Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products

by Eyal, Nir

Published: December 25, 2013

Read: January 25, 2020

★★★★★

Goodreads

Review

While revolving around products, there are deep lessons that transfer to personal habits. Instead of optimizing your product to be habit-forming, you can optimize the habit systems you want to create. Meticulously outlines a model of what makes products stick and supports it with studies and specific tech products used everyday. This might be my favorite book about habits because of its fast pace and nuanced connection to reality. There is even an earnest call to create good habits instead of just an addiction.

Notes

Habit forming competituve advantage:

Link to human internal motivation or daily schedule names people use product without external trigger

4 steps:

trigger

Action, behavior done in anticipation of reward, two levers ease and reward

Variable reward, predictable awards don't create desire , we don't recheck our fridge but we will if it could have a new treat.

Investment, increases odds you come back when you invest time, money, or social action. Especially something that makes content more valuable

Unless tech process slowed down we will be more addicted in next 50 year

Superpower should be used to nudge people make better choices as judged by themselves. It's not a superpower if it can't be used for evil.

Access, data, and speed is making more habit forming place

Habit often forms because that was the way we found resolution in past. Mind predicts it will again.

Habit increase customer ltv and ability to increase prices. Free play games charge when people become addictive. Higher word of mouth. Lowers cycle time of vitality. Less able to change product.

Stanford gorvil paper:People irrationally overvalue old and new product need to be 9x better. Some new products are doomed to fail even if the product advantage is substantial. I.e Dvorak vs QWERTY

New behaviors have sorry half life, tend to regress to first learned behaviors. Old habits die hard.

More frequently, the harder habit occurs.

Even if Bing was better than Google, it could feel slower just because people reacting to pixel placement

Amazon lets other everyone advertise lower price. This increases brand loyalty even if they don't make the sale.

Habjt forming increases due to the two factors: higher frequency and higher perceived value over alternatives

Medicine or painkiller. Painkillers solve problems, and medicine appeals to emotional rather than functional need. Facebook can start as medicine, but become painkiller.

Habit is like an itch that provides discomfort. Habit aren't addiction, addiction are negative and cause harm.

Triggers

Habits are built upon. There is internal trigger either internal or external. 4 types of explicit trigger: paid which is mostly for new users, earned are free like publicity, relationship triggers can create virality, owned triggers take up real estate in user life and are opt in like email, app icon.

Ultimately goal is to get external trigger to just become habit with internal trigger. Takes weeks or months.

Scratch user itch and internal need

Depressive study of college students showed depressed people used internet, email, video ,and games more perhaps trying to find internal relief.

People must associate your product with filling the need. Need to figure out how users feel. First identify particular frustration in user terms. What people say they want vs what they actually do. Ask why until you get to an emotion. Negative triggers often serve food trigger.

User stories that read like a play.

Why chain? Email - send and receive messages - know what happening in other lives - fear of bring left out

Chapter 3 action

Doing must be easier than thinking. More effort means less likely to occur.

3 ingredients to do action: motivation, trigger, ability to do it. A=mta

..Motivation is The energy for action. 3 core motivators: seek pleasure and avoid pain, seek hope and avoid fear, seek social acceptance and about rejection. Very present in ads.

Remove steps to complete a task.

Ev Williams says to build a startup you should identify a human desire preferably one that has been around for a really long time and use modern technology to take out steps.

Twitter limit made people willing to play

6 factors of task difficulty: nonroutine, brain cycles, social deviance, money, time, physical effort. You should identify what the biggest limiting resource is during design.

Facebook login lowers sign in time.

Motivation or ability? Always easier to increase simplicity and ability, motivation can be expensive to increase

Twitter instead of asking for people to broadcast, they just had to call to wanting to have followers.

Cognitive heuristics to know:

Scarcity: identical cookies in jar with 2 or 10. 2 considered more valuable. If you then added 8 to 2, they considered it less valuable even less then those who started with 10.

Framing: pricey wine more enjoyed even shown under fmri though same wine

Anchoring: things on sale make you think it is worth

Repeat effect, endowed progress effect that people more motivated as they approach goal: If you gave a punchcard with 8 or 10 with two free punches, so still need 8. 2 free punches group finished the goal 83% more.

Facebook trys to get us to finish our profile as we already started.

Chapter 4 variable rewards

After the action, you need to reward your users by solving a problem to reinforce the action.

Pleasure center with electroes, people will want to hit the button even if the machine off

It's not the sensation of the reward itself, it's the craving and anticipation that needs to be relieved, the stress of desire

Novelty sparks our interest and breaks is out of the habit and makes it recognize it more

Skinner added variability of reward and it increase the action

Come in three types:

1. Tribe, social rewards, driven by other people making you feel accepted and attractive

People seeing someone being rewarded for something will change their behavior to be more like it especially if they are similar to you

Like Facebook, stack overflow, league(honor pts), satisification in recognition from community

Variabke rewards of the hunt, Humans ran using ..presisentence hunting, running their prey to exhaustion using our better disdpitation of heat to run continuously for 8 hours, this has made its way to our brain and what keeps us going is rewards of things we need I.e feeds(see more reward at the bottom)

Rewards off the self, conquer obstacles. Instrinic motivations to gain sense of competence. I.e video games offering progression and completion, email unread is goal,.

Mohola offers money with variable monetary rewards vs Quora. If they wanted money, it was too little, Quora social rewards with upvotes is more attractive.

Rewards must fit in the narrative of why the product is useful to have good gamification.

Adding "but you are free to accept or refuse" doubles compliance or asking for bus fare. Even over email. People have hair trigger response to threat to autonomy.

At heart of story is variability, people actually feel what protagonist feels including motivations

Farmville has finite variability, content creation sites has infinite variability. Variability valuable if person has choice. Google and uber have inherent variability but shouldn't matter.

Changing attitude

Before user create mental association, they must first invest in product

After frequency, second most important in habit formation is a users attitude about behavior. Attitude change is a Movement up perceived utility access.

Small investments can cause habit formation. Escalation of responsibility, commitments we make make us valuable it more. Labor leads to love, we irrationally value effort.

Those who made their own oragami, then bid on it paid 5x more than those who didn't. Ikea effect.

Past well predicts our future. We try to be consistent and avoid cognitive dissonance.

Rationalization helps us give reasons to a behavior even if the reasons are given by sometime else.

This must be worthwhile because I spent so much time on it and I spent $20 because it's so good.

Investments are done for long term rewards. Like following someone. Asking users to contribute work after reward it leverages Central trait of humans is recriprociation done not just with interaction with humans but also machines.

Stored value. They create data. The more information you provide to LinkedIn the more likely you are to be a valuable user. The more data the more the stored value increases through your content or followers. Switching services means abandoning a following, reputation on eBay or upwork can literally change the price. People learning Adobe Photoshop invest by learning and less likely to switch.

If users aren't doing investment, you should build up in successive small easy tasks.

External triggers must be used to rengage the user to get them through the hooked model to actually develop the habit.

26% of app downloaded and used only once. App asks for calendar, to tell them to record after a meeting

Each Snapchat encouraged a response, loading trigger with each investment. Pinterest does same thing notifying you when someone comments on something you follow.

Habits are a competitive advantage.

Stored value in the form of data, skill, content, followers, or reputation

Chapter 6

Connect the users problem with the designers solution enough to build a habit. Users move from low engagement to high engagement.

Ask yourself: what do users want, what pain is it relieving? What brings users to your site? What is simplest action users take to receive reward and how can you make it simpler? Are users fulfilled yet let wanting more? What work do users invest?

Power should used with caution. Manipulation and hooked is trying to change behavior. Weight watchers is manipulation.

Ask yourself: Would maker use product and does it improve lives?

Addiction affects people more predisposed.

Peddler(wouldnt use yourself): If you wouldn't use your own product, then you twist mind until you get what you want.

Entertainer(don't improve lives): hits driven business of ephermal desires and good distribution

Dealer(doesn't improve or use): explotation to get money

Facilitator believe both and have highest chance of success

End

Uversuon is the most popular Bible app and could be valued at over 300mil.

Having it in Mobile makes it easier to bring up.

Had study guides and reading plans with digestible pieces and quotes on you've like addiction

Focuses on daily use and notifications, their notifications are messages from God

Community keeps people engaged, look at data like importance of was of ease of use and putting most interesting per of Bible first.

Harvard metaanalysis disclosing info about self is inherently rewarding and some will forgot money to disclose about sel

44% of people quit gym within 6 months.

19billion spent each year on gyms

Fitbod tells you what exercises to do removing the uncertainty of not knowing what to do in gym. Fitbod lets you invest by storing data. Giving you personal goals and instrinic reward is not random badges but personal bests.

You need to iterate. Habit testing: identiy, codify, and modify. you need ample. data, isers and a productfirst identify who are the habitual users. Cohort analysis. At least 5% of users needs to be very active by thinking about what an active user activity would look like. See if they have similsritues and the habit path. Like Twitter saw following 30 have huge spike in devotion so Twitter or following in their inspiring onboarding.

Nascent behavior, start niche then go mainstream. Look at early adopters. Start as medicine then become painkillers

Enabling technologies. Every decade new tech wave. Technologies start with infrastructure, then wave gathers eith new types of apps that reach massive pentration.

Look for idea to make cycling through hooked model more faster, frequent, or more rewarding.

Interfave changes are ripe for products. GUIs, google, fb, make action easier and uncover truth to user action

Paul B says live in the future.