Using the Hook Model for user research
By: Biswajeet Das
Tags: User Research, Product Design, Hook Model, Human Centered Design, User Experience

The Hook Model was first introduced in the book called “Hooked” by Nir Eyal, an Israeli-born American author, lecturer and investor. It is a thinking model to be used to build Habit-Forming Products. The book covers topics like how habits are formed using the hooked model and few examples of companies who successfully applied it to hook their users.

In this blog post we will talk about — What the Hook model is and how it works, How User Researchers and the entire team can use this Model in their Design Process.

How does the Hook Model Work?

The Hook Model is divided into four phases. They are namely — Trigger, Action, Variable Reward and Investment. These are the phases through which any user must go through in a product or a service to get hooked to the product or you can say keep using the product again and again.

Trigger — This is the first phase of the habit-forming loop where the user first feels that there is a need. A need for the fulfillment of some need or a desire. For example, when we don’t eat for a long time we feel hungry. Here the need is Food and Hunger is the trigger which tells us that we should eat. Similarly, if we are in need of money we get financially stressed and start looking for ways to earn using Google search. Here money is the need and financial stress is the trigger. For each trigger, there is a cause behind it. Let us consider the first example where the trigger is hunger. Let us do a root cause analysis to find out the real cause for the trigger by using the 5Why Analysis Method.

Why are you hungry?

Because I have not eaten anything since yesterday.

Why have you not eaten anything since yesterday?

Because I’m broke right now, no money to buy food.

Why are you broke?

Month end, and I’ve spent all my money somewhere else.

Why didn’t you save some money?

Because I have a very bad habit of spending off my money early. I can’t save money, no matter how much I have I just spend it off.

So for this person, the root cause of his hunger is him not being able to save money. Now can we help him to form a money-saving habit? How about developing an app that motivates him to save some money? So in the second example what can be the root cause of the person's financial stress? Can we do a Root Cause Analysis to find out the root cause? Also, let's ask ourselves, why does anyone downloads a dating app? What can be the trigger?

There are two types of Triggers: External & Internal.

a. External Trigger — These triggers are embedded with information, which tells the user what to do. There are 4 types of external triggers:

i) Paid Triggers — Triggers which are created by companies to catch their attention to start using their product or their services or re-visit them. Eg: Notifications, emails, messages, etc.

ii) Earned Triggers — The triggers which are earned by the time spent by the user on the product or the service. Eg: Favorable press mentions, hot viral videos and featured app store placements.

iii)Relationship Triggers — When we come to know about a product or a service from another person face to face or via social media that’s a relationship trigger. Eg: Apps like Google Pay, PayPal knew that once account holders started sending other users money they would realize the tremendous value of the service, sending referral codes by one user to another user or non user of the product is also another kind of Relationship Trigger.

iv) Owned Triggers — These triggers are already available in the users environment and its upon the users to opt in to allowing these triggers to appear or not. Eg: An app icon on the user’s phone screen, an e-mail newsletter to which the user subscribes.

b. Internal Trigger — Internal triggers are those which manifests automatically in our minds. Eg: Hunger, Pain, loneliness, etc.

In one of my next Blog Posts we will discuss about how these triggers are used by Marketing People in building strategies to grow their Customer Base.

Action — The behavior or the simplest step which we take to achieve our goal is the Action. When we are hungry we eat food. All the tasks(actions) which we do to complete the cooking or ordering food to eat are actions. A series of tasks make up an activity. While ordering food these are the tasks we do in chronological order — we open the food delivery app, search for the food, place the order by paying the money online or opting for cash on delivery. This series of tasks is also called The User Journey Map and in this case of ordering food online it is the User Journey Map of ordering food.

There may be variations in the food ordering journey or possible pain points of users along the way. These are the things which User Experience Designers keep looking for by doing User Research to improve the overall experience of that journey while keeping in mind that there can be different kinds of users and that all behave or act in their own ways due to various underlying factors. This is why User Research is so important during User Experience Design.

Variable Reward — When we complete an action our goal gets accomplished and that accomplishment makes us feel rewarded. When the rewards are such that it makes us want that reward more than just once and makes us perform the action again and again out of anticipation as a result of its variable nature they are known as Variable Rewards. Variable Rewards make users happy. Let’s take this example of food ordering again. You ordered a Large Pizza and the Pizza arrives with a scratch card which allows you to scratch and win discounts and other free items. You scratched and you won yourself a 20% discount on your next order above Rupees 500. Next time you scratched the card again and even if you don’t win anything that time won’t you still crave for a variable reward the next time you order?

A pizza company making people scratch & match toppings to win cash money, food prizes and discounts. A very good way to hook the customers using Variable Reward.

There are three types of variable rewards:

a. Rewards of the Tribe — These are the rewards which makes us feel connected with other people by giving us some recognition amongst other people or by giving us an opportunity to build our network or simply to be known by people even if it’s for a short period of time.

For Example There is an Indian Reselling App called Meesho which allows the top 10 resellers to be on the leadership board on the app. This gives the resellers some fame and recognition. This makes them feel proud. It might not work for other apps like food apps. I doubt if there are too many people who would like to see their name on a leadership board of a food app for ordering the maximum amount of food. but there are definitely gamers who would like to see theirs on the leadership boards of game apps.

Meesho Leadership Board displaying the names of Top Resellers on the platform.

b. Rewards of the Hunt — The rewards related to material resources and information are called Rewards of Hunt. Some examples of rewards related to material resources is the winning a lottery, hunting for good deals on online food delivery apps like Swiggy, Uber Eats, etc.

Some examples of a reward related to information is that very good Twitter post which we find out of most other posts which are generally not very useful for us, search engines like Google, Bing, etc. where we can search loads of useful information.

c. Rewards of the Self — Rewards that gives us the feeling of self-accomplishment are called Rewards of the Self. For example we can talk about those fitness apps which make us run an extra mile or 10 extra push-ups just to reach the next level. These rewards make you feel proud of yourself and encourage to perform even better. To make it even better some companies also add a reward of the hunt with it. You feel proud of yourself for accomplishing a task and happy also at the same time for making some materialistic gain by doing that task. Walk to earn apps are the best example where they mix all the different types of rewards together. They also add a leadership board so that you feel connected with other users.

Investment — It is the amount of work done in the form of time or money spent on the product while performing the actions on it. For example LinkedIn Learning allows you to learn lessons for free for a particular period of time and after that they ask you to pay a minimal amount to continue learning. Now that you have spent some time on the the platform and earned variable rewards in the form of information which was very fruitful for you, you don’t feel like not investing the minimal amount to continue receiving the learning you were receiving.

Last but not least I would like to give my own example of blogging with Medium as an example of investment. I’ve spent so much time on writing the blog posts, sourcing information, sharing the blog posts on Facebook and LinkedIn with my friends, and getting a chance to connect with other bloggers that I feel like I’ve invested and I’m very close to forming a habit of blogging on Medium.

Use of the Hook Model in User Research

While conducting an User Research for a product or a service on its users the User Researcher usually tries to find out the users motivations, behavior, needs, desires, habits, needs, desires, pain points etc. towards the product or the service or while using it. Product cycle have namely these three phases — Discovery, Development and Live. This is how User Research can use the hook model in these three phases of the Product Cycle —

A. Discovery Phase — We try to understand our users in this phase. In the Product Discovery Phase the needs, desires, problems, habits, motivations of the users are established. All 4 components of the Hook Model are used to understand the users needs that causes triggers, their behaviors of using other products and also understand what kind of reward motivates them enough to invest in an product. Strategies are brainstormed to form user habit-forming products or services to fulfill those needs of the users and to hook them in the process. A human-centric design approach is taken here.

User Research Methods: One-one-one Interviews, Ethnography Studies, Diary Studies, Surveys, etc.

B. Development Phase —

In this phase product ideas are generated, Information Architectures, User Flows, Conceptual Models(If it is a machine), Wireframes and paper prototypes of the products are built to test them with the users. Marketing and Sales strategies are also built at the same time. User Researchers play the role of being with the users, the designers and every other stakeholder involved with the product to make sure everyone is aligned and are moving towards the same goal while building the product. User researchers provides insight by constantly talking with the users, conducting interviews while users test the product and watching them use the prototypes to get insights from them and make sure that the product being developed is aligned with their needs, behaviors, desires, etc. and also making sure that the product hooks the users. Here the User Researchers act as the bridge which connects the users with the Product, Design, Marketing as well as the Sales team. As a result of this involvement of the User Researchers little to lot of iterations are made during this phase using User Research insights.