Book Summary | Hooked | Nir Eyal
By: Ahmed Mujtaba Khan
Tags: Design Process, Product Design, Design, Startup, Designer

Man is a creature of his habits. The book “Hooked” provides tools for embedding the use of products in consumers’ habits/ daily routines i.e. the customer uses the product without any conscious effort as a default behavior. Many Innovations fail because they are merely a marginal value addition to the existing solutions. For the new entrants to stand a chance they must be nine times better than the existing solutions. The hooked model is designed to connect user’s problem with designer’s solution frequently enough to form a habit.

The habit forming potential of a product can be measured by plotting frequency of product use and perceived utility. A common attribute of all successful innovations is that they solve problems. Their needs to be a clarity that the solution being offered is a pain reliever or gain provider. Sticky business models create an itch in the minds of their users and create a product to provide relief to this itch i.e. a possible strategy could be to begin as a gain provider until the absence of the gain being provided becomes a pain.

The hooked model proposed in the book constitutes of Trigger, Action, Variable Reward and Investment.

1. Triggers

New habits need a foundation to be built upon. Triggers provide these basis. Triggers can be external and internal. External triggers guide the user and place information in the users’ environment. There are 4 types of external triggers; a. Paid triggers (unsustainable) b. Earned triggers (e.g. favorable mention) c. Relationship trigger d. Owned trigger. Internal triggers on the other hand are basically users’ emotions. New habits are sparked by external triggers, but associations with internal triggers are what keeps users hooked.

Creating a product whose use becomes a user’s habit takes more than a survey. There is always a huge gap between a user’s declared preference and revealed preference. Thus a business needs to understand its customer better than the customer himself. To put it in one sentence a business needs very high level of empathy to build a sticky product. Empathy means understanding a customer’s desires, emotions and the context in which they use the product.

2. Action- Immediate Reward

A trigger is a missed bullet if it the user does not take action. To initiate action doing must be easier than thinking. To initiate any action three ingredients are required; Sufficient Motivation, Ability and Trigger. Trigger is the stimuli while motivation is the desire to take the action. All humans are motivated to seek pleasure and avoid pain, to seek hope and avoid fear and to seek social acceptance and avoid rejection. Ability is the user’s capability to use the business’s solution. The author here quotes from the book “Three Simple Steps to Creating Truly Innovative Products”- understand the reason people use a product or service. Next, lay out the steps the customer must take to get the job done. Finally, once the series of tasks from intention to outcome is understood, simply start removing steps until you reach the simplest possible process. Consequently, any technology or product that significantly reduces the steps to complete a task will enjoy high adoption rates by the people it assists. Easier equals Better.

The author also quotes Evan Williams, who co-founded Blogger and later twitter ““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.”

There are 6 “elements of simplicity”- factors which influence a tasks difficulty; Time, Money, Physical effort, Brain Cycles, Social Deviance, Disruption to existing routines. Amongst the ability and motivation, interventions should be designed to increase the ability of the user first. The basic principal of getting users to take the intended action is to help them conserve their energy.

3. Variable Reward

Psychologically it is not the reward which produces the feeling of pleasure in a user’s brain, but the anticipation of the reward. Overtime predictable rewards lose their value. To hold our attention, products must have an ongoing degree of novelty.

Variable rewards come in 3 types; a. Reward of the tribe- Social rewards based on our need of connection. Our brains are adapted to seek rewards that make us feel accepted, attractive, important, and included e.g. Facebook. b. Rewards of the hunt- persistent journey of grasping the reward e.g. machine gambling. c. Rewards of the self- Personal rewards we seek for gratification, the satisfaction of completion e.g. Video Games.

Variable Rewards are not free passes. Only by understanding what truly matters to users can a company correctly match the right variable reward to their intended behavior. Rewards matter only if they scratch the user’s itch and at the same make it itch again. Rewards must fit into the narrative of why the product is used and align with the user’s internal triggers and motivations.

4. Investment- Rewards for the future

Investment means commitment and commitment happens to have a profound effect on a user’s habits as we irrationally value our efforts, user’s seek consistency with their past behavior and tend to avoid cognitive dissonance. (Cognitive dissonance is changing our perception about unachievable target). These tendencies affect our future actions and the more effort we put into something the more we value it. We tend to rationalize our behavior. Investments are about the anticipation of longer-term rewards, not immediate gratification.

The timing of asking for reward is certainly critical, here the author refers to reciprocity rule. The philosophy of investment is to convince the user that service gets better with quality. It is pertinent to consider the motivation and ability of the user while asking for investment and at the same time loading additional external triggers according to the user’s past behavior. The investment is to serve as a string to bring the user back.

Shedding light on the morality issues related to the morality issues associated with the manipulation, the author has proposed using the manipulation matrix which addresses two questions; a. Does the product materially improves users’ lives? b. Will the designer use this product him/ herself?

Once the designer has developed a product and has formed a hypothesis it needs to be tested with the actual users. The author has proposed the habit testing process, inspired by the lean methodology (Build, Measure, Learn). The habit testing process provides actionable data for identifying the devotees, habit forming elements of the product and the reason they are changing habits. The habit testing process encompasses;

a. Identifying the habitual users of the product and the frequency of their usage.

b. Out of the habitual users identified at least 5% should use the product as predicted. The author quoted the example of Twitter. “in its early days, Twitter discovered that once new users followed 30 other members, they hit a tipping point which dramatically increased the odds they would keep using the site”

c. Revisit the product and identify ways to nudge new users down the same habit path taken by devotees.