Hooked by the book Hooked: Trigger

Triggers cue the user to take action and are the first step in the Hook Model

• habits need a foundation, which is the trigger, to build upon the behavior change.

Triggers come in two types — external and internal

External triggers tell the user what to do next by placing information within the user’s environment

• external triggers provide the user information on what to do next
• good and effective products reduce this action to a single click

Types of External Triggers

1. Relationship Triggers

• One person telling their friends and family about the product (similar to earned trigger) but the audience is smaller as oppose to a large blog article reaching thousands of readers
• Can measure this trigger using viral cycle time — measuring supercharged growth based on how many people are investing in the product/service by referring it to their friends. Monitor viral cycle time and aim for a decrease to accelerate user investment in product

2. Owned Triggers

• a trigger that consumes a place in the user’s environment ie. An app icon on their phone, email newsletters

3. Paid Triggers

• paying to drive users into a site. ie. adwords.
• Not very sustainable

4. Earned Triggers

• Reward for having a good product/service reputation by getting media coverage, viral videos, users blogging about product/service, etc.

Internal triggers tell the user what to do next through associations stored in the user’s memory

• internal triggers are emotional stimulus and responses that keep user behavior consistent to form a habit without repeated prompting
• The amount of time internal triggers become frequent enough to form habits may vary to weeks or months.
• 2 good strategies to determine internal triggers and understand users better are creating user narratives and the 5 why’s method

Internal triggers manifest automatically in your mind. Connecting internal triggers with a product is the brass ring of consumer technology

Negative emotions frequently serve as internal triggers

• Feelings of boredom, loneliness, frustration, confusion, and indecisiveness often instigate a slight pain or irritation and prompt a response

To build a habit-forming product, makers need to understand which user emotions may be tied to internal triggers and know how to leverage external triggers to drive the user to actions

For the curious birds

1. Study demonstrating that people suffering from symptoms of depression use the internet more

Ask yourself the following questions to explore more about a product:

1. Who is your product’s user?
2. What is the user doing right before your intended habit?
3. Come up with three internal triggers that could cue your user to action. Refer to the 5 whys Method
4. Which internal trigger does your user experience most frequently?
5. Finish this brief narrative using the most frequent internal trigger and the habit you are designing: “Every time the user (internal trigger), he/she (first action of intended habit)
6. Refer back to the question about what the user is doing right before the first action of the habit. What might be places and times to send an external trigger?
7. How can you couple an external trigger as closely as possible to when the user’s internal trigger fires?
8. Think of at least three conventional ways to trigger your user with current technology (e-mails, notifications, text messages, etc) Then stretch yourself to come up with at least 3 crazy or currently impossible ideas for ways to trigger your user (wearable computers, biometric sensors, carrier pigeons, etc.)