Hooked

My takeaways to remember

Dopamine —> associated with desire and wanting not pleasure

what draws us to act is not the sensation we receive from the reward itself, but the need to alleviate the craving for that reward.

The enemy of building habits is past behavior (QWERTY still prevails despite inferiority)

Frequent reinforcement over short period of time increases chances

The Hooked Model is designed to connect the user’s problem with the designer’s solution frequently enough to form a habit.

ask yourself these fundamental questions for building effective hooks: What do users really want? What pain is your product relieving? (Internal trigger) What brings users to your service? (External trigger) What is the simplest action users take in anticipation of reward, and how can you simplify your product to make this action easier? (Action) Are users fulfilled by the reward yet left wanting more? (Variable reward) What “bit of work” do users invest in your product? Does it load the next trigger and store value to improve the product with use? (Investment)

Hooked Cycle

Trigger (ie paid, earned, owned)

New habits are sparked by external triggers, but associations with internal triggers are what keeps users hooked.

Action

if the user does not take action, the trigger is useless. To initiate action, doing must be easier than thinking. Remember, a habit is a behavior done with little or no conscious thought. The more effort—either physical or mental—required to perform the desired action, the less likely it is to occur.

Fogg model posits that there are three ingredients required to initiate any and all behaviors: (1) the user must have sufficient motivation; (2) the user must have the ability to complete the desired action; and (3) a trigger must be present to activate the behavior. The Fogg Behavior Model is represented in the formula B = MAT, which represents that a given behavior will occur when motivation, ability, and a trigger are present at the same time and in sufficient degrees.

3 core motivations:

seek pleasure and avoid pain;

seek hope and avoid fear;

seek social acceptance and avoid rejection

Evan Williams, cofounder of Blogger, Twitter, and Medium: “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.”

increasing motivation is expensive Influencing behavior by reducing the effort required to perform an action is more effective than increasing someone’s desire to do it. Make your product so simple that users already know how to use it

Variable Reward (Important Considerations for Designing Reward Systems)

Maholo case

In Mahalo’s case, executives assumed that paying users would drive repeat engagement with the site. After all, people like money, right? Unfortunately, Mahalo had an incomplete understanding of its users’ drivers. Ultimately, the company found that people did not want to use a Q&A site to make money. If the trigger was a desire for monetary rewards, users were better off spending their time earning an hourly wage. And if the payouts were meant to take the form of a game, like a slot machine, then the rewards came far too infrequently and were too small to matter. However, Quora demonstrated that social rewards and the variable reinforcement of recognition from peers proved to be much more frequent and salient motivators. Quora instituted an upvoting system that reports user satisfaction with answers and provides a steady stream of social feedback. Quora’s social rewards have proven more attractive than Mahalo’s monetary rewards. Only by understanding what truly matters to users can a company correctly match the right variable reward to their intended behavior.

Important of personal agency

a recent meta-analysis of forty-two studies involving over twenty-two thousand participants concluded that these few words, placed at the end of a request, are a highly effective way to gain compliance, doubling the likelihood of people saying yes.24 The magic words the researchers discovered? The phrase “But you are free to accept or refuse.” The “but you are free” technique demonstrates how we are more likely to be persuaded to give when our ability to choose is reaffirmed…when a request is coupled with an affirmation of the right to choose, reactance is kept at bay.
Companies fail to change user behaviors because they do not make their services enjoyable for its own sake, often asking users to learn new, unfamiliar actions instead of making old routines easier. Companies that successfully change behaviors present users with an implicit choice between their old way of doing things and a new, more convenient way to fulfill existing needs.

Investment

The stored value users put into the product increases the likelihood they will use it again in the future and comes in a variety of forms (LinkedIn, Spotify, Twitter all become more valuable the more we invest time in them)

Reputation is a form of stored value users can literally take to the bank. On online marketplaces such as eBay, Upwork, Yelp, and Airbnb, people with negative scores are treated very differently from those with good reputations.

Skill creates lock-in

For example, Adobe Photoshop is the most widely used professional graphics editing program in the world. The software provides hundreds of advanced features for creating and manipulating images. Learning the program is difficult at first, but as users become more familiar with the product—often investing hours watching tutorials and reading how-to guides—their expertise and efficiency using the product improves. They also achieve a sense of mastery (rewards of the self, as discussed in chapter 4). Unfortunately for the design professional, most of this acquired knowledge by users does not translate to competing applications.

From Intro

Although dopamine is often wrongly categorized as making us feel good, introducing variability does create a focused state, which suppresses the areas of the brain associated with judgment and reason while activating the parts associated with wanting and desire.

1: The Habit Zone

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ingrained habits—behaviors done with little or no conscious thought—which, by some estimates, guide nearly half of our daily actions. Habits are one of the ways the brain learns complex behaviors. Neuroscientists believe habits give us the ability to focus our attention on other things by storing automatic responses in the basal ganglia, an area of the brain associated with involuntary actions. Habits form when the brain takes a shortcut and stops actively deliberating over what to do next. The brain quickly learns to codify behaviors that provide a solution to whatever situation it encounters.

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Viral Cycle Time is the amount of time it takes a user to invite another user, and it can have a massive impact. “For example, after 20 days with a cycle time of two days, you will have 20,470 users,” Skok writes. “But if you halved that cycle time to one day, you would have over 20 million users! It is logical that it would be better to have more cycles occur, but it is less obvious just how much better.” Having a greater proportion of users daily returning to a service dramatically decreases Viral Cycle Time for two reasons: First, daily users initiate loops more often (think tagging a friend in a Facebook photo); second, more daily active users means more people to respond and react to each invitation. The cycle not only perpetuates the process—with higher and higher user engagement, it accelerates it.

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A classic paper by John Gourville, a professor of marketing at Harvard Business School, stipulates that “many innovations fail because consumers irrationally overvalue the old while companies irrationally overvalue the new.”8 Gourville claims that for new entrants to stand a chance, they can’t just be better, they must be nine times better. Why such a high bar? Because old habits die hard and new products or services need to offer dramatic improvements to shake users out of old routines. Gourville writes that products that require a high degree of behavior change are doomed to fail even if the benefits of using the new product are clear and substantial.

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For example, the technology I am using to write this book is inferior to existing alternatives in many ways. I’m referring to the QWERTY keyboard which was first developed in the 1870s for the now-ancient typewriter. QWERTY was designed with commonly used characters spaced far apart. This layout prevented typists from jamming the metal type bars of early machines.9 This physical limitation is an anachronism in the digital age, yet QWERTY keyboards remain the standard despite the invention of far better layouts

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The enemy of forming new habits is past behaviors, and research suggests that old habits die hard. Even when we change our routines, neural pathways remain etched in our brains, ready to be reactivated when we lose focus.13 This presents an especially difficult challenge for product designers trying to create new lines or businesses based on forming new habits.

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For new behaviors to really take hold, they must occur often. In a recent study at the University College London, researchers followed participants as they attempted to form a habit of flossing their teeth.14 As one of its findings, the study concluded that the more frequently the new behavior occurred, the stronger the habit became. Like flossing, frequent engagement with a product—especially over a short period of time—increases the likelihood of forming new routines.

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As represented in figure 1, a behavior that occurs with enough frequency and perceived utility enters the Habit Zone, helping to make it a default behavior. If either of these factors falls short and the behavior lies below the threshold, it is less likely that the desired behavior will become a habit.

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research thus far has not found a universal timescale for turning all behaviors into habits. A 2010 study found that some habits can be formed in a matter of weeks while others can take more than five months.21 The researchers also found that the complexity of the behavior and how important the habit was to the person greatly affected how quickly the routine was formed.

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Vitamins Versus Painkillers

Vitamins, by contrast, do not necessarily solve an obvious pain point. Instead they appeal to users’ emotional rather than functional needs.

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Before making up your mind on the vitamin versus painkiller debate for some of the world’s most successful tech companies, consider this idea: A habit is when not doing an action causes a bit of discomfort. The sensation is similar to an itch, a feeling that manifests within the mind until it is satisfied. The habit-forming products we use are simply there to provide some sort of relief.

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My answer to the vitamin versus painkiller question: Habit-forming technologies are both. These services seem at first to be offering nice-to-have vitamins, but once the habit is established, they provide an ongoing pain remedy.

2: Trigger

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External triggers are embedded with information, which tells the user what to do next. An external trigger communicates the next action the user should take

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Too many choices or irrelevant options can cause hesitation, confusion, or worse—abandonment.4

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we’ve all learned that Web site links are for clicking and app icons are for tapping. The only purpose for these common visual triggers is to prompt the user to action. As a readily accepted aspect of interface design, these calls to action don’t need to tell people how to use them; the information is embedded.

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Advertising, search engine marketing, and other paid channels are commonly used to get users’ attention and prompt them to act. Paid triggers can be effective but costly ways to keep users coming back. Habit-forming companies tend not to rely on paid triggers for very long, if at all.

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Earned triggers are free in that they cannot be bought directly, but they often require investment in the form of time spent on public and media relations. Favorable press mentions, hot viral videos, and featured app store placements are all effective ways to gain attention. Companies may be lulled into thinking that related downloads or sales spikes signal long-term success, yet awareness generated by earned triggers can be short-lived. For earned triggers to drive ongoing user acquisition, companies must keep their products in the limelight—a difficult and unpredictable task.

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Relationship triggers can create the viral hyper-growth entrepreneurs and investors lust after. Sometimes relationship triggers drive growth because people love to tell one another about a wonderful offer.

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Owned triggers consume a piece of real estate in the user’s environment. They consistently show up in daily life and it is ultimately up to the user to opt in to allowing these triggers to appear. For example, an app icon on the user’s phone screen, an e-mail newsletter to which the user subscribes, or an app update notification only appears if the user wants it there. As long as the user agrees to see the trigger, the company that sets the trigger owns a share of the user’s attention.

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owned triggers prompt repeat engagement until a habit is formed. Without owned triggers and users’ tacit permission to enter their attentional space, it is difficult to cue users frequently enough to change their behavior.

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When a product becomes tightly coupled with a thought, an emotion, or a preexisting routine, it leverages an internal trigger. Unlike external triggers, which use sensory stimuli like a morning alarm clock or giant “Login Now” button, you can’t see, touch, or hear an internal trigger.

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

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In the case of internal triggers, the information about what to do next is encoded as a learned association in the user’s memory. The association between an internal trigger and your product, however, is not formed overnight. It can take weeks or months of frequent usage for internal triggers to latch onto cues. New habits are sparked by external triggers, but associations with internal triggers are what keeps users hooked.

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Finding customers’ internal triggers requires learning more about people than what they can tell you in a survey, though. It requires digging deeper to understand how your users feel. The ultimate goal of a habit-forming product is to solve the user’s pain by creating an association so that the user identifies the company’s product or service as the source of relief.

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These common needs are timeless and universal. Yet talking to users to reveal these wants will likely prove ineffective because they themselves don’t know which emotions motivate them. People just don’t think in these terms. You’ll often find that people’s declared preferences—what they say they want—are far different from their revealed preferences—what they actually do.

3: Action

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The next step in the Hooked Model is the action phase. The trigger, driven by internal or external cues, informs the user of what to do next; however, if the user does not take action, the trigger is useless. To initiate action, doing must be easier than thinking. Remember, a habit is a behavior done with little or no conscious thought. The more effort—either physical or mental—required to perform the desired action, the less likely it is to occur.

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While there are many theories about what drives human behaviors, Dr. B. J. Fogg, Director of the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University, has developed a model that serves as an elegant way to understand what drives our actions. Fogg posits that there are three ingredients required to initiate any and all behaviors: (1) the user must have sufficient motivation; (2) the user must have the ability to complete the desired action; and (3) a trigger must be present to activate the behavior. The Fogg Behavior Model is represented in the formula B = MAT, which represents that a given behavior will occur when motivation, ability, and a trigger are present at the same time and in sufficient degrees.

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The nature of motivation is a widely contested topic in psychology, but Fogg argues that three Core Motivators drive our desire to act. Fogg states that all humans are motivated to seek pleasure and avoid pain; to seek hope and avoid fear; and finally, to seek social acceptance and avoid rejection

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any technology or product that significantly reduces the steps to complete a task will enjoy high adoption rates by the people it assists. For Hauptly, easier equals better

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as the steps required to get something done (in this case to get online and use the Internet) were removed or improved upon, adoption increased.

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Evan Williams, cofounder of Blogger, Twitter, and Medium, echoes Hauptly’s formula for innovation when he describes his own approach to building three massively successful companies: “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.”

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increasing motivation is expensive and time consuming. Web site visitors tend to ignore instructional text; they are often multitasking and have little patience for explanations about why or how they should do something. Influencing behavior by reducing the effort required to perform an action is more effective than increasing someone’s desire to do it. Make your product so simple that users already know how to use it

4: Variable Reward

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The study revealed that what draws us to act is not the sensation we receive from the reward itself, but the need to alleviate the craving for that reward.

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The stress of desire in the brain appears to compel us, just as it did in Olds’s and Milner’s lab mouse experiments.

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Skinner’s pigeons tell us a great deal about what helps drive our own behaviors. More recent experiments reveal that variability increases activity in the nucleus accumbens and spikes levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine, driving our hungry search for rewards.6 Researchers observed increased dopamine levels in the nucleus accumbens in experiments involving monetary rewards as well as in a study of heterosexual men viewing images of attractive women’s faces.7 Variable rewards can be found in all sorts of products and experiences that hold our attention. They fuel our drive to check e-mail, browse the web, or bargain-shop. I propose that variable rewards come in three types: the tribe, the hunt, and the self. Habit-forming products utilize one or more of these variable reward types.

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Our brains are adapted to seek rewards that make us feel accepted, attractive, important, and included.

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this technique works particularly well when people observe the behavior of people most like themselves or who are slightly more experienced (and therefore, role models).9 T

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What motivates them to invest the effort into what others may see as the burdensome task of writing technical documentation? Stack Overflow devotees write responses in anticipation of rewards of the tribe. Each time a user submits an answer, other members have the opportunity to vote the response up or down. The best responses percolate upward, accumulating points for their authors (figure 19). When they reach certain point levels, members earn badges, which confer special status and privileges. Naturally, the process of accumulating upvotes is highly variable—no one knows how many will be received from the community when responding to a question.

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Stack Overflow works because, like all of us, software engineers find satisfaction in contributing to a community they care about. The element of variability also turns a seemingly mundane task into an engaging, gamelike experience.

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The need to acquire physical objects, such as food and other supplies that aid our survival, is part of our brain’s operating system. Where we once hunted for food, today we hunt for other things. In modern society, food can be bought with cash, and more recently by extension, information translates into money. Rewards of the hunt existed long before the advent of computers. Yet today we find numerous examples of variable rewards associated with the pursuit of resources and information that compel us with the same determination as the San hunter chasing his prey.

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In Mahalo’s case, executives assumed that paying users would drive repeat engagement with the site. After all, people like money, right? Unfortunately, Mahalo had an incomplete understanding of its users’ drivers. Ultimately, the company found that people did not want to use a Q&A site to make money. If the trigger was a desire for monetary rewards, users were better off spending their time earning an hourly wage. And if the payouts were meant to take the form of a game, like a slot machine, then the rewards came far too infrequently and were too small to matter. However, Quora demonstrated that social rewards and the variable reinforcement of recognition from peers proved to be much more frequent and salient motivators. Quora instituted an upvoting system that reports user satisfaction with answers and provides a steady stream of social feedback. Quora’s social rewards have proven more attractive than Mahalo’s monetary rewards. Only by understanding what truly matters to users can a company correctly match the right variable reward to their intended behavior.

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In fact, a recent meta-analysis of forty-two studies involving over twenty-two thousand participants concluded that these few words, placed at the end of a request, are a highly effective way to gain compliance, doubling the likelihood of people saying yes.24 The magic words the researchers discovered? The phrase “But you are free to accept or refuse.” The “but you are free” technique demonstrates how we are more likely to be persuaded to give when our ability to choose is reaffirmed.

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when a request is coupled with an affirmation of the right to choose, reactance is kept at bay.

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too many companies build their products betting users will do what they make them do instead of letting them do what they want to do. Companies fail to change user behaviors because they do not make their services enjoyable for its own sake, often asking users to learn new, unfamiliar actions instead of making old routines easier. Companies that successfully change behaviors present users with an implicit choice between their old way of doing things and a new, more convenient way to fulfill existing needs.

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The cycle of conflict, mystery, and resolution is as old as storytelling itself, and at the heart of every good tale is variability. The unknown is fascinating, and strong stories hold our attention by waiting to reveal what happens next.

5: Investment

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There is one last step in the Hooked Model that is critical for building habit-forming products and services. Before users create the mental associations that activate their automatic behaviors, they must first invest in the product.

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The more users invest time and effort into a product or service, the more they value it. In fact, there is ample evidence to suggest that our labor leads to love.

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The stored value users put into the product increases the likelihood they will use it again in the future and comes in a variety of forms.

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Content Every time users of Spotify listen to music using the streaming service, they strengthen their ties to the product.

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On LinkedIn the user’s online résumé embodies the concept of data as stored value. Every time job seekers use the service, they are prompted to add more information. The company found that the more information users invested in the site, the more committed they became to it.

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Followers On the morning of Twitter’s initial public offering on November 7, 2013, a news commentator on Bloomberg Television said that “the technology needed to build the company could be built in a day.”9 In fact, he was right. Twitter is a simple application. With a bit of basic programming know-how, anyone can build their very own clone of the multibillion-dollar social media behemoth. In fact, several companies have tried to supplant the popular social network. One of the most notable attempts came from a disgruntled developer who decided to build App.net, an ad-free alternative that many tech industry watchers argue is actually a better product. However, like other attempts to copy the service, App.net failed to take off. Why is this? Collecting people to follow on Twitter, as well as collecting followers, provides tremendous value and is a key driver of what keeps Twitter users hooked (

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Reputation Reputation is a form of stored value users can literally take to the bank. On online marketplaces such as eBay, Upwork, Yelp, and Airbnb, people with negative scores are treated very differently from those with good reputations.

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Skill

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For example, Adobe Photoshop is the most widely used professional graphics editing program in the world. The software provides hundreds of advanced features for creating and manipulating images. Learning the program is difficult at first, but as users become more familiar with the product—often investing hours watching tutorials and reading how-to guides—their expertise and efficiency using the product improves. They also achieve a sense of mastery (rewards of the self, as discussed in chapter 4). Unfortunately for the design professional, most of this acquired knowledge by users does not translate to competing applications.

6: What Are You Going to Do with This?

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The Hooked Model is designed to connect the user’s problem with the designer’s solution frequently enough to form a habit.

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ask yourself these fundamental questions for building effective hooks: What do users really want? What pain is your product relieving? (Internal trigger) What brings users to your service? (External trigger) What is the simplest action users take in anticipation of reward, and how can you simplify your product to make this action easier? (Action) Are users fulfilled by the reward yet left wanting more? (Variable reward) What “bit of work” do users invest in your product? Does it load the next trigger and store value to improve the product with use? (Investment)

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7: Case Studies

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

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Wherever new technologies suddenly make a behavior easier, new possibilities are born.

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the Internet was first made possible because of the infrastructure commissioned by the U.S. government during the cold war. Next, enabling technologies such as dial-up modems, followed by high-speed Internet connections, provided access to the web. Finally, HTML, web browsers, and search engines—the application layer—made browsing possible on the World Wide Web. At each successive stage, previous enabling technologies allowed new behaviors and businesses to flourish.