How to build habit forming products? Book Summary - Hooked by Nir Eyal

The content of this book revolves around building habit forming or addictive products.

Although the book is about building any kind of product but it is more helpful for someone who wants to build digital or online products.

Philosophy - ?The main philosophy behind the book is that more frequently the new behaviour occurs, the stronger the habit becomes.

“For an infrequent action to become a habit, user must be provided high utility,?either from gaining pleasure or avoiding pain. But a behaviour that provide minimum perceived benefit can also become a habit simply because it occurs frequently.”

Author gives a hooked model for forming habitual behaviour which have four stages - Trigger, Action, variable reward and investment. Let’s discuss them one by one.

1.?????Trigger

Trigger may in the form of external trigger (notification, pop up) or may be in the form of internal trigger.

For example – If you get an important phone call and your phone is on silent mode, you will not pickup the phone even though it is more important. Here comes the role of trigger. So here, ringing is an external trigger.

Internal triggers are manifested in our mind. The only thing is that our product needs to be matched with those triggers.

Feeling of boredom, loneliness,?frustration, confusion and indecisiveness are some internal triggers. For example – You do not always need notifications to get into Instagram. Your boredom is enough to pull you into it.

So, as a product engineer,?its our goal to solve these problems and eliminate the pain of user.

To find out pain or pleasure that motivates a person,?use 5 why technique where you repeat "why?" 5 times so that the nature of problem becomes clear and you can address that problem.

For example - Instagram recognised a pain point known as "fear of missing out".

2.?????Action - This is the second step after trigger.

In authors word, to initiate action, doing must be easier than thinking. It is because habit is something doing which requires no conscious efforts. So to attract users to your product, using your product must be easier.

So what are the things that drive users to take actions ? The things are – Motivation and Ability to complete the desired action.

Increasing someone’s ability to use product is more effective at influencing their behaviour than increasing their desire to do it.

So, let’s discuss ability in detail.

For increasing ability to use product, make products easier to use. Products that significantly reduces steps to complete tasks will enjoy higher adoption rates by the people.

For making things easier to use, author had given some elements of simplicity.

1. Time - time required to complete action.

2. Money - money incurred to take action

3. physical effort

4. Mental effort

5. Non routine - how much the action disrupts routine activities.

Either try to remove or reduce these six elements to make your product easy to use.

For example - Some companies eliminates many steps needed for registration procedure ?simply by allowing users to register with their sites via existing Facebook credentials.

Similarly,?some mobile phones companies allow users to use camera without unlocking phone.

Blogger , an online site made posting content online dramatically easy and this resulted into more people creating online content as opposed to just consuming it.

For influencing desire to use product, some behavioural psychological concepts could be used such as

(a)???Scarcity effect – Limited seats, last piece or?last day discount are some schemes which drive users. Users thing that there is something which other people know but he don’t know.

(b)??The endowed progression effect – People are more likely to take action if they think that they had already made some progress. For example – Linkedin have?‘Improve your profile strength ‘ section where after each step a user completes , the meter shows the user is advancing .

I would suggest you to read an another book?i.e. ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’?for understanding behavioural psychology in detail, the concept of which are used in nearly every field and aspects of life whether they are decision making or sales or marketing or investment.

3. Variable reward - Studies show that what draws us to the act is not the reward itself but it is the anticipation of reward.

In a famous experiment , hungry rats were placed inside a box. Every time they pressed a lever, they get food. The rats learned cause and effect of pressing the lever and getting food. So, in the next part of the same experiment, they added variability to getting food i.e.?machine discharged food after a random number of taps. This time, number of times the lever was pressed by the rats increased dramatically. This happened because things became unpredictable this time and rats were hungry for the reward.

Same tactics are used by social media companies now a days.. The uncertainty of what users will find each time when they open Facebook drive them to open Facebook again and again. Not every post is engaging, only random posts are engaging and this maintains the variability in Facebook.

Similarly in twitter, on occasion you might find particularly interesting piece of news, while other times you won't.?This keeps you hunting for more news.

When there is no variability,?everything becomes predictable and product loose its appeal to its users.

We discussed variability and its examples . Now let’s discuss rewards.

Rewards may be in the form of –

(a)???Reward of the tribe – Gratification from others. For example – likes, comments etc.

(b)??Reward of the hunt – material goods, money or information. For example – the rewards you get while using step set go. You get coins after walking certain steps which you can use to buy things.

(c)???Rewards of the self – mastery, competency, completion or consistency. For example - ?A fitness app which shows your progress after you achieve a desired level of mastery , say 50 bench presses or 100 push ups.

As you get mastery over something, you automatically feels more satisfied and filfilled.

4. Investment - The more time and effort a user invest in a product , more he will value it. The purpose of this stage is to make users invested into the product.

Author asks, What would be the first reaction of anybody while he sip bear for the first time? Most probably , his innate reaction would reject it, yet he would learn to like it after repeated exposure of it. It is because he made in it a lot of investment in the form of time & effort.

For understanding this topic deeply, let's understand 'IKEA Effect' . According to Wikipedia's definition, The?IKEA effect?is a cognitive bias in which consumers place a disproportionately high value on products they partially created.

IKEA, a furniture retail company, sells affordable , ready to assemble household furnishings. Unlike its competitors who sell preassembled furnishings, IKEA puts its customers to work by asking them to assemble their own furniture . This gives them the feeling of their ownership in making furniture and they love it more.

So, the businesses that leverage user effort have higher perceived value of their product because user put their work into them.

If your followers on social media reached a certain milestone, you are less likely to leave it because you invested a lot in it and you have a reputation and followers which are the result of time & efforts you invested there.

Investment in a product by the user increases the perceived value of?product. We are habitual to take things for granted when we receive them for free.

Investment by users even help us in making services better especially if our product is AI ( Artificial Intelligence) based, which improve continuously if it gets more data from users. Spotify’s personalized music recommendations are an example of how technology adopts and improves based on users’ investment in content.

You might be thinking that author first asked to remove efforts in order to complete a task in second stage of product building i.e. action stage and now he is asking for users to make efforts in investment stage.

Here asking for effort is coming after variable reward stage.?The timing of asking for user investment is important here.

First your product made the life of users easier. Now users will reciprocate to make things easier for you.

This is all about hooked model. The steps defined in the model are to be applied continuously as it is a continuous process.

I have tried to cover almost every concept from the book. If you want to cover the same concepts in detail and with more real life examples , you may read the book. The book covers nearly 200 pages with some thought exercises at the end of every chapter in the form of homework. Overall the book is easy to understand, insightful and good.