.
• The Anchoring Effect – People often anchor to one piece of information when making a decision. Discounted prices are a great example of this because rarely does a customer compare all the prices of alternative products, they simply focus on the perceived saving.
• The Endowed Progress Effect – People see an increase in motivation when they believe they are nearing a goal. For example, Linkedin uses a progress bar that shows how far you are from ‘completing’ your profile. The trick is you never look far away, but never quite make it.

Variable Reward

What draws us to act is not the sensation from the reward itself, but the need to alliviate the craving for that reward.

Without variability we are like children in that once we have figured out what will happen next we become less excited. To hold our attention products must have an ongoing degree of novelty.

There are three types of variable reward:

• Rewards of the Tribe – The search for social rewards fueled by a need for connectedness with other people.
• Rewards of the Hunt – The search for material resources and information.
• Rewards of the Self – The search for intrinsic rewards of mastery, competence and completion.

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

Investment

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 labour leads to love.

Investments increase the likelyhood of users returning by improving the service the more it is used. they allow the acrual of value in the following ways:

• Stored Value – The collection of memories and experiences, in aggregate, become more valuable over time and the service becomes harder to leave as a users investment in the site grows. Spotify’s personalised music recommendations are a great example of this.
• Data – The more information users invested in the product, the more committed they become to using it. Google Photo’s is a great example of this.
• Followers – Subscribing, following or friending the right people increases the value of the product by displaying more relevant or interesting content to each user. Twitter is a great example of this.
• Reputation – Both buyers and sellers are more likely to stick with a service they have invested their efforts in to maintain a high-quality score. Marketplaces like Ebay are good examples of this.
• Skill – Once users have invested the time and effort learning how to use the product they are less likely to switch to a competing product. An example of this is Adobe Photoshop.

It’s recommended that you progressively stage the investment you want from users into small chunks of work, starting with small, easy tasks and building up to harder tasks during successive cycles through the hooked model.