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Summary
Automatic Behaviors: Habits are automatic behaviors triggered by situational cues, often performed with little conscious thought.
Internal Triggers: Successful products connect to internal triggers, encouraging users to engage without external prompts by integrating into their daily routines and emotions.
Sequential Hook Cycle: The Hook Model involves four components—Trigger, Action, Variable Reward, and Investment—that work sequentially to form and reinforce user habits.
Variable Rewards: Providing unpredictable rewards keeps users engaged and returning, as variability creates intrigue and desire.
Investment and Retention: Users' investments of time, data, or effort increase their attachment to the product, enhancing retention and reducing sensitivity to price changes.
Table of contents
The Habit Zone
The Hook Model
The 4 components of the Hook Model
Mastering the Trigger & Action
External triggers vs. Internal triggers
Building Triggers
Brain Influencers (Heuristics) that influence actions
Mastering the Variable Reward & Investment
Reward types
Designing solutions for rewards
Psychology behind investments
How to get users to invest
Habit Testing
Intro to the Hook Model
Habits are "automatic behaviors triggered by situational cues" (things we do with little or no conscious)
Focus on the principle of "First to mind wins"
The smart thing is to attach the products to internal triggers so that users show up without any external triggers.
Instead of relying on expensive marketing, try to link the product or service to the user's daily routine and emotions
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.
The Hook Model is designed to connect the user’s problem with the designer’s solution frequently enough to form a habit.
The 4 components of the Hook model
Triger - is what agitate the behavior
External - starts by notifying the user through email, website link, app notification
Internal - after cycling through successive hooks, users begin to form association with internal triggers (triggers attached to existing behavior and emotions)
Action - is the behavior done in anticipation of a reward
product should be excellent in terms of usability, interactive, design, or anything that encourage action
Two basic influencers:
The ease of performing an action
The psychological motivation
Variable Reward - is what makes the user to keep coming again and again. The creation of a craving, desire, intrigue
The unsurprising response of your fridge light turning on when you open the door doesn’t drive you to keep opening it again and again. However, suppose a different treat magically appears in your fridge every time you open it— voilà, intrigue is created…variability is the key.
Investment - is what makes the user to keep coming again and again. The creation of a craving, desire, intrigue
is where the user does a bit of work to get a better Hook cycle in order to increase the odds that the user will make another pass
This is when the user puts in some of his time, data, effort, social capital or money to improve the service for the next-go round
That's why when i eventually invest on Facebook with my comment or share, the process and hook doesn't end there cuz a few minutes and days later I'll be getting people commenting and sharing my post and will open up into another cycle. The key is to understand what your target will want next?
Same thing when i invest time on filling my Social Media profile and start noticing recommendations and insights. My investment made the service much useful. The key is to track user's preferences and keep providing exactly what they like.
Benefits of the Hook model
Increasing customer lifetime value
FACT: Business is worth the sum of its future profits (as seen by investors), that's why many companies invest in R&D and implement strategies to grow future profits by either: Increasing revenues or decreasing expenses
SOLUTION: Fostering consumer habits is an effective way to increase the value of a company by driving higher customer lifetime value (CLTV): the amount of money made from a customer before that person switches to a competitor, stops using the product, or dies.
EX: For products or services in which consumers tend (have) to stay loyal for a long time using a particular product or service, companies will spend a lot to acquire such customers. Like credit card users.
Providing pricing flexibility
FACT: Warren Buffet says " You can determine the strength of a business over time by the amount of agony they go through in raising prices".
SOULTION: As customers form routines around a product, they come to depend upon it and become less sensitive to price.
EX: That's why In the free-to-play video game business (Clash of Clans), it is standard practice for game developers to delay asking users to pay money until they have played consistently and habitually. Once the compulsion to play is in place and the desire to progress in the game increases, converting users into paying customers is much easier. The real money lies in selling virtual items, extra lives, and special powers.
EX; Candy Crush Saga, a game played mostly on mobile devices. The game’s “freemium” model converts some of those users into paying customers, netting the game’s maker nearly $1 million per day.
EX: take Evernote, the popular note-taking and archiving software: It is free to use but the company offers upgraded features, such as offline viewing and collaboration tools, for a price
Conclusion: to build a habit forming product/service, users should have the ability to try, admire and get desire to continue or repeat. Only then, they get to pay. The best business model to implement such tactic is the Freemium model. And as usage increased over time, so did customers’ willingness to pay.
Supercharging growth
Hooked users become "Brand Evangelist": Users who continuously find value in a product are more likely to tell their friends about it. Frequent usage creates more opportunities to encourage people to invite their friends, broadcast content, and share through word of mouth.
Products with higher user engagement also have the potential to grow faster than their rivals.
Facebook the "More is More" principle: more frequent usage drives more viral growth
Improving the Viral Cycle (is the Time is the amount of time it takes a user to invite another user). 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.
Sharpening the competitive edge
FACT: Many entrepreneurs fall into the trap of building products that are only marginally better than existing solutions, hoping their innovation will be good enough to woo customers away from existing products. But when it comes to shaking consumers’ old habits, these naive entrepreneurs often find that better products don’t always win
SOLUTION: User habits are a competitive advantage. Products that change customer routines are less susceptible to attacks from other companies.
Also, Hooked products usually has "storing value" where users data is stored reducing the tendency to switch to an alternative. Ex, Memories and experiences captured on Instagram are added to one’s digital scrapbook
Building the Mind Monopoly
The product that comes to mind when the pain or the craving triggers is the product that owns monopoly in the mind of the customer
Altering behavior requires not only an understanding of how to persuade people to act—for example, the first time they land on a web page—but also necessitates getting them to repeat behaviors for long periods, ideally for the rest of their lives.
For new behaviors to really take hold, they must occur often. Frequent engagement with a product— especially over a short period of time—increases the likelihood of forming new routines.
All new behaviors have a short life and most people return to their old habit. Two-thirds of alcoholics who complete a rehabilitation program will pick up the bottle, and their old habits, within a year’s time.
Old habits die hard
Ex: Google is the best search engine, yet if we use Bing we rarely see a lot of differences. So why users don't switch to Bing? it's simply because Habits keep users loyal. If a user is familiar with the Google interface, switching to Bing requires cognitive effort. Also Google is working so hard with its vast products and features to make itself as the only solution in the mind of the user, especially by engaging via the "Micro Moments"
The Habit Zone
This only works for business that requires ongoing, unprompted user engagement.
If an insurance company recommend buying their service and you bought it. That's it, there is nothing more the customers need to do.
The user must perceive a high degree of utility, either from gaining pleasure or avoiding pain. Sometimes displaying a competitive pricing on your site that is lower than yours will put you as a default solution for customers’ purchasing needs.
How to determine a product habit-forming potential? (By plotting two factors)
Frequency: how often the behavior occurs
Perceived Value: how useful and rewarding the behavior is in the user’s mind over alternative solutions
Vitamins Vs. painkillers
Reasons why companies/products fail?
Companies run out of funding
Products enter markets too early or too late
The marketplace doesn’t need what companies are offering
Founders simply give up.
The one reason for success is when you solve a problem, but what kind?
Painkillers solve an obvious need, relieving a specific pain, and often have quantifiable markets.
Vitamins, by contrast, do not necessarily solve an obvious pain point. Instead they appeal to users’ emotional rather than functional needs. When we take our multivitamin each morning, we don’t really know if it is actually making us healthier
But the question is: what about Facebook, twitter, Instagram? How they're a painkiller?
These companies created the feeling that they're the painkillers for us. We did not know we needed them until they became part of our everyday lives. A habit is when not doing an action causes a bit of pain. They created the feeling of discomfort when not using them. (we can also argue that they tapped into the pain of being bored)
The word pain is not solving a real big problem as many thing, it can be simply like an itch, a feeling that manifests within the mind and causes discomfort until it is satisfied.
The answer: A Habit-Forming Product Should be BOTH ( a vitamin and a painkiller). They provide services that seem at first to be offering nice-to-have vitamins, but once the habit is established, they become must-haves.
Qs to build a habit-forming business model
What habits does your business model require?
What problem are users turning to your product to solve?
How do users currently solve that problem and why does it need a solution?
How frequently do you expect users to engage with your product?
What user behavior do you want to make into a habit?
1) The Trigger component
External Triggers
Should ask for one action only (just like a landing page)
If it's a CTA then you have to explain what they're getting after doing the action of pressing the button. This can be in the CTA text or explained in an email for example
However, sometimes you don't use CTA but use things that people already are familiar of their purpose. Ex, text links are known to be clicked, Apps are known to be tapped.
tell the user what to do next by placing information within the user’s environment.
Used only to get people attention to use the product (not for habit forming or revisiting your site) and get them to the Hook funnel
Types:
1. Paid Triggers
Used to get people attention and prompt them to act
Come in form of ads, SEO, SEA, and other paid channels
Used to acquire new users only
3. Relationship Triggers
when others tell or refer your product
can be through a product feature (i.e like of facebook) or through WOM campaigns
one of the most effective ways
don't use it unethically by using your user's names for refereing without their intentions (called dark patterns)
2. Earned Triggers
Used to generate awareness and attention
less costly and sometimes free
like press mentions, hot viral videos, being featured in app store
4. Owned Triggers
Are the triggers that can show up constantly in the users daily life after he opt-in and he is allowed to control the appearance of the trigger
Come in form of e-mail newsletter or an app update notification
As long as the user agrees to receive a trigger, the company that sets the trigger owns a share of the user’s attention.
This is the only trigger with the "relationship triggers" that can be used for repeat engagement until a habit is formed
Internal Triggers
is when a product becomes tightly coupled with a thought, an emotion, or a preexisting routine
Can be introduced into the user's mind by massive ad campaign highlighting the emotion and telling them what to do or by developing something that is deeply researched to meet the user's need
Products that attach to these internal triggers provide users with quick relief. Once a technology has created an association in users’ minds that the product is the solution of choice, they return on their own, no longer needing prompts from external triggers.
New habits are sparked by external triggers, but associations with internal triggers are what keeps users hooked.
Tell the user what to do next through associations stored in the user’s memory.
Types:
1. Negative emotions
Feelings of boredom, loneliness, frustration, confusion, and indecisiveness often instigate a slight pain or irritation and prompt an almost instantaneous and often mindless action to quell the negative sensation.
The severity of the negative emotion might be minor but if it touches deeply the consumer psychology and needs then it's enough. People sometimes use Facebook whenever they're felling bored
When we feel overly stressed, we seek serenity, perhaps finding relief in sites like Pinterest. When we feel lonely, destinations like Facebook and Twitter provide instant social connections. When we feel uncertain we unconsciously come to Google
2. Positive emotions
may even be triggered by a need to satisfy something that is bothering us
The desire to be entertained can be thought of as the need to eliminate boredom. A need to share good news can also be thought of as an attempt to find and maintain social connections.
Building Triggers
Requires a deep digging in how/what the users feel as a pain and solve it
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.
Knowing the user's pain point should be before developing the features
People sometimes don't know what they want and often declare preferences (what they say they want) which are far different from their revealed preferences(what they actually do.)
It's effective that your external trigger (notification):
Integrates with the internal triggers or stimuli people are facing (like fear of failing exams), &
Comes at the right time (that's why an app is a must now as it's the closest thing to your potential customer when the trigger strikes)
How?
Learn the drivers behind successful habit-forming products (not to copy them, but to understand how they solve users’ problems)
Use the "5 Whys Method" (asking the questions why five times until you reach to the root). Questions like Why do people really send text messages? Why do they take photos? What role does watching television or sports play in their lives? What would your users want to achieve by using your solution? Where and when will they use it? What emotions influence their use and will trigger them to action?
Use of tools like "Customer Avatar Story", "Usability Study" & "Empathy Maps" to learn about the user.
Inside Instagram triggers
They made every picture in their app unique so that it serves as a relationship external trigger raising awareness and serving as a cue for others to install and use the app and enable sharing them on the big social media like Facebook & Twitter
Use your own feature or product as a "relationship trigger"
Allow sharing them on the big channels
Make them unique to grab attention
Others learned of the app from the media and bloggers, or through the featured placement Apple granted Instagram in its App Store—all earned external triggers. Try to make your product be ranked in a special great list, so that you make media spread your product without asking them to
Once installed, Instagram benefited from owned external triggers. The app icon on users’ phone screens and push notifications about their friends’ postings served to call them back.
With repeated use, Instagram formed strong associations with internal triggers relieving a small itch which are the fear of losing a special moment, the dispel of boredom by connecting them with others via pictures, alleviates the increasingly recognizable pain point known as fear of missing out, or FOMO
Qs to build Triggers into your product
Who is your product’s user?
What is the user doing right before your intended habit?
Come up with three internal triggers that could cue your user to action. Refer to the 5 Whys Method described in this chapter.
Which internal trigger does your user experience most frequently?
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).”
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?
How can you couple an external trigger as closely as possible to when the user’s internal trigger fires?
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 three crazy or currently impossible ideas for ways to trigger your user (wearable computers, biometric sensors, carrier pigeons, etc.). You could find that your crazy ideas spur some new approaches that may not be so nutty after all. In a few years new technologies will create all sorts of currently unimaginable triggering opportunities.
2) The Action component
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. The question becomes “how can a product designer influence users to act?”
What drivers our action?
By Dr. B Fogg (Director of the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University)
equation> B=MAT (motivation, ability & trigger at the same time)
Ex, Imagine a time when your mobile phone rang but you didn’t answer it. Why not? Perhaps the phone was buried in a bag and therefore difficult to reach. In this case your inability to easily answer the call inhibited the action. Your ability was limited.
Maybe you thought the caller was a telemarketer or someone else you did not want to speak to. Your lack of motivation influenced you to ignore the call. It is possible that the call was important and within arm’s reach, but the ringer on your phone was silenced.
which should you invest in first, motivation or ability? All should be present to spark a behavior but action should have the most attention and effort as it's the best asset
Heuristics and Perception
"There are many counterintuitive and surprising ways companies can boost users’ motivation or increase their ability by understanding heuristics—the mental shortcuts we take to make decisions and form opinions" ~Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman
Encouraging "Actions" (as described before) is different than encouraging "Decision" (paying with influencing the mind & emotion)
It's true that if you decrease your products price, many people will find it easy to act and purchase it. But also, if you make it expensive, you'll need to come up with ways to make people decide and purchase it.
Brain Influencers (Heuristics)
The Scarcity Effect
signal something about the product. If there are fewer of an item, the thinking goes, it might be because other people know something you don’t
Forms:
Limited Time
Limited Quantity
Experiment: Two similar jars, one was filled with 2 cookies and one with 10 and was offered to guests. All guests would take cookies from the one with less quantity
The Framing Effect
The mind takes shortcuts informed by our surroundings to make quick and sometimes erroneous judgments.
Forms:
Packaging
Testimonials
Reviews
Experiment 1: A world-class violinist who have tickets range at $100 for attendees, went down the street and start playing. Almost nobody knew they were walking past one of the most talented musicians in the world.
Experiment 2: Study to test the effect of price, in which attendees where given the same sample of wine with a different price tags ranging from 5-$90 and their brains were scanned with MRI. Interestingly, as the price of the wine increased, so did the participants’ enjoyment of the wine. Not only did they say they enjoyed the wine more but their brain corroborated their feelings
The Anchoring Effect
People often anchor to one piece of information when making a decision.
the common human tendency to rely too heavily on the first piece of information offered (the "anchor") when making decisions. During decision making, anchoring occurs when individuals use an initial piece of information to make subsequent judgments.
Fact: we tend to to get hooked and eventually purchase the discounted products displayed on every retail for "Buy One Get One At Free", even though, if we just search we'll see similar individual pieces with same or even cheaper price
The Endowed Progress Effect
The study demonstrates the endowed progress effect, a phenomenon that increases motivation as people believe they are nearing a goal.
Experiment: Punch cards are often used by retailers to encourage repeat business as people feel they're close to receive something for free. Two groups where given punch cards. Group A was given a card with 8 squares not punched. And the group B was given cards with 10 squares but two already punched. Both have the same number of punches to reach the goal, but group B had 82% higher completion rate.
Example: LinkedIn and Facebook uses this to encourage people to put more information about themselves when completing their online profiles. When they start they get a bar 10% filled and they encouraging improving the profile by giving them a visual metric without any numbers displaying how far they're from reaching a goal
3) The Variable Rewards
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.
Habit-forming products should provide variable unpredictable rewards
Ex: When a baby approaches a dog for the first time, he becomes curious of the creature. After a few exploration, the baby figures out that the dog is not a threat and what follows is excitement and laugh every time the dog approaches. He enjoys it. And after a few years what was once thrilling about the dog no longer holds the child’s attention in the same way because the child has learned to predict the dog’s behavior and no longer finds the it entertaining. So he goes and purse another thing.
Without variability we are like children in that once we figure out what will happen next (predict the reward), we become less excited by the experience.
To hold our attention, products must have an ongoing degree of novelty.
Novelty sparks our interest, makes us pay attention, and—like a baby encountering a friendly dog for the first time—we seem to love it.
Ex: Pigeons were given food every time they press a lever. They learned the cause-effect relationship. But then the pigeons where given food after a random variable number of taps. Sometimes pigeons get the food sometimes they don't. The experiment revealed that after introducing the variability, the frequency of the pigeons actions to receive the reward increased.
Types of rewards
Rewards of the Tribe
Are social rewards driven by our connectedness with other people. Our brains are adapted to seek rewards that make us feel accepted, attractive, important, and included.
People who observe someone being rewarded for a particular behavior are more likely to alter their own beliefs and subsequent actions.
Facebook:
Logging in reveals an endless stream of content friends have shared, liked or commented on
Click of the “Like” button provides a variable reward for the content’s creators. “Likes” and comments offer tribal validation for those who shared the content, and provide variable rewards that motivate them to continue posting.
Stack Overflow:
What makes people spend time and effort writing voluntary in this website, YouTube, or Wikipedia, is that each answer submitted users can vote the response up or down.
The more votes a person have the more chance he get to earn a badge. The process of accumulating upvotes is highly variable making people to visit continuously checking what his status.
League of legends:
After being known for their bullying community due to user's anonymity, the website used "Honor Points" to encourage positive behavior by allowing others to vote an each player
Rewards of the Hunt
is the search for material resources and information.
Machine Gambling: By awarding money in random intervals, gamblers keep hunting for the reward Twitter: People keep scrolling searching for resources, information and top leader tweets to hunt for information
Rewards of the Self
For personal form of gratification. Pursuing a task to completion can influence people to continue all sorts of behaviors
Video Games:
players seek to master the skills needed to pursue their quest.
Leveling up, unlocking special powers, acquire advanced weaponry, visit uncharted lands, and improve their characters’ scores and other game mechanics fulfill a player’s desire for competency by showing progression and completion.
Code Academy:
Shows the progress of the code developer as he learn and open up variable challenges
Emails
We open our emails to see unread messages as they represent as a sort of goal to be completed.
Consideration when designing
They're not a free pass
Mahalo.com Case: A Q&A forum where they had to use incentives to get users to ask & answers Qs. Posting a question & the best response to the question help users help earn a virtual currency that can be exchanged into money. But with time they lost popularity and Quora kicked in with social upvoting rewards. Users after all, don't want to use a Q&A for monetary reasons
Only by understanding what truly matters to users can a company correctly match the right variable reward to their intended behavior.
The use of gamification (the use of gamel-ike elements in nongame environments): Points, badges, and leaderboards can prove effective, but only if they scratch the user’s itch.
Rewards must fit into the narrative of why the product is used and align with the user’s internal triggers and motivations.
Maintain a sense of autonomy
Users should agree to what personal information your share about them
we are more likely to be persuaded to give (allow sharing our public info) when our ability to choose is reaffirmed.
To encourage people to share personal info publicly, allow them to join communities (social rewards), making it easier and more rewarding to share encouragement, exchange advice, and receive praise.
often asking users to learn new, unfamiliar actions instead of making old routines easier is not effective
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.
To change behavior, products must ensure the users feel in control. People must want to use the service, not feel they have to.
Beware of finite variability
Breaking Bad Success (vs. Mentalist ): At the heart of every episode is a problem the characters must resolve. Each episode’s central conflict is resolved near the end of the show, at which time a new challenge arises to pique the viewer’s curiosity. To know the solution, the viewers has to wait for the next episode. The unknown is fascinating, and strong stories hold our attention by waiting to reveal what happens next.
Finite variability: an experience that becomes predictable after use.
For example, games played to completion offer finite variability, while those played with other people have higher degrees of infinite variability because the players themselves change the game-play throughout. YouTube, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter all leverage user-generated content to provide visitors with a never-ending stream of newness.
The best Variable Reward case is EMAIL
First, there is uncertainty concerning who might be sending us a message. We have a social obligation to respond to e-mails and a desire to be seen as agreeable (rewards of the tribe).
We may also be curious about what information is in the e-mail: Perhaps something related to our career or business awaits us? Checking e-mail informs us of opportunities or threats to our material possessions and livelihood (rewards of the hunt).
We are motivated by the uncertain nature of our fluctuating e-mail count and feel compelled to gain control of our in-box (rewards of the self).
Qs to ask when designing for Rewards
Speak with five of your customers in an open-ended interview to identify what they find enjoyable or encouraging about using your product. Are there any moments of delight or surprise? Is there anything they find particularly satisfying about using the product?
Review the steps your customer takes to use your product or service habitually. What outcome (reward) alleviates the user’s pain? Is the reward fulfilling, yet leaves the user wanting more?
Brainstorm three ways your product might heighten users’ search for variable rewards using:
Rewards of the tribe—gratification from others.
Rewards of the hunt—material goods, money, or information.
Rewards of the self—mastery, completion, competency, or consistency.
4) The Investment
users are asked to do a bit of work. So they put something of value into the system (unlike in the action phase), to anticipate of longer-term rewards, not immediate gratification.
ask for the investment after the reward, the company has an opportunity to leverage a central trait of human behavior.
The big idea behind the investment phase is to leverage the user’s understanding that the service will get better with use (and personal investment). Like a good friendship, the more effort people put in, the more both parties benefit.
The more users invest time and effort into a product or service, the more they value it
progressively stage the investment you want from users into small chunks of work, starting with small, easy tasks and building up to harder tasks during successive cycles through the Hook Model.
The psychology behind it?
We Irrationally value our efforts (Labor Investment)
Unlike its competitors who sell preassembled merchandise, IKEA puts its customers to work. The benefit of making users invest physical effort in assembling the product, adopt an irrational love of the furniture they built
The more effort we put into something, the more likely we are to value it
We Seek to Be Consistent with Our Past Behaviors
Two household groups were asked to place a BIG sign "Drive Carefully" in front of their homes. Only one group (group B) was given a SMALL sign that says "Be a Safe Driver" 2 weeks prior this experiment. After a month, the result shows 76% of group B still keep the BIG sign and 17% of the other group.
We Avoid Cognitive Dissonance
is when we change our perception of something good to relieve a pain
Ex: When a hungry fox couldn't get a hanging grapes that he desperately wants, the fox starts to conflict his perception because it is too uncomfortable to reconcile the thought that the grapes are sweet and ready for the taking, and yet he cannot have them. So he decides that the grapes are sour and bad.
We can change our perception to cope with the environment, or social norms
Rationalization:
We change our attitudes and beliefs to adapt psychologically. This helps us give reasons for our behaviors, even when those reasons might have been designed by others.
How to do it?
1) Storing Value
To become better with use, habit-forming technology utilizes investments users make in the product to enhance the experience.
Forms of storing value:
Content
The collection of memories and experiences, in aggregate, becomes more valuable over time and the service becomes harder to leave as users’ personal investment in the site grows. Information generated, collected, or created by users (e.g., songs, photos, or news clippings) are examples of stored value in the form of content.
Examples
Every time users of Apple’s iTunes add a song to their collection, they are strengthening ties to the service and iTunes get better knowing their preferences
Every status update, “like,” photo, or video shared on Facebook adds to the user’s timeline. As users continue to share and interact with information on the service, their digital life is recorded and archived.
Data
users invest in a service by either actively or passively adding their own personal data.
Ex: LinkedIn stores your personal resumes that has to be changed every now and then, Mint aggregates all of the user’s financial accounts in one place, providing a complete picture of their financial life
Followers
Investing in following the right people increases the value of the product by displaying more relevant and interesting content in each user’s Twitter feed. It also tells Twitter a lot about its users, which in turn improves the service overall.
Also, having built a connections in a certain website, will keep you loyal to it. No one wants to rebuild a loyal following they have worked hard to acquire and nurture.
Therefore, to acquire more followers, content creators must invest in producing more—and better—tweets. The great thing is "the more followers you have, the better status and reputation you get". This got people to market and build Twitter from ground zero
Reputation
On online marketplaces such as eBay, TaskRabbit, Yelp, and Airbnb, people with negative scores are treated very differently from those with good reputations.
This can be a deciding factor in what price a seller gets for an item on eBay, who is selected for a TaskRabbit job, which restaurants appear at the top of Yelp search results, and the price of a room rental on Airbnb.
Awards, badges, scores, history are used to build reputation
Reputation makes users, both buyers and sellers, more likely to stick with whichever service they have invested their efforts in to maintain a high-quality score
Skill
Investing time and effort into learning to use a product or service
Adobe Photoshop is pretty difficult at first, but after a customer invest time to learn, they become skilled and refuse to abandon it. However, asking too much might backfire (so be careful)
2) Loading the next trigger
Habit-forming technologies leverage the user’s past behavior to initiate an external trigger in the future. This is when users set future triggers during the investment phase, providing companies with an opportunity to reengage the user
Examples:
External trigger: once downloaded, users get clear easy instructions in how to use it
Action: a follow-up action tells the users to start listing tasks
Once tasks are achieved, the variable rewards arrive in the form of a congratulatory message and the satisfaction of mastering the app.
Investment comes when the app asks to syn with external calendars so that after a meeting, the app sends notification to list the folow-up task required. So they've leveraged the stimulus of being anxiety about forgetting to do a task after a meeting (internal trigger) with their external trigger (notification at the RIGHT time)
Tinder
By simplifying the investment of sorting through potential mates, Tinder makes loading the next trigger (getting a match date) more likely with each swipe. The more swipes, the more potential matches are made; naturally, each match sends notifications to both interested parties.
Snapchat
users load the next trigger every time they use the service. Each photo or video sent contains an implicit prompt to respond; the Snapchat interface makes returning a pic incredibly easy by twice tapping the original message to reply.
The self-destruct feature encourages timely responses, leading to a back-and-forth relay that keeps people hooked into the service by loading the next trigger with each message sent.
Pinterest
Fulfil the internal trigger of boredom.
Provides variable unlimited rewards as you scroll down the page
Leverage the reward of the tribe by making it easy to communicate and follow the pinner
Every time an image is pinned, liked, commented, repined, allows Pinterest to tailor related pins according to users taste
Qs to ask
Review your flow. What “bit of work” are your users doing to increase their likelihood of returning?
Brainstorm three ways to add small investments into your product to:
Load the next trigger.
Store value as data, content, followers, reputation, and skill.
Identify how long it takes for a “loaded trigger” to reengage your users. How can you reduce the delay to shorten time spent cycling through the Hook?
Habit Testing
Building a habit-forming product is an iterative process and requires user-behavior analysis and continuous experimentation.
Technological changes and how people interact with it, often create opportunities to build new hooks.
Manipulation of Matrix (answers “Should I attempt to hook my user?”)
Facilitator:
You're facilitating a health habit.
Has exception of something that you can't use now but would've used if available, like education
Peddler:
Fitness apps, charity Web sites, and products that claim to suddenly turn hard work into fun
They try to manipulate
Peddlers tend to lack the empathy and insights needed to create something users truly want.
Entertainer:
Art is often fleeting; products that form habits around entertainment tend to fade quickly from users’ lives.
A hit song, repeated over and over again in the mind becomes boring
Dealer:
Presumably the only reason the designer is hooking users is to make a buck.
How to?
Identify
First, define what it means to be a devoted user. How often “should” one use your product?
“Who are the product’s habitual users?”
Codify
Codify the steps they took using your product to understand what hooked them.
The way users engage with your product creates a unique fingerprint. Where users are coming from, decisions made when registering, and the number of friends using the service are just a few of the behaviors that help create a recognizable pattern.
You are looking for a Habit Path—a series of similar actions shared by your most loyal users.
Modify
revisit your product and identify ways to nudge new users down the same Habit Path taken by devotees. This may include an update to the registration funnel, content changes, feature removal, or increased emphasis on an existing feature.
Discovering habit-forming ideas
As you go about your day, ask yourself why you do or do not do certain things and how those tasks could be made easier or more rewarding.
Studying your own needs can lead to remarkable discoveries and new ideas because the designer always has a direct line to at least one user: him- or herself.
Wherever new technologies suddenly make a behavior easier, new possibilities are born.
Nascent Behavior
Habit-forming products usually start to seem as a product for a niche or small group. Like Facebook, first being for Harvard students only for testing purposes and for producing a problem/market fit
Conclusion Qs
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)