Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products Summary (8/10)

Hooked: How to Form Habit Building Products is a book that combines insights from psychology to inform us about how we become habituated to technologies – and how we can, in turn, design products that can get users habituated. Eyal makes an important distinction between habits and addictions – as they are often used interchangeably. The purpose of Hooked isn’t to get people addicted – as addictions are harmful for one’s health. But rather, to get people into new habits – and these habits can be highly beneficial to your users.

Eyal created a model to describe how a habit is created. The Hook Model consists of four phases.

1. Trigger
2. Action
3. Variable Reward
4. Investment

The book goes into each of the phases in detail.

New Habits are LIFO

If you’re someone who’s tried to quit smoking, eat healthier, meditate, or tried to regularly exercise – and failed to do all of these things, you’ll be keenly aware of the difficulty of forming new habits. But more than that, you’ll also be aware of how difficult it is to kick old habits. Eyal points out that new habits are LIFO “last in, first out” – in that your most recently acquired habits are least likely to persist.

This is an important thing to understand for several reasons. One, you need to be vigilant and realistic if you are trying to combat a deeply ingrained habit. Your expectations need to be adjusted, and at the same time – you need to take more measures to ensure that you prevent yourself from slipping. Understanding the difficulty of maintaining new habits can be a powerful motivator to better reinforcing them. Similarly, if you’ve tried to help someone else overcome a destructive habit – knowing this should endow you with more patience towards them.

The second reason this is important, is that if you’re designing a product for your users, you should know your new users are going to be difficult to maintain. They already have powerful habitual patterns that are difficult to break – even if your product is high in quality.

I believe that this is the central premise to why Hooked is a useful book. Knowing the difficulty of breaking down habit patterns motivates you to want to understand how our minds form habits in the first place, and what steps we can take to better cement these in our routines (or in others).

Vitamin vs Painkiller

There are many reasons companies fail, but the common characteristic of all successful innovations is that they solve problems. Investors typically want to know if you’re building a “vitamin or a painkiller”. A painkiller is solving a real problem – it’s addressing a “pain point” that the consumer has and is more likely to become a successful product. Vitamins on the other hand are things you take every day – believing they are useful, but they aren’t relieving you of pain. In other words, you can get rid of your vitamins. And for that reason, investors tend to dislike investing in vitamins.

But sometimes, the distinction between the two isn’t so clear. How would you classify Facebook? Like many other social media companies, Facebook started out as a vitamin – but after users became more attached and invested in the platform – it became a painkiller.

Fogg’s Model

Dr B.J Fogg from Stanford University developed a model to help us understand what drives our actions. He states that there are three main ingredients worth considering.

1. The user must have enough motivation.
2. The user must have the ability to complete the action
3. A trigger must be present to activate the behavior

To give an example – think of a phone ringing. There are three possible reasons why you wouldn’t answer your phone. Either you do not have enough motivation – you are trying to avoid communicating with the caller. Or you don’t have the ability t answer it – the phone is in your bag, and you’re driving. Or finally your phone is on silent mode – and you lack the trigger to know your phone is ringing.

Fogg also describes six “elements of simplicity” – these are the factors that influence how difficult a task is. They are:

1. Time – how long it takes to complete an action
2. Money – the fiscal cost of taking an action
3. Physical effort—the amount of labor involved in taking the action
4. Brain cycles—the level of mental effort and focus required to take an action
5. Social deviance—how accepted the behavior is by others
6. Non-routine—according to Fogg, “How much the action matches or disrupts existing routines.”

The Three Types of Rewards

The Tribe

This type of reward involves the search for social rewards. These can come in many forms. A good example is Facebook. Once you’re logged in – you are exposed to content your friends have shared, their comments, and updated information about how many times something was “liked.” One of the powerful motivators of causing you to go back is the intermittency of the rewards. Every time you log in, your experience is different. Sometimes, your experience is much more positive than other times. This uncertainty keeps you curious and interested. “Comments” and “likes” are also a form of tribal validation to you if you’ve shared content, and they will motivate you to continue posting in the future.

The Hunt

The search for information and material resources is the “Hunt”. This is another primordial emotion that predates computers by millions of years. You are hardwired to pursue useful information – the same way your ancestors were compelled to pursue food (prey).

A good example of the hunt is gambling. Most people know that they are likely to lose every time they enter a casino – and yet they persist in doing so. The addiction has led to the creation of a multi-billion-dollar industry. Slot machines are a classic example of how the intermittency of rewards can imprison you to the game – despite having no control over the final outcome.

The Self

“Rewards of the self is the search for intrinsic rewards of mastery, competence, and completion.” We have an innate urge to conquer obstacles and complete challenges – even if they are not practically useful or even fun. You might have experienced this while trying to complete a difficult puzzle, or logical riddle – that clearly are not providing you with feelings of pleasure. Edward Deci and Richard Ryan’s “Self-determination theory” suggests that people have an intrinsic desire to be competent.

Video games are a great example. Players invest thousands of hours to master the required skills to play the game competently. They are addicted to levelling up, gaining new powers, and breaking high scores to continue their path towards progress.

The Newness Problem

Farmville was a huge hit – but the game itself was incredibly simple. Eventually, when Zynga wanted to create new games – that were like Farmville – to capitalize on their success, they failed. The novelty wore off. The problem with Farmville, Breaking Bad, and other products that derive their value for the constant production of newness – is that people will eventually get bored. The same cannot be said about multi-sided platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Since the content on these platforms are user-generated, it’s hard for them to get old. And people who invest time and energy into honing their skills on Twitter or Facebook, building a community, and dedicating countless amounts of time – will be allergic to the idea of switching to another platform.

The Moral Question

There is something about designing a product to get people “Hooked” that doesn’t sit right – morally. Eyal devotes a chapter discussing the moral conundrums that designers are likely to face, and he proposes that you ask yourself what type of creator you are to resolve this question. He provides us with a Manipulation Matrix that has each quadrant represent a “type” of manipulator.

The Facilitator

The first (and benign) kind is the Facilitator – who uses the product he is selling, and genuinely believes it will add value to his users’ lives. This is the best category to be in. For example, designing a fitness app that the creator would use to make working out easier.

The Peddler

The peddler is someone who doesn’t practice what they preach. They are the designers who might design a fitness app that asks you to diligently record every calorie you’ve consumer per day – under an altruistic guise of wanting to improve people’s lives. But when pressed, they would admit to not be willing to use the app themselves.

The Entertainer

The third category is “Entertainer” – these are the designers who don’t claim to be adding real value to their users’ lives, but they would use what they are selling to you. For example, Angry birds and Farmville.

The Dealer

This is the category to avoid at all costs. This is when the designer creates a product they wouldn’t use, or think is good for you. Another word for this is “exploitation”. For example, casinos and drug dealers.

If you’re an entrepreneur and you want a quick guide to know what to think about before launching you business, check out The Myth of Entrepreneurship.