How To Build Habit Forming Products

How to build habit forming products? In Hooked, Nir Eyal has some suggestions.

The technologies we use have turned into compulsions, if not full-fledged addictions. Habits — Automatic behaviors triggered by situational cues. With little or no conscious thought. Our actions have been engineered by the products we use. What makes some products so habit forming?

Habits are not bad. Habits guide half of our daily actions. They are one of the ways the brain learns complex behaviours.

Instead of relying on expensive marketing, habit forming companies link their services to the users daily routines and emotions. Twitter. Google.

How do products create habits? They manufacture them. Through a series of experiences called hooks. Resulting in unprompted user engagement.

Hooks are everywhere. In apps, sports, movies, games, and even in jobs. World will get more addictive in the next 40 years than it did in the last 40.

If it can’t be used for evil, it’s not a superpower!

Habit forming products can do far more good than harm. Choice architecture — nudge/help people make better choices.

The four steps of the Hook Model:

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Trigger

Trigger is the spark plug in the engine.

Habits are not created. They are built upon. Like how oysters create pearls from the arrival of a tiny irritant. Triggers form the basis of sustained behaviour change.

Two types of triggers: external and internal.

External triggers are embedded with information telling what to do next. Like a promotional e-mail. Paid triggers — ads, search engine marketing.(Because they are expensive) companies generally use them to acquire new users and then rely on other external triggers to keep them. Earned triggers — viral videos, featured app store placements. For this, companies must keep their products in limelight — a difficult and unpredictable task. Relationship triggers — one person telling others. FB likes. Requires building an engaged user base. Owned triggers — consume real estate in user’s environment. Ex: App icon on user’s phone screen. They prompt repeated engagement until a habit is formed.

External triggers are only the first step. When users form habits, they are cued by a different kind of trigger: internal ones. When a product becomes tightly coupled with a thought, an emotion, or a preexisting routine, it leverages an internal trigger. Internal triggers manifest automatically in your mind. Emotions, particularly, negative ones, are powerful internal triggers. Boredom, frustration, confusion. Positive emotions —Ex: desire to be entertained.

E-mail, the mother of all habit forming technologies, is a go-to solution for many of our daily agitations, from validating our importance to providing an escape from life’s more mundane movements.

Finding customers internal triggers requires learning more about people than what they can tell you in a survey, though. First, the company must identify the particular frustration or pain point in emotional terms, rather than product features. Makes it more difficult — people’s declared preferences — what they say they want — are far different from their revealed preferences — what they actually do. Try user personas, empathy maps, 5 Whys (TQM).

Do This Now

  • Who is your product’s user?
  • What is the user doing right before your intended habit?
  • Come up with three internal triggers that could cue your user to action. Use the 5 why’s method.
  • Which internal trigger does your user experience most frequently?
  • Finish this narrative: Every time the user (internal trigger), he/she (first action of intended habit).
  • Refer to 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 (e-mails, notifications, sms etc). Then stretch yourself to come up with at least three crazy or currently impossible ideas for ways to trigger your user (wearable, carrier pigeons etc).

Action

Following the trigger, comes the action: the behaviour done in anticipation of the reward. However, if the user does not take action, the trigger is useless.

To initiate action, doing must be easier than thinking.

Fogg Behaviour Model: B = MAT. When the motivation, ability and the trigger are present at the same time and in sufficient degrees.

Advertisers regularly tap into people’s motivations to influence their habits. Negative emotions like fear can also be powerful motivators. Every behaviour is driven by one of the three core motivators:

  • seeking pleasure and avoiding pain
  • seeking hope and avoiding fear
  • seeking social acceptance while avoiding social rejection

Usability — the ability to take action is equally important. Any technology or product that significantly reduces the steps to complete a task will enjoy high adoption rates by the people it assists.

Six elements of simplicity (ability is influenced by them):

  • Time (how long it takes to complete the action)
  • Money (fiscal cost of taking an action)
  • Physical effort (amount of labour involved)
  • brain cycles (level of mental effort and focus involved to take the action)
  • social deviance (how acceptable the behaviour is by others), and
  • non-routine (how much the action matches or disrupts existing routines).

Designers should ask “What is the thing that is missing that would allow my users to proceed to the next step?” All this helps push users across the action line.

However, also to note: People are not always rational. Heuristics — mental shortcuts we take to make decisions and form opinions. Take note of four of these brain biases in particular:

  • The Scarcity Effect — The appearance of scarcity affects their perception of value. Ex: “Only 14 left in stock” on Amazon page.
  • The Framing Effect — Mind takes shortcuts informed by our surroundings to make quick and sometimes erroneous judgements. Ex: A top artist not noticed in a Subway. Tasting the same wine each time but perceiving pleasure changes by the price announced — 5 or 90$.
  • The Anchoring Effect — People often anchor to one piece of information when making a decision. Ex: Buy one get one half-off.
  • The Endowed Progress Effect — A phenomenon that increases motivation as people believe they are nearing a goal. Ex: “Your profile is 80% completed” on LinkedIn

For product designers building habit forming products, understanding and leveraging these methods for boosting motivation and ability can provide highly impactful.

Do This Now

  • 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 where they receive their expected outcome. How many steps does it take before users obtain the reward they came for? How does it compare with competing products and services?
  • Which resources are limiting your users ability to accomplish the tasks that will become habits? Time, brain cycles (too confusing), money, social deviance (outside the norm), physical effort, non-routine (too new).
  • Brainstorm three testable ways to make intended tasks easier to complete.
  • Consider how you might apply heuristics to make habit-forming actions most likely.

Variable Reward

To create a craving. To keep users engaged, products need to deliver on their promise. This is different from feedback loops — predictable one’s don’t create desire. Variable rewards are one of the most powerful tools companies implement to hook users.

A brain study revealed that what draws us to act is not the sensation we receive from the reward itself, but the need to alleviate the craving for that reward.

Variable rewards can be found in all sorts of products and experiences that hold our attention. They fuel our drive to check e-mail, browse web, bargain shop. Three types of variable rewards.

Rewards of the Tribe: Or social rewards, are driven by our connectedness with other people. Rewards that make us feel accepted, attractive, important and included. Civic and religious groups, spectator sports, all use this. FB, Twitter, Pinterest. Social learning theory — people who observe someone being rewarded for a particular behaviour are more likely to alter their own beliefs and subsequent actions (Imagine role models). This is exactly the kind of demographics and segmentation that sites like FB apply. Likes are a tribal validation!

Rewards of the Hunt: The need to acquire physical objects, such as food and other supplies that aid our survival, is part of our brain’s operating system. In modern society, food can be bought with cash. Information translates into money! Today, we find numerous examples of variable rewards associated with the pursuit of resources that compel us (to chase his prey). Gambling — the pursuit can be intoxicating. Scrolling of feed in Twitter — to keep hunting for more information with flick of a finger to search for variable rewards.

Rewards of the Self: Variable rewards we seek for a more personal form of gratification. People desire among other things, to gain a sense of competency. Completing a puzzle, for ex. Adding an element of mystery to this goal makes the pursuit all the more enticing. Ex: investing hours in a video game to get better scores, go to unchartered territory, get weapons. Even the humble e-mail. Have you ever caught yourself checking e-mail for no particular reason? No of unread messages is a sort of goal to be completed for many!

Which rewards should you offer? Fundamentally, variable reward systems must satisfy users’ needs while leaving them wanting to reengage. Most habit forming products and services utilise one or more of these three. E-mail for example, utilises all three. We have a social obligation to respond (rewards of the tribe). Checking e-mail informs us of opportunities or threats to our material possessions and livelihood (rewards of the hunt). Lastly, e-mail itself is a task — challenging us to sort, categorise, and act (rewards of the self).

Wait! Variable rewards are not a free pass!

Mahalo vs Quora: Mahalo assumed that paying users would drive engagement. People who answered questions were paid virtual currency exchangeable for real money. When Quora launched, it did not offer a single cent. But it won. Unfortunately, Mahalo had an incomplete understanding of its users’ drivers. If the trigger was a desire for monetary rewards, users were better off spending their time earning an hourly wage. Quora’s social rewards have proven more attractive than Mahalo’s monetary rewards.

Only by understanding what truly matters to users can a company correctly match the right variable reward to their intended behaviour.

Gamification — is being used with varying success. It is still not a “one-size-fits-all” solution to drive user engagement.

Rewards must fit into the narrative of why the product is used and align with the user’s internal triggers and motivations.

Maintain a sense of autonomy. Although influencing behaviour can be a part of good product design, heavy handed efforts may have adverse effects and risk losing user’s trust. “But you are free to refuse or accept.” These few words placed at the end of requests are highly effective! You reminded people of their freedom to choose! Your mother telling you to put on the coat or your boss micromanaging can result in hair trigger response to threats to one’s autonomy. So, couple requests with an affirmation of the right to choose. To change behaviour, products must ensure the users feel in control. People must want to use the service, not feel they have to.

Beware of finite variability. An element of mystery is an important component of continued user interest. Experiences with finite variability become less engaging because they eventually become predictable.Businesses with finite variability are not inferior per se, they just operate under difficult constraints. Infinite variability — experiences that maintain interest by sustaining variability with use. Ex: World of Warcraft — multi player online game — still captures attention — because players themselves alter the gameplay throughout.

Content consumption, like watching a TV show, is an example of finite variability, content creation is infinitely variable. Ex: Dribble for designers. Youtube.

Do This Now

  • Speak with five 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 customers 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 — gratification, from others
  • rewards of the hunt — material goods, money, or information
  • rewards of the self — mastery, completion, competency or consistency

Investment

Investment phase increases the odds that the user will make another pass through the hook cycle in future. Investment — time, data, effort, social capital, or money.

The more users invest time and effort into a product or service, the more they value it. In fact, there is ample evidence to suggest that our labour leads to love.

We irrationally value our efforts. The IKEA effect. It’s packaging process allows for less labour costs, better distribution efficiency, and better utilisation of real estate in stores. It turns out there is a hidden benefit to making users invest physical effort in assembling the product. They adapt an irrational love of the furniture they built. Businesses that leverage user effort confer higher value to their products simply because their users have put work into them.

We seek to be consistent with our past behaviours. Studies reveal our past is an excellent predictor of our future. Little investments (such as placing a tiny sign in a window — check the book for the story — can lead to big changes in future behaviours.

We avoid cognitive dissonance. Hungry fox encountering grapes metaphor. Fox comforts himself by changing his perception of the grapes. That’s cognitive dissonance. Consider beer drinking. To avoid the cognitive dissonance of not liking something that others seem to take so much pleasure in, we change our perception.

Together the three tendencies just described influence our future actions. The more effort we put into something, the more likely we are to value it; we are more likely to be consistent with our past behaviours; and finally, we change our preferences to avoid cognitive dissonance.

These tendencies are also known as rationalisation, in which we change our attitudes and beliefs to adapt psychologically!

Rationalisation helps us give reasons for our behaviours, even when those reasons might have been designed by others.

Storing Value

The stored value users put into the product increases the likelihood they will use it again in the future and comes in a variety of forms.

  • Content — the collection of memories and experience, in aggregate, becomes more valuable over time and the service becomes harder to leave as users’ personal investment in the site grows. Google Photos, iTunes Music.
  • Data — more information users invested in the site, the more committed they become to it. LinkedIn. Mint.
  • Followers — Switching services can mean abandoning years of investment and starting over. No one wants to rebuild a loyal following they have worked hard to acquire and nurture.
  • Reputation — A form of stored value users can literally take to the bank. eBay. TaskRabbit. Reputation makes users, both buyers and sellers, more likely to stick with whichever service they have invested their efforts in to maintain a high quality score.
  • Skill — Investing time and effort into learning to use a product is a form of investment and stored value. Adobe Photoshop.

Do This Now

  • 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: lad 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?

What Are You Going To Do With This?

Creating habits can be a force for good, but it can also be used for nefarious purposes. What responsibility do product makers have when creating user habits?

When is it wrong to manipulate users?

I offer the Manipulation Matrix, a simple decision support tool entrepreneurs, employees, and investors can use long before product is shipped or code is written. The matrix seeks to help you answer not “Can I hook my users?” but instead “Should I attempt to?”

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Facilitators use their own product and believe it can materially improve people’s lives. They have the highest chance of success because they most closely understand the needs of their users.

Peddlers believe their product can materially improve people’s lives but do not use it themselves. They must beware of the hubris and inauthenticity that comes from building solutions for people they do not understand firsthand.

Entertainers use their product but do not believe it can improve people’s lives. They can be successful, but without making the lives of others better in some way, the entertainer’s products often lack staying power.

Dealers neither use the product not believe it can improve people’s lives. They have the lowest chance of finding long-term success and often find themselves in morally precarious positions.

Do This Now

Take a minute to consider where you fall on the Manipulation Matrix. Do you use your own product or service? Does it influence positive or negative behaviors? How does it make you feel? Ask yourself if you are proud of the way you are influencing the behavior of others.