By Nir Eyal
79% of smartphone owners check their device within 15 minutes of waking up every morning. 1/3 of Americans say they would rather give up sex than lose their cell phones. 1
4 Steps to the Hook Model: Trigger, Action, Variable Reward, and Investment. 6
Habit forming products start by alerting users with external triggers like an e-mail, a Web site link, or the app icon on a phone. 7
Action – the behavior done in anticipation of a reward. 8
Variable Reward – Feedback looks are all around us, but predictable ones don’t create desire. 8
Investment – An action improves the service for the next go-around. 10
Habits – behaviors done with little or no conscious thought. 13
Habits form when the brain takes a shortcut and stops actively deliberating over what to do next. The brain quickly learns to codify behaviors that provide a solution to whatever situation it encounters. 16
Nail biting – the brain automatically deduces that if the decision was a good one yesterday, then it is a safe bet again today and action becomes a routine. 17
Warren Buffett – you can determine the strength of a business over time by the amount of agony they go through in raising prices. As customers form routines around a product they come to depend upon it and become less sensitive to price. Such as Coca-Cola or Candy Crush. 20
Many entrepreneurs fall into the trap of building products that are only marginally better than existing solutions, hoping their innovation will be good enough to woo customers away from existing products. But when it comes to shaking consumers’ old habits they find that better products don’t always win. Many innovations fail because consumers irrationally overvalue the old while companies irrationally overvalue the new. 23
A new product must be 9x better than any existing old competitor. Gourville 23
LIFO – the habits you’ve acquired recently are the ones most likely to go the soonest. Research shows that nearly everyone who loses weight on a diet gains back the pounds within two years. 26
Old habits die hard and for new habits to really take hold, they must occur often. 26
Products fail because companies run out of money, products enter markets too early or too late, the marketplace doesn’t need what companies are offering, or founders simply give up. Successful innovations SOLVE PROBLEMS. 32
Habit forming technologies are both vitamins and pain killers. 34
External triggers are embedded with information which tells the user what to do next. 41
Internal triggers manifest automatically in your mind. Connecting internal triggers with a product is the brass ring of consumer technology. 48
Emotions, particularly negative ones, are powerful internal triggers and greatly influence our daily routines. Feelings of boredom, loneliness, frustration, confusion, and indecisiveness often instigate a slight pain or irritation and prompt an almost instantaneous and mindless action to quell the negative sensation. 48
Fear is powerful internal trigger. 55
The appearance of scarcity affects perceived value. (Amazon.com “only 4 left”) 86
Framing Heuristics – the price of wine increased so did the enjoyment of the win. 88
Punch cards that are used by retailers for repeat business are more effective when the first punch is already stamped or given as opposed to being blank. 89
Stack Overflow – the Quora for software developers and it works because human beings like to contribute to a community they care about
Email – even email as a sense of accomplishment attached to it, to feel rewarded the messages must be read and responded to. 113
Codeacademy – learn to program with immediate feedback. Fun and rewarding. 115
Reminding people they have the freedom to choose – reactance, the hair-trigger response to threats to your autonomy/freedom. A good tool to use for email/virality and selling. 121
Escalation of Commitment – 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 labor leads to love. 136
Cognitive Dissonance – the irrational manipulation the way one sees the world. The more effort we put into something the more we are likely to value it. 140
You must HABIT TEST your product. Ask yourself how often SHOULD a user use your product? 195
Instead of asking what problem should I solve, ask what problem do I wish someone would solve for me? Studying your own needs can lead to remarkable discoveries and new ideas because the designer always has a direct line to at least one user: Himself. 199