
Captain hook(ed) learnt me a few things
About how to build habit forming products
I found an unpublished draft of this article among my unpublished medium stories. I wrote it last year during summer 2016. Better late than never ! đ
I recently read again âHookedâ by Nir Eyal (2013). Below are my reading notes. All greatness is from the author, all approximations and understanding errors are from me.
For those with little time or with a good memory of it, the 5 essential questions to ask yourself for building effective hooks:
- What do users really want ? What pain is your product relieving ? (internal trigger)
- What bring 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 fullfilled by the reward yet left wanting more? (variable reward)
- What âbit of workâ do users invest in your product? Does it load the next trigger and store value to improve the product with use ? (Investment)
And remember what is a habit : â A habit is when not doing an action causes a bit of painâ. Pain is defined as an itch, a feeling that manifests within the mind and causes discomfort until it is satisfied.
The habit zone
Or what would be the practical advantages of your product entering the habit zone of your users.
Aim 1: âHabit forming products change user behavior and create unprompted user engagement. The aim is to influence customers to use your product on their own, again and again, without relying on overt calls to action such as ads or promotions. Once a habit is formed, the user is automatically triggered to use the product during routine events such as wanting to kill time while waiting in line.
Aim 2: increasing customer lifetime value
Aim 3 : providing pricing flexibility
Aim 4 : supercharging growth â David Skok : âThe most important factor to increasing growth isâŠViral Cycle Timeâ. Viral cycle time is the amount of time it takes a user to invite another user, and it can have a massive impact.
Aim 5: sharpening the competitive edge
Various points
- User habits are a competitive advantage. Products that change customer routines are less susceptible to attacks from other companies.
- Gourville (marketing, HBS) claims that for new entrants to stand a chance, they canât just be better, they must be 9 times better. Why ? customer over value the old, companies over value the new. There is a perception discrepancy.
- A company can begin to determine itâs productâs 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 userâs mind over alternative solutions).â
Trigger
4 types of external trigger
- Paid triggers : SEA. Generally used to acquire new users and then other triggers are used to bring them back
- Earned Triggers: favorable press mention, hot viral vids, featured app store placement > requires to stay on the limelight for a long time
- Relationship triggers: word of mouth or product referral
- Owned triggers : up to the user to opt-in and allow these triggers to appear (email newsletter subscribed to, app notification etc.) > most important one because itâs hard to form a user habit without their tacit agreement to enter their attentional space
All external triggers aim at making the user form habits so that internal triggers takes the relay.
Internal trigger
When a product becomes tightly coupled with a thought, an emotion, or a preexisting routine, it leverages an internal trigger.
âŠ
Emotions, particularly negative ones, are powerful internal triggers and greatly influence our daily routines. Feelings of boredom, loneliness, frustration, confusion, and indeciveness often instigate a sligh pain or irritation and prompt an almost instantaneous and often mindless action to quell the negative sensation.
Building for triggers
The ultimate goal of a habit forming product is to solve the userâs pain by creating an association so that the user identifies the companyâs product or service as the source of relief.
First the company must identify the particular frustration of pain point in emotional terms, rather than product features
To do so use tools like user stories, customer development, usability studies, empathy maps, 5 whys method. When identified, see which external trigger could drive the user to action.
Action
Refer to the B.J. Fogg behavior model:
Behavior = Motivation + Ability + Trigger, all 3 present at the same time
Motivation
Motivation can be summed up into :
- Seeking pleasure and avoiding pain
- Seeking hope and avoiding fear
- Seeking social acceptance and avoiding rejection
Ability
Ability can be summed up into :
- Make achieving that behavior dead simple.
- Refers to J. Hauptly method :
- Understand the reason why people use a product or service
2. Lay out the steps the customer must take to get the job done (from intention to outcome)
3. Start removing steps until you reach the simplest possible process
- Refer to B.J. Fogg 6 elements of simplicity : Time, Money, Physical effort, Brain cycles, Social deviance, non-routine
4 brain bias to keep in mind when designing action :
- Scarcity effect : the appearance of scarcity affects the perception of value
- The framing effect : the mind takes shortcuts informed by our surroundings to make quick and sometimes erroneous judgments
- The anchoring effect : people often anchor to one piece of information when making a decision
- The endowed progress effect : a phenomenon that increases motivation as people believe they are nearing a goal.
Variable Reward
Here you reward your users by solving a problem, reinforcing their motivation for the action taken in the previous phase.
Rewards of the tribe, aka social rewards are driven by our connectedness with other people > reward that make us feel accepted, attractive, important, and included.
Rewards of the hunt, aka the search for ressources (here information)
Rewards of the self, aka the reward of conquering obstacles, even if just for the satisfaction of doing so.
Beware of finite variability, an experience that becomes predicatble after use. They hence become less engaging.
Investment
Before users create the mental associations that activate their automatic behaviors, they must first invest in the product.
Itâs all about how small investments change our perception, turning unfamiliar actions into everyday habits.
Refer to the power of commitments : the more users invest time and effort into a product or service, the more they value it. In fact there is ample evidence that our labor leads to love :
- We irrationnally value our efforts, cf. Ikea effect
- We avoid cognitive dissonance
- Storing value : reputation, data, followers etc.
This phase is super important as it allows the company to load the next trigger.
By Nir Eyal own words : âUltimately habit forming products create a mental association with an internal trigger. Yet to create the habit, users must first use the product through multiple cycles of the Hook Model. Therefore, external triggers must be used to bring users back around again to start another cycle. Habit-forming technologies leverage the userâs past behavior to initiate an external trigger in the future.â
What to do with this ?
5 fundamental questions for building effective hooks
- What do users really want ? What pain is your product relieving ? (internal trigger)
- What bring 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 fullfilled by the reward yet left wanting more? (variable reward)
- What âbit of workâ do users invest in your product? Does it load the next trigger and store value to improve the product with use ? (Investment)
Habit testing and where to look for habit-forming opportunities
Test the habit in your product doing the following :
Step 1 : IDENTIFY
- Define who are your users
- Define how often âshouldâ one use your product
- Dig into analytics to know how many and which type of users meet this treshold
- Define cohorts to follow users throught each iterations
Step 2 : CODIFY
- How many of such users (as defined above) is enough ? > aim for 5%
- If you have such a number codify the steps they took using your product to understand what hooked them >> look for the HABIT PATH : a series of similar actions shared by your most loyal users
Step 3 : MODIFY
- Modify and track users by cohort so see effects
I hope the above summary will help those who do not have time to read the book or need a reminder on a specific point of the book. If you want to know more (you should đ), take the time to read the book !
