Brainwashing your Users for Good
Lessons learned from workshop on the psychology of habit design with Nir Eyal
THE GIST: We meet with Nir Eyal to talk about the psychology of habits to design engaging products that have a positive impact on users’ lives. Understanding what moves users to action allows startups to build products that are aligned with users’ inner motivations. By following Nir’s Hook model, products stand a better chance of changing user behavior as they move users to new habits over time.
Why do some products fail and others succeed? For behavioral scientist Nir Eyal the answer is simple: the companies that successfully manage to build user habits around their products will prevail, even if there are better alternatives on the market. And Nir is not alone.
Warren Buffet also recognizes the critical importance of habits in business. He once stated that the “chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.”
We’ve met with Nir Eyal at Boston’s World Trade Center, where he was teaching his famous “Hooked” methodology in a workshop for product managers, marketers, entrepreneurs and MBA students. Nir Eyal is a psychology expert and serial entrepreneur, as well as author of the highly appraised book “Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products”, which has been just re-published in its second edition on November 4th, 2014.
The key idea of the book is that by understanding users’ psychology we can design self-sustaining habits around products. Such habits have the potential to increase customer lifetime value, improve viral cycles, provide defensibility of market positions and supercharge company growth. Examples of habits can be seen in a variety of markets and especially in the domain of social media and social network sites. Yet building habit-forming products is hard work and exceptionally rare. Once mastered, however, this methodology can differentiate between the winners and losers in the highly competitive digital attention space.
Nir’s methodology consists of four steps: a trigger, an action, a reward and an investment.
Triggers are actuators of behaviors and can be external and internal; behaviors can be prompted by external features of an app like “share” and “like” buttons, as well as internal emotional states such as feelings of loneliness, boredom or happiness.
Actions are minimal efforts that keep the user engaged. They are facilitated by motivation and ability and are activated by triggers. Usability design is extremely important in this respect. “To increase the odds of a user taking the intended action, the behavior designer makes the action as easy as possible, while simultaneously boosting the user’s motivation,” says Nir.
Rewards act as reinforcements and feedback loops. Interestingly, users are oftentimes more motivated by the anticipation of reward rather than by the reward itself. Nir summarizes this in the following way: “Technology companies are creating new habits by running users through a series of desire engines — and variable rewards fuel the chain reaction.”
Investments store value and create preferences for future engagements. For example, this could include inviting friends, listing interests, accumulating virtual assets and learning to use new features. Nir explains: “By building products that follow users throughout their day, on smartphones, tablets, and more recently wearable devices, companies have an opportunity to cycle users through the four phases of the Hook more frequently and increase the odds of creating products people love.”
This framework builds on decades of research in the psychological literature and draws on important concepts such as implementation intentions, self-determination theory, and dual process theory, which have also been popularized by Nobel Prize laureate Daniel Kahneman in his recent book. It is worth noting that Nir’s work goes one step further by striking an excellent balance between theory and practice that lead to actionable insights for product managers and designers.
As we learn more about habit-forming designs, it is difficult not to raise the question about the morality of manipulation: are the products we design painkillers for the pain they create? Is it ethically justifiable to manufacture desires and habits around technologies?
Nir’s answer to these questions frequently echoes the well-known maxim from the Spider-man comics: “With great power comes great responsibility”. It is thus the moral responsibility of the innovators to use the psychology of habit-design for good and assist their users in creating habits that will help them live better, healthier and happier lives.
Originally published in the print edition of The Harbus, the official student newspaper of Harvard Business School on November 4, 2014.
Image credit: TNW (CC-BY)
About the author: Vyacheslav (@slavacm) is a doctoral candidate at the Oxford Internet Institute and a Visiting Fellow at Harvard University. He researches the psychology of technology adoption and is a Global Shaper at the World Economic Forum.
