Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products

“A must read for everyone who cares about driving customer engagement.”

— Eric Ries, author, The Lean Startup

In Nir Eyal's book “Hooked: How to Build Habit Forming Products", he reveals the model for building products that people love. And products that win are the ones that get us hooked.

The Habit Zone#

If you are building a habit-forming product, write down the answers to these questions:

• What habit 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?

Trigger#

• Who is your product’s users?
• 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.
• 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. Stretch yourself to come up with at least three crazy or currently impossible ideas for ways to trigger your user.

Action#

• Walk through the path your users would take to use your product or service, beginning from the time they feel their internal trigger to the point they receive their expected outcome. How many steps does it take before users obtain the reward they came for? How does this process compare with the simplicity of some of the examples described in this chapter? How does it compare with competing products and services?
• Which resources are limiting your users’ ability to accomplish the tasks that will become habits?
• Brainstorm three testable ways to make intended tasks easier to complete.
• Consider how you might apply heuristics to make habit-forming actions more likely.

Variable Reward#

• Speak with 5 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
• Rewards of the hunt
• Rewards of the self

Investment#

• 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?

Here is an example of how Pinterest keeps you “hooked”

Here is the distillation of his model in 4 steps to keep your prospects and customers engaged.

1. Create internal and external triggers that bring people to your product

2. Get them to log-in or sign up to your resources or product

3. Provide a variable reward that connects to the tribe, provides resources and enables personal mastery

4. Allow them to build an investment that provides more triggers to keep them coming back.

Source: NIRANDFAR