1-Page Summary

Habits are a shortcut for your brain - you execute automatic behaviors without having to think hard about it. Habits develop when the behavior has solved the problem continuously in the past.

Habit-forming products use a 4-step loop to hook you:

Each successive loop makes the next loop more likely to occur, causing a flywheel effect. To explain each in more detail:

Trigger

External triggers are delivered through the environment. They contain information on what the user should do next, like app notifications prompting users to return to see a photo.

Over time, as a product becomes associated with a thought, emotion, or preexisting routine, users return based on internal triggers. Emotions - especially negative ones like boredom, loneliness, confusion, lack of purpose, and indecisiveness - are powerful internal triggers. These triggers may be short and minor, possibly even subconscious.

To build a habit, you need to solve a user’s pain so that the user associates your product with relief.

To discover the root problem, ask “Why?” as many times as it takes to get to an emotion.

Action

To initiate action in a habit, doing must be easier than thinking. An action has three requirements:

Make the process to use your product as simple as possible. Lay out the steps the customer takes to get the job done. Then remove steps until you reach the simplest possible process.

Identify which factor is most impeding your users. Is the mental effort needed to use your product too high? Is the user in a social context where the behavior is inappropriate? Is the behavior so different from normal routine that it’s offputting?

Variable Reward

To build a habit, your product must actually solve the user’s problem so that the user depends on your product as a reliable solution. The benefit the user receives is the reward.

Variable rewards are more effective than fixed rewards. Fixed rewards don’t change at all, delivering the same reward at unchanging intervals. Variable rewards are more like slot machines, delivering unknown amounts at an unknown frequency. Unpredictable reward sizes and novelty spike dopamine levels, which in turn strengthen the development of the habit. Imagine a slot machine that merely paid you $0.99 every time you wagered $1.00 - how fun would that be?

There are three types of variable rewards:

Investment

The more effort we put into something, the more we value it, and the more likely we are to return. Thus, to encourage a user to return and build a habit, prompt them to put something of value into the system so that they value the app more highly and pave the way for longer-term rewards.

Often the user’s investment increases the value of future rewards, building a virtuous cycle of usage that becomes ever more valuable.

Here are examples of types of user investments, with explanations of how they improve future rewards and enable triggers:

Introduction

Modern technology has us addicted to its use. Cognitive psychologists define habits as “automatic behaviors triggered by situational cues,” and app/tech product usage clearly qualifies in many cases.

Companies that are better at building usage habits are at a clear economic advantage. When hooked, users return to a product without expensive marketing - they return on their own volition, spurred by internal triggers rather than external prompting. People who feel lonely automatically open Facebook. Employees who want to procrastinate automatically open their email. Better access, data, and speed are making things more addictive.

The Hooked model of habit formation consists of 4 steps that form a sequence in a loop:

hooked-loop.png

  1. A trigger prompts the behavior.
    • Triggers can be external or internal. External triggers come from outside a person’s thinking (e.g. phone notifications or seeing an advertisement). Internal triggers are internal drives (e.g. relieving boredom or loneliness).
    • For products, behaviors often begin with external triggers. Then, as the habit forms, the behavior becomes associated with internal triggers.
  2. The trigger prompts an action, which is a behavior done in anticipation of a reward.
    • An action is more likely when there is motivation to do it, and when it is easier to do.
  3. The action delivers a variable reward.
    • Predictable rewards don’t cause cravings. You don’t crave turning on your faucet since you know what happens every time.
    • In contrast, variable rewards prompt more intense dopamine hits and push the user to desire the next hit.
  4. In completing the action, the user invests in the product, improving her future experience and increasing the likelihood of completing another loop in the future.
    • Investments include inviting friends, storing data, building a reputation, and learning to use features.

One step of the loop essentially forms one user session. The user returns when prompted by a trigger (external or internal). Over time, the user associates her problem with the solution, and whenever the problem appears, she will automatically seek the solution out of habit.

We’ll be breaking down each of the steps in a chapter.

Chapter 1: Why Habits are Powerful

Habits are a way for the brain to conserve resources by executing automatic behaviors without thinking hard about it. Habits are established when the action has continuously solved the problem in the past.

When you get ready for bed, you execute a specific sequence of actions that you don’t have to think very hard about. Likewise, when you feel bored, you may execute a habit of turning on your phone and swiping up to refresh your feed, since this was an effective way of combating boredom in the past.

Habits are valuable for companies because:

When Do Behaviors Become Habits?

Habits are more likely to be established when the action is more frequent and when the perceived utility is higher. Google quickly became a habit since searches happen on a daily basis, and its search results were much more useful than competing search engines.

For infrequent actions to become habit, the user must perceive a high degree of utility. This applies to purchasing items and large transactions.

Some behaviors never become habits because they don’t occur frequently enough - you don’t really have a house-buying habit if you buy a new house every 10 years.

Is it better for your product to be a painkiller (solving an obvious pain point) or a vitamin (nice-to-haves, appealing to emotional needs)? While classically investors prefer the former, some of the largest companies - Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram - don’t seem to be solving “real” pain points - getting social validation isn’t nearly as important as feeding yourself.

Products can begin as vitamins but, once the behavior is ingrained, they become pain remedies, removal of which becomes painful. Similarly, when people first heard of Facebook, they likely didn’t think they needed it in their lives; but a few years later, many find the news feed indispensable and addictive.

Exercise: Consider Your User’s Habits

Think about the habit that you want your users to build.

Chapter 2: Trigger

The next 4 chapters cover each step of the Hooked model for habit-forming products.

The chain reaction that starts a habit always begins with a trigger. Habits form like pearls in oysters. It starts as a tiny irritant, like a piece of sand, triggering continuous layering of coats to produce a pearl (a fully formed habit).

External Triggers

External triggers are delivered through the environment. They contain information on what the user should do next, like app notifications prompting users to return to see a photo.

Types of external triggers include:

Internal Triggers

Over time, as a product becomes associated with a thought, emotion, or preexisting routine, users return based on internal triggers. Emotions - especially negative ones like boredom, loneliness, confusion, lack of purpose, and indecisiveness - are powerful internal triggers. These triggers may be short and minor, possibly even subconscious.

When triggered, we often execute a mindless action to ease the negative sensation.

Discover Your User’s Pain

To build a habit, you need to solve a user’s pain so that the user associates your product with relief.

The needs that users seek to solve are often timeless and universal. Said Ev Williams of Twitter, “We often think the Internet enables you to do new things - but people just want to do the same things they’ve always done.”

To make the user’s pain feel real, build a persona of user problems. This takes the form of a specific person of a certain demographic who feels and behaves a certain way. (e.g. “Mary is a stay-at-home mother in Wisconsin who doesn’t have time to feed her 3 kids after work.”) This persona provides a rallying force for the entire team to do the right things to solve the problem.

To discover the root problem, ask “Why?” as many times as it takes to get to an emotion. Example for professional email:

Now that you’ve uncovered this fear, you might design your product around the core pain point. For instance, you could highlight emails featuring positive feedback and allow her to sticky encouraging emails for motivation.

Naturally, people have different motivations for the same behavior (like checking email), so you could create multiple viable personas. People may use email to reduce FOMO, seek social connection, or avoid boredom. You’ll need to research your users and figure out which personas are most likely to use your product..

Exercise: Create Your Triggers

Think about your user’s pain points to create the best product.

Chapter 3: Action

After the trigger, the user needs to perform the desired action.

To initiate action in a habit, doing must be easier than thinking. An action has three requirements:

Consider how you behave when you hear your phone vibrate. The trigger is there, but you might not have the motivation (it’s the end of the day and you want to shut the world out). Or if the phone is buried at the bottom of your bag, you have insufficient ability to get the phone. And if the phone is muted, you have no trigger to activate the behavior.

Motivation to Take Action

Motivation is the “energy for action.” All humans are motivated to:

Advertising commonly employs these desires.

Ability to Take Action

Ability is the capacity to do a behavior.

Make the process to use your product as simple as possible. Lay out the steps the customer takes to get the job done. Then remove steps until you reach the simplest possible process.

Web technology inexorably moves toward making activities easier. The lower-friction products are usually the ones that win.

Though critics once decried Twitter’s 140-character limitation, what they missed was how this constraint lowered the barrier for participation, prompting many more to engage. (Shortform note: similarly, Snapchat’s ephemeral messaging lowers the barrier for messaging, compared to a permanent high-quality medium like Instagram.)

Said Ev Williams of Twitter, “Take a human desire, preferably one that has been around for a really long time...identify that desire and use modern technology to take out steps.”

How to Simplify Your Action

Behavioral scientist B. J. Fogg describes six factors that influence a task’s difficulty:

(Shortform note: some of the largest web companies have reduced one or more of these factors by multiples, or even orders of magnitude:

Furthermore, each of these roughly matched routines that people had previously done - Uber fit people’s prior habits behavior of getting into strangers’ cars, and Amazon fit user’s behaviors of shopping in physical stores.)

Identify which factor is most impeding your users. Is the mental effort needed to use your product too high? Is the user in a social context where the behavior is inappropriate? Is the behavior so different from normal routine that it’s offputting?

Here are examples of tactics to reduce frictions:

Should you start with increasing ability or motivation? The author argues, “always start with increasing ability.” Motivating users is hard - users don’t read text, and they have deeply ingrained behaviors. Reducing the effort to perform an action gets them to the reward more quickly.

Shortcuts to Increase Motivation

Cognitive biases affect all of us, causing things to see things as quite not objective. You can use cognitive biases and heuristics in your favor to increase motivation:

Exercise: Reduce Your Barriers to Action

Reduce the frictions for your user to take action.

Chapter 4: Variable Reward

To build a habit, your product must actually solve the user’s problem so that the user depends on your product as a reliable solution. The benefit the user receives is the reward.

When a habit is established, the user comes to crave the solution before actually receiving the reward. In the brain, the nucleus accumbens is responsible for dopamine signaling to reward behavior and set habits. Brain imaging studies have found that signaling was activating not when actually receiving the reward, but rather in anticipation of it.

Importantly, variable rewards are more effective than fixed rewards. Fixed rewards don’t change at all, delivering the same reward at unchanging intervals. Variable rewards are more like slot machines, delivering unknown amounts at an unknown frequency. Unpredictable reward sizes and novelty spike dopamine levels, which in turn strengthen the development of the habit. Imagine a slot machine that merely paid you $0.99 every time you wagered $1.00 - how fun would that be?

The idea of variable rewards was famously studied by Skinner, who experimented with animals pressing a lever to receive food. In the variable group, each lever press was given a random amount of food at random intervals. Animals in the variable group dramatically increased the number of times the animal pressed the lever.

Similarly, products with predictable, finite variability are far less engaging than those with unpredictable, infinite variability. How often do you rewatch your favorite movie, vs checking Facebook?

Infinite variability can often be achieved by the unpredictable actions of other people, as in multiplayer games like World of Warcraft or social networks like Facebook.

Three Variable Reward Types

There are three types of variable rewards:

Here are two examples of successful habit-forming products that use variable rewards:

StackOverflow

Email

Any system of variable rewards isn’t an automatic panacea - it needs to be tied to what really, intrinsically matters to users. Q&A site Mahalo.com tried to pay users money for answering questions, but ultimately found this was insufficient motivation. If money were a primary motivation, users were better off earning a wage, as the rewards came too infrequently and were too small. In contrast, more popular sites like Quora and StackOverflow don’t pay any money, but they use the more powerful tribe rewards to drive stronger behavior.

Autonomy

In general, humans desire autonomy, the freedom to choose their own actions.

Threats to autonomy give rise to reactance, the adrenaline-fueled feeling when your boss micromanages you or your mom tells you to put on your coat. This increases the friction of completing a task

The author hypothesizes that part of the reason people sneak breaks to look at their phone or Facebook at work is to regain some sense of autonomy.

Exercise: Design Your Rewards

Consider how to deepen the rewards that your users get.

Chapter 5: Investment

Investment is the last step of the 4-step model: allowing the user to invest in the product to improve future experiences.

The more effort we put into something, the more we value it, and the more likely we are to return.

Three psychological tendencies cause the investment effect:

Thus, to encourage a user to return and build a habit, prompt them to put something of value into the system so that they value the app more highly and pave the way for longer-term rewards.

Often the user’s investment increases the value of future rewards, building a virtuous cycle of usage that becomes ever more valuable. The extra value can come from personalization through data or enhanced user abilities. Furthermore, the user’s investment increase the switching costs to using a rival product - it means forsaking everything they’d built up.

Even better, the user’s investment allows for personalized external triggers based on the user’s past behavior.

How to Build User Investments

Here are examples of the types of user investments, with explanations of how they improve future rewards and enable triggers:

Content Curation

The idea: when users curate content they like, the product can surface more content the user is likely to enjoy through customization.

Data

The idea: when users contribute personal data, the product can issue useful recommendations by analyzing the data.

Followers and Social Connections

The idea: when a user connects to other users, the contributions of other users provide more value and are compelling triggers to return.

Reputation

The idea: when users build reputations on a site, their influence increases, and their desire to leave decreases.

Skills

The idea: For highly technical software like Photoshop and Salesforce, using the product requires great time and effort. Investing more time unlocks new capabilities that produce better results, in the form of better looking images or more sales closed.

Triggers are less natural here, but may arise through product updates or as result of the output (eg changes in sales lead status).

Reminders

The idea: explicitly asking the user to set reminders for herself is a form of investment and rewards.

In every one of the above, notice how the switching costs are incredibly high after investing a lot of effort. Thus each service has a natural defensible moat from competitor attack.

Furthermore, note how all of the above tend to have virtuous cycles or flywheel effects - because the product gets more valuable with more investment, the user wants to return and use it more, which further increases the product value.

Caveat: because investment increases friction, ask users to do work after they’ve received the variable rewards, not before. And to prevent scaring users away, stage the investment into small chunks of work, starting with small, easy tasks and building up complexity over successive cycles.

Exercise: Build User Investments

Get your users to invest in your product by taking action.

Chapter 6: Building Habits Responsibly

With great power comes great responsibility. You’ve now learned how to build products that change people’s behaviors, be persuasive, and manipulate people into doing things they might not naturally do.

This can sound evil. Yet many successful products ranging in morality manipulate people’s behavior. Why is Weight Watchers any better than slot machines? How do we distinguish good habit forming from bad?

Hooked provides the useful Manipulation Matrix, which can help you examine whether you should be attempting to hook your users. Depending on whether you believe your product improves the user’s life and whether you use the product yourself , you fit into these profiles:

Maker does not use it Maker uses it
Materially improves the user’s life Peddler Facilitator
Does not improve the user’s life Dealer Entertainer

While your bin placement doesn’t guarantee success, morality, or market size, they do affect your chances of success. Businesses in different bins have different properties.

Facilitator

You create something you would use and earnestly believe makes the user’s life better. These tend to be healthy habits.

You cannot consider yourself a facilitator unless you’ve experienced the problem yourself.

Because you have the problem yourself, you know the user well, and are often best positioned to solve the user’s problems. This increases your chance of success.

If it’s something you would have used earlier in life but wouldn’t today, then the longer the time difference, the lower your odds of success. For instance, if you’re building a product for apartment renting, but you’ve owned a house for 10 years, you’re likely out of touch with what users want.

There is still a risk of addiction for even the most healthy products, but luckily the rate is low (<1%), and the benefits likely outweigh the cons.

Peddler

You create something you don’t use yourself, but you believe improves the user’s life.

Because you don’t have the problem yourself, you have to take extra leaps to imagine the user who’ll find the product valuable.

You operate at a heavy disadvantage because of your disconnect with your customers and their needs, which makes your product feel inauthentic. This lowers your chances of success.

Common examples include advertising to a market unlike yourself, too-good-to-be-true products.

Entertainer

If you just want to have fun, but can’t honestly claim it improves lives, it’s entertainment.

Entertainment, like art, is important, but tends to be fleeting because they don’t consistently improve people’s lives. They tend not to be habit-forming products - you can only watch a movie so many times, until you seek the next dose of novelty.

Sustainable businesses here come not from the content itself or the user’s habits - they arise from effective distribution to get to more users while they’re still hot, and continuous novelty to keep feeding interest.

(Shortform note: entertainment that has other variable rewards, like a social community and infinite variability, are more likely to form persistent habits - like online role-playing game World of Warcraft, or the large content library of Netflix.

Also, this categorization is subjective - some game developers are facilitators who honestly believe their games honestly improve the world, but their games are subject to the same properties as games by developers who are entertainers.)

Dealer

In the absence of both utility and self-usage, you presumably are building the product only to make money.

This can put you in morally precarious positions.

Casinos and drugs both squarely fit in this category.

Chapter 7: Bible App Example

Having understood the model of building habits, we can now dive into a single business.

The Bible App is the leading Bible app that allows users to study the Bible, providing daily snippets and reading plans as well as the full Bible text. Founded by a pastor and owned by a church group, the Bible App is squarely in the Facilitator category.

With over 200 million downloads, it received a natural advantage by being early to the new App store in 2008, but it also methodically uses Hooked principles to become a habit-forming product.

Triggers

Action

Variable Reward

Investment

Chapter 8: Testing Habits with Users

Now that you have ideas, you need to test them with real users. The author proposes the Habit Testing process, similar to “build, measure, learn” from Lean Startup.

  1. Identify
    • Define what it means to be a devoted user. How often should she use your product? What does this person do?
    • Use cohort analysis to figure out how your users are meeting this benchmark.
    • Nir Eyal argues 5% of habitual users is a good benchmark to exceed - fewer and you may have a problem.
  2. Codify
    • Identify the steps your habitual users took to find patterns to what hooked them.
    • Twitter found that following 30 people reached a tipping point
  3. Modify
    • Modify the same Habit Path identified above - update the conversion funnel, remove features that block action, strengthen features that increase investment.

Discovering Habit-forming Opportunities

You might be wondering what kind of product to build and how to get your users to build habits. How can you find ideas for habit-forming experiences?