Hooked by Nir Eyal

Why do some products capture our attention while others flop? What makes us engage with certain things out of sheer habit? Is there an underlying pattern to how technologies hook us? Nir Eyal answers these questions (and many more) with the Hook Model – a four-step process that, when embedded into products, subtly encourages customer behaviour. Hooked is based on Eyal’s years of research, consulting, and practical experience. He wrote the book he wished had been available to him as a start-up founder – not abstract theory, but a how-to guide for building better products.

Notes from, “Eyal, Nir. Hooked. Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.”

How I Got Hooked

In 2008 I was among a team of Stanford MBAs starting a company backed by some of the brightest investors in Silicon Valley. Our mission was to build a platform for placing advertising into the booming world of online social games. (p. 4).

These years of distilled research and real-world experience resulted in the creation of the Hooked Model: a four-phase process companies use to form habits. 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. (p. 5).

The Habit Zone

Neuroscientists believe habits give us the ability to focus our attention on other things by storing automatic responses in the basal ganglia, an area of the brain associated with involuntary actions. Habits form when the brain takes a shortcut and stops actively deliberating over what to do next. (p. 16).

Professor August Dvorak’s keyboard design, for example, placed vowels in the center row, increasing typing speed and accuracy. Though patented in 1932, the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard was written off. QWERTY survives due to the high costs of changing user behavior. (p. 23).

Switching to a new e-mail service, social network, or photo-sharing app becomes more difficult the more people use them. The nontransferable value created and stored inside these services discourages users from leaving. (p. 24).

A 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). (p. 29).

A behavior that occurs with enough frequency and perceived utility enters the Habit Zone, helping to make it a default behavior. If either of these factors falls short and the behavior lies below the threshold, it is less likely that the desired behavior will become a habit. (p. 30).

“Are you building a vitamin or painkiller?” is a common, almost clichéd question many investors ask founders eager to cash their first venture capital check. The correct answer, from the perspective of most investors, is the latter: a painkiller. (p. 31).

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. (p. 32).

My answer to the vitamin versus painkiller question: Habit-forming technologies are both. These services seem at first to be offering nice-to-have vitamins, but once the habit is established, they provide an ongoing pain remedy. (p. 33).

Trigger

Habit-forming technologies start changing behavior by first cueing users with a call to action. This sensory stimuli is delivered through any number of things in our environment. External triggers are embedded with information, which tells the user what to do next. (p. 41).

Unlike external triggers, which use sensory stimuli like a morning alarm clock or giant “Login Now” button, you can’t see, touch, or hear an internal trigger. Internal triggers manifest automatically in your mind. Connecting internal triggers with a product is the brass ring of habit-forming technology. (pp. 47-48).

Emotions, particularly negative ones, are powerful internal triggers and greatly influence our daily routines. Feelings of boredom, loneliness, frustration, confusion, and indecisiveness often instigate a slight pain or irritation and prompt an almost instantaneous and often mindless action to quell the negative sensation. (p. 48).

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. (p. 52).

Toyota Production System, described by Taiichi Ohno as the “5 Whys Method.” Ohno wrote that it was “the basis of Toyota’s scientific approach … by repeating ‘why?’ five times, the nature of the problem as well as its solution becomes clear.” (p. 54).

Instagram is more than a camera replacement; it is a social network. The app helps users dispel boredom by connecting them with others, sharing photos, and swapping lighthearted banter. Like many social networking sites, Instagram also alleviates the increasingly recognizable pain point known as fear of missing out, or FOMO. For Instagram, associations with internal triggers provide a foundation to form new habits. (pp. 56-57).

Action

While there are many theories about what drives human behaviors, Dr. B. J. Fogg, Director of the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University, has developed a model that serves as an elegant way to understand what drives our actions.

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.

The Fogg Behavior Model is represented in the formula B = MAT, which represents that a given behavior will occur when motivation, ability, and a trigger are present at the same time and in sufficient degrees. (pp. 61-62).

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. (p. 63).

For example, Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign leveraged a deeply inspiring message and image during a time of economic and political upheaval. (p. 64).

Ability

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. First, Hauptly states, understand the reason people use a product or service. Next, lay out the steps the customer must take to get the job done. Finally, once the series of tasks from intention to outcome is understood, simply start removing steps until you reach the simplest possible process. (p. 67).

Evan Williams, cofounder of Blogger, Twitter, and Medium, echoes Hauptly’s formula for innovation when he describes his own approach to building three massively successful companies:

“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.”

Blogger made posting content online dramatically easier. The result? The percentage of users creating content online, as opposed to simply consuming it, increased. (p. 70).

Fogg describes six “elements of simplicity”—the factors that influence a task’s difficulty.These are:

• Time—how long it takes to complete an action.
• Money—the fiscal cost of taking an action.
• Physical effort—the amount of labor involved in taking the action.
• Brain cycles—the level of mental effort and focus required to take an action.
• Social deviance—how accepted the behavior is by others.
• Non-routine—according to Fogg, “How much the action matches or disrupts existing routines.” (pp. 71-72).

Variable Reward

The third step in the Hooked Model is the variable reward phase, in which you reward your users by solving a problem, reinforcing their motivation for the action taken in the previous phase. (p. 95).

Stanford professor Brian Knutson conducted a study exploring blood flow in the brains of people wagering while inside an fMRI machine. (p. 96).

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. (p. 97).

Rewards of the Tribe

Our brains are adapted to seek rewards that make us feel accepted, attractive, important, and included. (p. 100).

Facebook provides numerous examples of variable social rewards. Logging in reveals an endless stream of content friends have shared, comments from others, and running tallies of how many people have “liked” something. (p. 101).

Rewards of the Hunt

The need to acquire physical objects, such as food and other supplies that aid our survival, is part of our brain’s operating system. (p. 107).

By awarding money in random intervals, games of chance entice players with the prospect of a jackpot. Naturally, winning is entirely outside the gambler’s control—yet the pursuit can be intoxicating. (p. 108).

Rewards of the Self

The rewards of the self are fueled by “intrinsic motivation” as highlighted by the work of Edward Deci and Richard Ryan. Their self-determination theory espouses that people desire, among other things, to gain a sense of competency. Adding an element of mystery to this goal makes the pursuit all the more enticing. (p. 111).

For example, advancing a character through the popular online game World of Warcraft unlocks new abilities for the player. The thirst to acquire advanced weaponry, visit uncharted lands, and improve their characters’ scores motivates players to invest more hours in the game. (pp. 111-112).

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 labor leads to love. (p. 136).

We Avoid Cognitive Dissonance

In a classic Aesop’s fable, a hungry fox encounters grapes hanging from a vine. The fox desperately wants the grapes. Yet as hard as he tries, he cannot reach them. Frustrated, the fox decides the grapes must be sour and that therefore he would not want them anyway.

The fox comforts himself by changing his perception of the grapes because it is too uncomfortable to reconcile the thought that the grapes are sweet and ready for the taking, and yet he cannot have them. To reconcile these two conflicting ideas, the fox changes his perception of the grapes and in the process relieves the pain of what psychologists term cognitive dissonance. (pp. 139-140).

These tendencies of ours lead to a mental process known as rationalization, in which we change our attitudes and beliefs to adapt psychologically. (pp. 140-141).

When players contemplate making a purchase, they acknowledge it is unwise to spend money on something that is not good. Yet just like the fox that perceives the grapes as sour to reduce his frustration at not being able to reach them, players justify their purchases to help convince themselves of something they want to be true—namely, that they are not foolish. The only solution is to keep paying to keep playing. (p. 142).

Storing Value

The stored value users put into the product increases the likelihood they will use it again in the future and comes in a variety of forms. (p. 145).

Every time users of Spotify listen to music using the streaming service, they strengthen their ties to the product… Spotify’s personalized music recommendations are an example of how technology adapts and improves based on users’ investment in content. (pp. 145-146).

Data

The collection of memories and experiences, in aggregate, becomes more valuable over time and the service becomes harder to leave as users’ personal investment in the site grows. (p. 147).

Mint.com is an online personal finance tool used by millions of Americans. The service aggregates all of the user’s accounts in one place, providing a complete picture of their financial life—but only if they invest their time and data in the service. Mint provides multiple opportunities for users to customize the site and make it more valuable with use. For example, the act of linking accounts, categorizing transactions, or creating a budget are all forms of investment. The more data collected, the more the service’s stored value increases (p. 148).

Followers

Investing in following the right people increases the value of the product by displaying more relevant and interesting content in each user’s Twitter feed. It also tells Twitter a lot about its users, which in turn improves the service overall. (p. 149).

Loading the Next Trigger

Habit-forming technologies leverage the user’s past behavior to initiate an external trigger in the future. (p. 154).

In mid-2013 a hot new company entered the hypercompetitive online dating market. Tinder quickly captured the attention of millions of people looking for love with a simple interface, generating 3.5 million matches from 350 million swipes each day.

After launching the mobile app, users browse profiles of other singles. Each potential match is presented as a card. Swipe left if you are not interested, right if that special someone catches your fancy. If both parties express interest, a match is made and a private chat connects the two potential lovebirds. (p. 156).

By simplifying the investment of sorting through potential mates, Tinder makes loading the next trigger more likely with each swipe. The more swipes, the more potential matches are made; naturally, each match sends notifications to both interested parties. (p. 157).

The Morality of Manipulation

The Hooked Model is fundamentally about changing people’s behaviors, but the power to build persuasive products should be used with caution. Creating habits can be a force for good, but it can also be used for nefarious purposes. What responsibility do product makers have when creating user habits? (p. 164).

If manipulation is an experience crafted to change behavior, then Weight Watchers, one of the most successful mass-manipulation products in history, fits the definition. Weight Watchers customers’ decisions are programmed by the designer of the system, yet few question the morality of the business. (p. 165).

Although many people see Weight Watchers as an acceptable form of user manipulation, our moral compass has not caught up with what the latest technology now makes possible. (pp. 165-166).

Manipulation Matrix

The matrix seeks to help you answer not “Can I hook my users?” but instead “Should I attempt to?” To use the Manipulation Matrix, the maker needs to ask two questions. First, “Would I use the product myself?” and second, “Will the product help users materially improve their lives?” (p. 167).

To help you, as a designer of habit-forming technology, assess the morality behind how you manipulate users, it is helpful to determine which of the four categories your work fits into. Are you a facilitator, peddler, entertainer, or dealer?

Facilitators use their own product and believe it can materially improve people’s lives. They have the highest chance of success because they most closely understand the needs of their users.

Peddlers believe their product can materially improve people’s lives but do not use it themselves. They must beware of the hubris and inauthenticity that comes from building solutions for people they do not understand firsthand.

Entertainers use their product but do not believe it can improve people’s lives. They can be successful, but without making the lives of others better in some way, the entertainer’s products often lack staying power.

Dealers neither use the product nor believe it can improve people’s lives. They have the lowest chance of finding long-term success and often find themselves in morally precarious positions. (pp. 176-177).

Case Studies

• After reading Hooked, the founders of the Fitbod App targeted a very specific user habit.
• Unlike competitors who went after vague behaviors like “build a healthy lifestyle,” Fitbod sought to own the internal trigger related to the uncomfortable feeling of uncertainty of not knowing what to do in the gym.
• Fitbod’s action phase quickly solves the user’s psychological discomfort by providing very specific instructions with a single tap of the app.
• In Fitbod’s variable rewards phase, discover which exercise to do, how much weight to lift, and how many repetitions to complete to beat their personal best.
• Finally, the data users enter when they complete an exercise improves the service and loads the next external trigger, thus perpetuating the habit of using the app. (p. 197).

Habit Testing

The Hooked Model helps the product designer generate an initial prototype for a habit-forming technology. It also helps uncover potential weaknesses in an existing product’s habit-forming potential.

Once a product is built, Habit Testing helps uncover product devotees, discover which product elements (if any) are habit forming, and why those aspects of your product change user behavior. Habit Testing includes three steps: identify, codify, and modify.

• First, dig into the data to identify how people are using the product.
• Next, codify these findings in search of habitual users. To generate new hypotheses, study the actions and paths taken by devoted users.
• Finally, modify the product to influence more users to follow the same path as your habitual users, and then evaluate results and continue to modify as needed. (pp. 212-213).