Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products

79 percent of smartphone owners check their device within 15 minutes of waking up every morning.

Users who continually find value in a product are more likely to tell their friends about it.

Gourville claims that for new entrants to stand a chance, they can’t just be better, they must be nine times better. Why such a high bar? Because old habits die hard and new products or services need to offer dramatic improvements to shake users out of old routines. Gourville writes that products that require a high degree of behavior change are doomed to fail even if the benefits of using the new product are clear and substantial.

The study demonstrated that people suffering from symptoms of depression used the Internet more. Why is that? One hypothesis is that those with depression experience negative emotions more frequently than the general population and seek relief by turning to technology to lift their mood.

all humans are motivated to seek pleasure and avoid pain, to seek hope and avoid fear, and finally, to seek social acceptance and avoid rejection.

Many innovations fail because consumers irrationally overvalue the old while companies irrationally overvalue the new.

Buffett and his partner, Charlie Munger, realized that as customers form routines around a product, they come to depend upon it and become less sensitive to price.

One method is to try asking the question "why" as many times as it takes to get to an emotion. Usually this will happen by the fifth “why.” This is a technique adapted from the Toyota Production System described by Taiichi Ohno as the “5 Whys Method.” Ohno wrote that it was "the basis of Toyota's scientific approach ... by repeating ‘why?’ five times, the nature of the problem as well as its solution becomes clear.

products that require a high degree of behavior change are doomed to fail

In a classic Aesop’s Fable, a hungry fox encounters grapes hanging from a vine. The fox desperately wants the grapes. But as hard as he may try, he can not reach them. Frustrated, the fox decides the grapes must be sour and that he therefore would not want them anyway.

We often think the Internet enables you to do new things … But people just want to do the same things they’ve always done.

When users start to automatically cue their next behavior, the new habit becomes part of their everyday routine. Over time, Barbra associates Facebook with her need for social connection.

Internet is, “a giant machine designed to give people what they want.

The mind takes shortcuts informed by our surroundings to make quick and sometimes erroneous judgments.

new behaviors have a short half-life, as our minds tend to revert to our old ways of thinking and doing. Experiments show that lab animals habituated to new behaviors tend to regress to their first learned behaviors over time.

Reducing the thinking required to take the next action increases the likelihood of the desired behavior occurring unconsciously.

there are three ingredients required to initiate any and all behaviors: (1) the user must have sufficient motivation; (2) the user must have the ability to complete the desired action; and (3) a trigger must be present to activate the behavior.

Once a technology has created an association in users’ minds that the product is the solution of choice, they return on their own, no longer needing prompts from external triggers.

To change behavior, products must ensure the user feels in control. People must want to use the service, not feel they have to.

As the machine scanned the blood flow in the various regions of their brains, the tasters were informed of the cost of each wine sampled. The sample started with a $5 wine and progressed to a $90 bottle. Interestingly, as the price of the wine increased, so did the participant's enjoyment of the wine. Not only did they say they enjoyed the wine more but their brain corroborated their feelings, showing higher spikes in the regions associated with pleasure. Little did the study participants realize, they were tasting the same wine each time.

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

For new behaviors to really take hold, they must occur often.

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

on sites such as Pinterest, whenever the user nears the bottom of a page, more results automatically load. Users never have to pause as they continue scrolling through pins or posts without end

Remember and Share - The Investment Phase is the fourth step in the Hook Model. - Unlike the Action Phase, which delivers immediate gratification, the Investment Phase is about the anticipation of rewards in the future. - Investments in a product create preference because of our tendency to overvalue our work, be consistent with past behaviors, and avoid cognitive dissonance. - Investment comes after the variable reward phase when users are primed to reciprocate. - Investments increase the likelihood of users returning by improving the service the more it is used. They enable the accrual of stored value in the form of content, data, followers, reputation or skill. - Investments increase the likelihood of users passing through the Hook again by loading the next trigger to start the cycle all over again. *** Do This Now Refer to the answers you came up with in the last “Do This Now” section to complete the following exercises: - 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: - Load the next trigger - Store value as data, content, followers, reputation and skill - Identify how long it takes for a “loaded trigger” to re-engage your users. How can you reduce the delay to shorten cycle-time through the Hook?

So why haven’t more Google users switched to Bing? Habits keep users loyal. If a user is familiar with the Google interface, switching to Bing requires cognitive effort. Although many aspects of Bing are similar to Google, even a slight change in pixel placement forces the would-be user to learn a new way of interacting with the site. Adapting to the differences in the Bing interface is what actually slows down regular Google users and makes Bing feel inferior, not the technology itself.

The Hook Model is designed to connect the user’s problem with the designer’s solution frequently enough to form a habit. It is a framework for building products that solve user needs through long-term engagement.

watching someone investing countless hours into completing a tabletop puzzle can reveal frustrated face contortions and even sounds of muttered profanity. Although puzzles offer no prize other than the satisfaction of completion, for some the painstaking search for the right pieces can be a wonderfully mesmerizing struggle.

A classic paper by John Gourville, a professor of marketing at Harvard Business School, stipulates that “many innovations fail because consumers irrationally overvalue the old while companies irrationally overvalue the new.”10