Build Habit-Forming Products with Hook Model & Lean Startup
By: Aleksandra Bis
Tags: Nir Eyal, Startup, UX Design, Lean Startup, MVP

Trigger

A trigger, both internal and external, leads to action which is undertaken regardless if the users are aware of such impulse or not. External triggers such as a notification, an app icon on a smart phone or an e-mail sent to the user can evoke certain repeated behaviours until a habit is formed. While, as Eyal indicated, “negative emotions frequently serve as internal triggers” e.g. uncertainty may lead us to Google thing, and boredom can send us falling down a YouTube rabbit hole.

Loneliness & boredom can be internal triggers to use Facebook.

Action

In this case, the Action is understood as the minimum interaction the user needs to have with the product to obtain a reward. For it to take place, it has to require less effort than thinking, as a routine activity is carried out almost unconsciously. In other words: the action should be as simple to do as possible. BJ Fogg, Director of Persuasive Tech Lab at Stanford University, formed a theoretical behaviour model explaining that three elements must occur simultaneously for an action to happen: motivation, ability, trigger. He argues that if the response does not occur, one of the listed elements has to be missing.

With Google, the action is as simple as typing a query.

Variable Reward

The variable character of the reward increases users engagement as it creates the need for feedback, focuses attention and gives pleasure. Studies show that our actions are carried out to handle stress caused by our desire for three types of rewards: the tribe, the hunt and the self. Their combination boosts their effectiveness in creating user habits. For instance, Email is an excellent example of incorporating such strategy as it delivers all three types of rewards irregularly: we have a social obligation to answer our emails (the tribe), received emails may contain information that is of value to us such as business opportunities (the hunt), going through, removing and organizing emails give a sense of fulfilling a task (the self).

On a side note, the variable reward is not necessary needed in products that already operate in a variable situation such as e.g. Uber. I guess we wouldn’t like to insert variability to the experience of “Can I get where I need to go and do it on time?”

Pinterest as another example of the variable rewards of the “hunt”.

Investment

As users invest in the product — their time, money, emotional commitment, effort, etc. — increases the probability of them coming back and using it again. Investment creates preference due to our tendency to overvalue the work we put in, serve our need to be consistent and avoiding cognitive dissonance.

In Twitter the investment comes in the form of following another user.

Implementing Hook Model in the Lean process

Now as we grasped the basics of the Hook model we can go onto trying to blend it into our Lean Startup methodology.

Naturally, not all products are meant or even need to be habit-forming. If however if that is something you are aiming at, it is best to think about it right from the start. The development of a habitual product requires many iterations and users behaviour analysis followed by constant experiments. Now isn’t that something that sounds just perfectly in line with the lean process?

The lean approach makes startups less risky by helping launch the product faster and cheaper than traditional methods. In the process, an experiment is viewed as the venture’s first product. Therefore, if at a given or any upcoming stage it proves to be successful, the manager will be able to take up specific actions: gather participants of the early market, conduct new experiments, further iterations and finally build the actual product. This way, when launched, it has a significant number of users, it is based on validated hypothesis, has a proven capability of solving real problems and the venture is equipped with a functional specification of what to implement next.

If there is one idea which has transformed the way we pursue innovation today more than any other, it’s the idea of using the scientific method to handle uncertainty.

The build-measure-learn feedback loop, a tool enabling to test the vision continuously, is at the core of the Lean Startup methodology. We don’t need the best possible hypothesis we want to test or the best possible plan of how to proceed. What needs to be done is getting through the build-measure-learn feedback loop with maximum speed to ensure product-centric learning.