I first learned about Nir Eyal through his article on the “Habits of Successful Startups” in March 2013. This article is about his book “Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products.”
A hook is a term that represents the action, reward, and investment process. Action triggers emotional responses, which in turn forms habits. The goal of habit-forming products is to hook users while making their lives better.
This post covers some lessons I learned from this book on how to form long-lasting user habits.
1. Trigger Action with External Triggers (Cue)
The cue is what triggers the action to start. There are two kinds of triggers: internal and external cues, both having different consequences for user engagement. What is an internal trigger? It’s a thought that prompts a person to take action because it’s associated with a certain behavior. What is an external trigger? An object or event prompts a person to take action because it has meaning in the user’s life.
For example, think of your smartphone’s alarm clock. When you wake up and see the time, you feel the urge to get out of bed and check your messages. This is because the smartphone’s alarm clock has meaning to you, and it acts as a reminder of something that needs to be done.
An example of an internal trigger is thinking about money. You feel the urge to check your bank account balance on your phone because there might have been a problem with the direct deposit amount. In both cases, the alarm clock and bank account balance are triggers that help people take action, but in the second example, it doesn’t hold any meaning in your life.
2. Satisfy People’s Needs (Reward)
What could be better than creating a product that does something for you? The reward is the benefit you get from taking a particular action when prompted with a trigger.
The author mentions some examples of rewards that are effective in habit-forming products: reducing fear, gaining satisfaction, connecting with others, learning something new, and solving problems. By reducing fear or making you feel satisfied, you are more inclined to make the action become a habit. A connection with other people can help form habits as well. This is why social media platforms are so addictive because by connecting with friends, you’re receiving a reward (it’s like getting a free gift every time you like someone’s status). The more you learn and solve problems by using the platform, the more hooked you become.
3. Make Actions Easy to Perform (Investment)
The third step is investment. For users to form habits, they must invest something first. It can be time or some other resource, but every action starts with an investment from a person.
This is why free apps that require you to sign up at first are so effective because you have already invested in the product before using it.
If you sign up for Pinterest, Facebook, or Google just once, you will receive their content daily in your newsfeeds because these platforms want to capitalize on the investment they have already made in you and form habits out of it.
4. Create a “Variable Reward.”
The fourth step is variable rewards. The more variable the reward, the more likely it will be repeated (because people like variety).
For example, think about playing slot machines. It’s all random, and you don’t know what kind of prize money you’re going to win on each bet, but people keep playing because they can never predict what they are getting next.
5. Make the Investment Small Enough (Minimum Viable Effort)
The fifth step is making the investment small enough to make it manageable, but at the same time not too small because you still want people to invest. The investment must be worth something, or else users won’t bother doing it. This is why your product needs to make an impact when people use it.
For example, Instagram sends you notifications when someone has tried to reach out to you. However, these notifications are not intrusive because they don’t come out too often (only once every two or three days). This invests in checking your Instagram messages low enough that most users will invest their time in it. But not too low because users still get a sense of achievement by doing it.
6. Ingestion: Get Them to Come Back
The sixth step is getting people to return and invest their resources into the product once more. The best way to do this is by using a trigger that reminds users about your product. This is why emails are effective because they remind you to use the product again after a certain amount of time has passed (usually between 12 hours and 72 hours).
7. The Hook Model
The seventh step is using the hook model, which contains four steps: trigger, action, reward, and investment. Once users take the first step, the trigger, they are prompted to take another step with a cue that tells them when it’s time to do so. Next comes the action. Users perform the desired action by opening your product and interacting with it. Once they have completed this reward phase, they are driven by their investment phase – they want to receive more value from the product, so they keep investing, which is why they are prompted to do another trigger again.
8. Create a “Habit Zone”
The eighth step is creating a “habit zone.” This means that you should always put your product in front of users at the location and time where they normally interact with it (for example, on their mobile phones). By doing this, it is easier to form a habit around your product.
It is important to know that most people try out your product only once. If they don’t like it, they will uninstall it and be done with your product.
However, if they do like it, they will look for more triggers to complete the desired action. Then you can slowly push them towards using their phone more often so that eventually they are coming back every day.
Conclusion
If you create a habit around your product, it will be much more difficult for users to quit using it because they have already formed a habit. This is why Nir Eyal states that “Habits are all about not having a choice.”