“Instead of relying on expensive marketing, habit-forming companies link their services to the users’ daily routines and emotions.”

❗ One-Liner

In-depth, easy-read, guide on ethically building addicting and irresistible products.

😎 Writer and Other Works:

1. Nir Eyal also wrote, “Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life” – a book on how to avoid distractions.
2. Ryan Hoover (Co-writer) is a tech entrepreneur and the founder of Product Hunt.

💭 Thoughts about the Book:

Since the world became a consumer-led economy, businesses and product makers have been vying for our attention.

Now with products becoming more digitized and people’s attention becoming much shorter, those who could guide attention at scale would rule the market.

The combination of the internet and smartphones made it easier for brands to be always on top of mind.

However, this forms a dichotomy, as people’s attention becomes easier to access, competition for it becomes more and more difficult.

To gain a sliver of market share in today’s Attention Economy, it’s essential that product makers build Habit-Forming products.

These are products that are so mind-numbingly accessible, entertaining, and easy to use that people would automatically flock to them during autopilot.

And throughout the day, most of our actions are automatic, without requiring deep thought before we do them.

Brushing our teeth, working out, and browsing our phones — all of these are Habits.

With high competition for people’s short attention spans, Product Designers nowadays have an increasing responsibility to embed Habit-Forming features when building their products.

Hooked is one of the best product design books I’ve read. Its concepts are up to date with the latest studies on User Experience, Human Behavior, and Software Design.

Even though it is filled with technical ideas, it was written in a way that was easy to digest both for casual and experienced readers.

If you’re designing a product (whether physical or software) or you’re just curious about how the latest apps are designed to control our habits, then this is a book you must definitely read.

😍 You would love this if you were:

1. Product Designer/Manager 👷🏻
2. Software Developer 👨🏻‍💻
3. UI/UX Geek 👩‍🎨
4. Walter White (Creating Addicting Tech instead of Meth) 😈

🤔 Books I’m reminded of:

1. The Design of Everyday Things (1988) by Don Norman
2. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (1984) by Robert Cialdini

These two classic books are one of the best materials I’ve read on Human Behavior and Product Design.

Though The Design of Everyday Things is more product-focused while Influence is more sales-focused, the psychological concepts laid out in these books essentially overlap.

If you think about it, everything is a product as long as you can convince anyone to pay for it; whether through product design, storytelling, or through otherworldly persuasive techniques.

The sell is in the design of the convincing.

📝 Bullet Notes:

Introduction:

• Habits are defined as “behaviors done with little or no conscious thought.” 
• The convergence of access, data, and speed is making the world a more habit-forming place.
• Businesses that create customer habits gain a significant competitive advantage.
• The Hook Model describes an experience designed to connect the user’s problem to a solution frequently enough to form a habit.
• The Hook Model has four phases: trigger, action, variable reward, and investment.

The Habit Zone: 

• For some businesses, forming habits is a critical component to success, but not every business requires habitual user engagement.
• When successful, forming strong user habits can have several business benefits including higher customer lifetime value (CLTV), greater pricing flexibility, supercharged growth, and a sharper competitive edge.
• Habits cannot form outside the Habit Zone, where the behavior occurs with enough frequency and perceived utility.
• Habit-forming products often start as nice-to-haves (vitamins) but once the habit is formed, they become must-haves (painkillers).
• Habit-forming products alleviate users’ pain by relieving a pronounced itch.
• Designing habit-forming products is a form of manipulation. Product builders would benefit from a bit of introspection before attempting to hook users to make sure they are building healthy habits, not unhealthy addictions.

Trigger:

• Triggers cue the user to take action and are the first step in the Hook Model.
• 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.
• Internal triggers tell the user what to do next through associations stored in the user’s memory.
• Negative emotions frequently serve as internal triggers.
• 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 action.

Action:

• The second step in the Hook Model in Action.
• Action is the simplest behavior in anticipation of reward.
• As described by Dr. B. J. Fogg’s Behavior Model:
  • For any behavior to occur, a trigger must be present at the same time as when the user has sufficient ability and motivation to take action.
  • To increase the desired behavior, ensure a clear trigger is present. Next, increase ability by making the action easier to do.Finally, align with the right motivator.
  • Every behavior is driven by one of three Core Motivators: 1) seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, 2) seeking hope and avoiding fear, and 3) seeking social acceptance while avoiding social rejection.
  • Ability is influenced by the six factors of time, money, physical effort, brain cycles, social deviance, and non-routineness. Ability is dependent on users and their context at a given moment.
• Heuristics are cognitive shortcuts we take to make quick decisions. Product designers can utilize many of the hundreds of heuristics to increase the likelihood of their desired action.

Variable Reward: 

• Variable reward is the third phase of the Hook Model, and there are three types of variable rewards: the tribe, the hunt, and the self.
• Rewards of the tribe are the search for social rewards fueled by connectedness with other people.
• Rewards of the hunt are the search for material resources and information.
• Rewards of the self are the search for intrinsic rewards of mastery, competence, and completion.
• When our autonomy is threatened, we feel constrained by our lack of choices and often rebel against doing a new behavior. Psychologists refer to this as reactance. Maintaining a sense of user autonomy is a requirement for repeat engagement.
• Experiences with finite variability become increasingly predictable with use and lose their appeal over time. Experiences that maintain user interest by sustaining variability with use exhibit infinite variability.
• Variable rewards must satisfy users’ needs while leaving them wanting to re-engage with the product.

Investment:

• The investment phase is the fourth step in the Hook Model.
• Unlike the action phase, which delivers immediate gratification, the investment phase concerns the anticipation of rewards in the future.
• Investments in a product create preferences because of our tendency to overvalue our work, be consistent with past behaviors, and avoid cognitive dissonance.
• Investment comes after the variable reward phase, when users are primed to reciprocate.
• Investments increase the likelihood of users returning by improving the service the more it is used. They enable the accrual of stored value in the form of content, data, followers, reputation, or skill.
• Investments increase the likelihood of users passing through the Hook again by loading the next trigger to start the cycle all over again.

Ethics:

• To help you, as a designer of habit-forming technology, assess the morality behind how you control users, it is helpful to determine which of the four categories your work fits into. Are you a facilitator, peddler, entertainer, or dealer?
• Facilitators use their own product and believe it can materially improve people’s lives. They have the highest chance of success because they most closely understand the needs of their users.
• Peddlers believe their product can materially improve people’s lives but do not use it themselves. They must beware of the hubris and inauthenticity that comes from building solutions for people they do not understand firsthand.
• Entertainers use their product but do not believe it can improve people’s lives. They can be successful, but without making the lives of others better in some way, the entertainer’s products often lack staying power.
• Dealers neither use the product nor believe it can improve people’s lives. They have the lowest chance of finding long-term success and often find themselves in morally precarious positions.

Case Study (The Bible App):

• The Bible App was far less engaging as a desktop Website; the mobile interface increased accessibility and usage by providing frequent triggers.
• The Bible App increases users’ ability to take action by front-loading interesting content and providing an alternative audio version.
• By separating the verses into small chunks, users find the Bible easier to read on a daily basis; not knowing what the next verse will be, adds a variable reward.
• Every annotation, bookmark, and highlight stores data (and value) in the app, further committing users.

Habit Testing and Where to Look for Habit-Forming Opportunities:

• The Hook Model helps the product designer generate an initial prototype for a habit-forming technology. It also helps uncover potential weaknesses in an existing product’s habit-forming potential.
• Once a product is built, Habit Testing helps uncover product devotees, discover which product elements (if any) are habit forming, and why those aspects of your product change user behavior. Habit Testing includes three steps: identify, codify, and modify. 
  • First, dig into the data to identify how people are using the product.
  • Next, codify these findings in search of habitual users. To generate new hypotheses, study the actions and paths taken by devoted users.
  • Finally, modify the product to influence more users to follow the same path as your habitual users, and then evaluate results and continue to modify as needed.
• Keen observation of one’s own behavior can lead to new insights and habit-forming product opportunities.
• Identifying areas where new technology makes cycling through the Hook Model faster, more frequent, or more rewarding provides fertile ground for developing new habit-forming products.
• Nascent behaviors —new behaviors that few people see or do, yet ultimately fulfill a mass-market need—can inform future breakthrough habit-forming opportunities.
• New interfaces lead to transformative behavior change and business opportunities.

Disclaimer: These notes are directly lifted from the Remember and Share Part of the Book.