Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal
Recent statistics suggest that an average person spends approximately 2 hours and 51 minutes per day on their mobile device. Also, people have a habit of checking their smartphones as soon as they wake up in the morning. When people see a notification from Facebook or TikTok, they start scrolling and pulling feeds even for hours.
Every time people see a notification popped-up on their smartphone, why there is an urge to check it immediately?
Even if people open the notification, what makes them continuously use the application for hours just by scrolling and pulling feeds?
Why are few applications so addictive even we are not gaining anything from them other than wasting time?
Habit-forming products
“Habit forming products start as vitamins and end up being painkillers” — Nir Eyal
If a product needs to be used by lots and lots of people then marketing alone is not sufficient. The companies also need to know how to make use of emotions and habits of people in an effective manner. So the people will keep using the product.
In-order to make use of people’s emotions & habits, the companies often create a series of hooks that make people continuously use the product.
The hook model
Nir Eyal, an Israeli-born American author, lecturer, who worked in the video gaming and advertising industries, explains how few products keep the users engaged with a Hooked model: a four-phase process — a trigger, an action, a variable reward and investment.
He describes that the companies use this hook model to associate users’ emotions and routines to a product which eventually helps them getting users to keep coming back to the products for more on their own, without any extensive marketing strategies.
“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.” — Nir Eyal
Trigger
The trigger is a starting point of the model. It can be a simple notification that pops up in your mobile phone which eventually let the user use the application for hours by simply scrolling the feeds. There are 2 types of triggers.
- External
- Internal
External triggers are embedded with information, which tells the user what to do next. Email, App Notifications are an example of external triggers.
Internal triggers are simply emotions like happiness, loneliness, fear of missing out, boredom and etc. It may take several days, weeks or even months of frequent usage for internal triggers to latch onto cues.
Action
This step requires the user to click on the trigger and be direct wherever product wants them to go. For E.g A simple action of clicking on the interesting picture in the news-feed takes the user to a website called Pinterest, a “pinboard-style photo-sharing” site.
To increase the chances of users returning to the product, this step should be easy and frictionless, i.e. “easier than thinking”.
Variable Reward
Research shows that levels of dopamine surge when the brain is expecting a reward. Variable rewards are one of the powerful tools that a lot of companies uses to hook the users with their product. These rewards simply create a craving & curiosity in users which lets them use the product again and again.
In “Prince of Persia”, one of the greatest video games of all time, the player must escape from the dungeons and save the princess who is locked in the tower before time runs out. At every level, the player has to bypass different traps such as Spike, deep pits and also face multiple enemies. In this game, the reward is “saving the princess” and of course the excitement to move from one level to another.
In the video game franchise “Tomb Raider”, the players can upgrade or customize their weapons using the salvage collected. As players progress through the game, they earn points from playing out specific activities and finishing in-game difficulties connected with hunting & exploration. The more they play the game, better items, weapons and equipment are gained.
Investment
This is the last phase of the hooked model. Investment is not just about user spending money to use the product for a certain period of time. It also includes activities such as Inviting friends, building assets virtually, and learning to use new features, etc.
All these commitments can be leveraged to make the trigger more engaging, the action is easier, and the reward more exciting with every pass through the hook cycle.
The idea behind this phase is to leverage the user’s understanding that the product will get better with investment. The more the users invest in a product, the more valuable the product becomes in their lives and the less they question its use.
Here is the video of Nir Eyal explaining about hooked Model.
If you are interested to know more about this book then you can buy it from Amazon or you can watch the online video course teach by the author himself in Udemy.
Also check out the video series where BrainCraft explores the psychology, design and impact of tech and social media on both ourselves and society.
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