Hooked Book Summary

The authors introduce the ‘Hook Model’ concept, the 4-step cycle that eventually leads to establishing a habit. They also dig deeper into specific aspects of habit formation and how to build products around that. Here are some learning points that I have learned from this book.

Learning Point #1: To act, we need three elements

1. Trigger

Triggers can be external, such as phone notifications, or internal, such as a feeling of boredom. Since we don’t acquire habits spontaneously, we need an external trigger (e.g. push notification) to start the cycle.

Going through the cycle frequently, we start associating internal triggers — such as emotions — with the product. We are ‘ hooked ‘ once we develop internal triggers to use a product.

2. Motivation

We are motivated to:

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

3. Friction

Doing the action should be easier than thinking about it. Six factors that contribute to friction:

• Time
• Money
• Physical effort
• Mental effort
• Social deviance
• Routine-fit (How much the action matches or disrupts existing routines)

Reducing friction is easier than motivating users, so if we have to choose — prioritize reducing friction. It will yield a better return on investment.

Learning Point #2: Investment from users is key

We should strive to build our product in a way that requires a small dose of investment with each use to improve the quality of rewards. It creates a repetitive motivation cycle. For example, the more time we spend on our Instagram feed, liking, commenting, and following (investment), the better feed recommendation we’ll receive (better reward).

Examples

• Content curation (Spotify playlists)
• Data (better LinkedIn recommendations)
• Followers and social connections (people I follow on Twitter)
• Reputation (Airbnb, eBay)

Learning Point #3: Variable rewards > static rewards

Predictable rewards don’t cause cravings, while variable rewards prompt an intense dopamine hit. Craving for variability causes a stronger emotional reaction than receiving the reward. There are three types of variable rewards:

Rewards of the tribe — We want to be accepted and feel important; this is why likes on Facebook mean so much to many of us; they give us social validation.

Rewards of the hunt — We are motivated by tangible rewards. Gambling uses a reward of money; searching for restaurants on TripAdvisor uses the reward of food.

Rewards of the self — We seek mastery and completion. When we play a video game, we are rewarded with increasing our skills and progressing level by level.‍

Additional Points:

• User-generated content is a recipe for endless variability.
• Negative emotions are the most potent internal triggers. They include fear of social disconnection, uncertainty, and boredom.
• The root problem is usually associated with emotion. Ask ‘why’ as many times as it takes to get to emotion. Then design the product around alleviating/boosting that emotion.
• We can use the Hook model to form ethical or unethical habits. To differentiate, let’s ask ourselves two questions. Does the product enhance the user’s life? Would we use the product ourselves?
• The scarcity effect increases motivation. We value things more if they are limited. If we have two jars of cookies, one with 3 cookies and the other with 40 cookies, we tend to perceive cookies in the first jar as more valuable.
• Endowed progress is an interesting tactic to boost motivation. For example, giving punch cards with ten slots and two already punched showed higher completion rates than giving a blank card with eight slots, even though both groups needed to do the same thing — get eight punches — to receive the reward.
• Ask the user to invest after receiving variable rewards, not before.