Hooked

Key Concepts

The Hooked Model

1. Trigger

“A trigger is the actuator of behavior—the spark plug in the engine. Triggers come in two types: external and internal.8 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.” (p. 7)

“When users start to automatically cue their next behavior, the new habit becomes part of their everyday routine.” (p. 7)

2. Action

“Following the trigger comes the action: the behavior done in anticipation of a reward.” (p. 7)

“Companies leverage two basic pulleys of human behavior to increase the likelihood of an action occurring: the ease of performing an action and the psychological motivation to do it.” (p. 8)

3. Variable Reward

“What distinguishes the Hooked Model from a plain vanilla feedback loop is the Hook’s ability to create a craving. Feedback loops are all around us, but predictable ones don’t create desire.” (p. 8)

4. Investment

“The investment occurs when the user puts something into the product of service such as time, data, effort, social capital, or money.” (p. 9)

“Remember, the Hooked Model does not get people to do things they don’t want to do. Your product must ultimately be useful.” (p. 30)

Types of External Triggers

1. Paid Triggers

“Advertising, search engine marketing, and other paid channels are commonly used to get users’ attention and prompt them to act.” (p. 44)

2. Earned Triggers

“For earned triggers to drive ongoing user acquisition, companies must keep their products in the limelight—a difficult and unpredictable task.” (p. 45)

3. Relationship Triggers

“One person telling others about a product or service can be a highly effective external trigger for action.” (p. 45)

4. Owned Triggers

“Owned triggers consume a piece of real estate in the user’s environment. They consistently show up in daily life and it is ultimately up to the user to opt in to allowing these triggers to appear. For example, an app icon on the user’s phone screen, an e-mail newsletter to which the user subscribes, or an app update notification only appears if the user wants it there. As long as the user agrees to see the trigger, the company that sets the trigger owns a share of the user’s attention.” (p. 46)

Internal Triggers

“Internal triggers manifest automatically in your mind. Connecting internal triggers with a product is the brass ring of habit-forming technology.” (p. 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 often mindless action to quell the negative sensation.” (p. 48)

To make the Action happen, make it as easy as possible

“To initiate action, doing must be easier than thinking. Remember, a habit is a behavior done with little or no conscious thought. The more effort—either physical or mental—required to perform the desired action, the less likely it is to occur.” (p. 61)

“The Fogg Behavior Model is represented in the formula B = MAT, which represents that a given behavior will occur when motivation, ability, and a trigger are present at the same time and in sufficient degrees.” (p. 62)

“Fogg states that 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.” (p. 63)

“To increase the likelihood that a behavior will occur, Fogg instructs designers to focus on simplicity as a function of the user’s scarcest resource at that moment. In other words: Identify what the user is missing. What is making it difficult for the user to accomplish the desired action?” (p. 72)

The Reward for taking the Action has to both be relevant for the user and variable

“The 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.” (p. 96)

“Recently, gamification—defined as the use of gamelike elements in nongame environments—has been used with varying success. Points, badges, and leaderboards can prove effective, but only if they scratch the user’s itch. When there is a mismatch between the customer’s problem and the company’s assumed solution, no amount of gamification will help spur engagement.” (p. 117)

Investment both makes the customer more committed and makes their experience better

“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.” (p. 136)

Habit Testing

Step 1: Identify 

“The initial question for Habit Testing is ‘Who are the product’s habitual users?’ Remember, the more frequently your product is used, the more likely it is to form a user habit.” (p. 201)

“First, define what it means to be a devoted user. How often ‘should’ one use your product?” (p. 201)

Step 2: Codify

“Yet how many such users are enough? My rule of thumb is 5 percent.” (p. 202)

“... if at least 5 percent of your users don’t find your product valuable enough to use as much as you predicted they would, you may have a problem. Either you identified the wrong users or your product needs to go back to the drawing board. If you have exceeded that bar, though, and identified your habitual users, the next step is to codify the steps they took using your product to understand what hooked them.” (p. 202)

“You are looking for a Habit Path—a series of similar actions shared by your most loyal users.” (p. 203)

Step 3: Modify

“Armed with new insights, it is time to revisit your product and identify ways to nudge new users down the same Habit Path taken by devotees.” (p. 203)

Quotables

“Seventy-nine percent of smartphone owners check their device within fifteen minutes of waking up every morning. Perhaps more startling, fully one-third of Americans say they would rather give up sex than lose their cell phones.” (p. 1)

“Habits form when the brain takes a shortcut and stops actively deliberating over what to do next.” (p. 16)

“However, the framework and practices explored in this book are not “one size fits all” and do not apply to every business or industry. Entrepreneurs should evaluate how user habits impact their particular business model and goals.” (p. 18)

“Renowned investor and Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett once said, ‘You can determine the strength of a business over time by the amount of agony they go through in raising prices.’” (p. 20)

“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.’” (p. 22)

“In his book Something Really New: Three Simple Steps to Creating Truly Innovative Products, author Denis J. Hauptly deconstructs the process of innovation into its most fundamental steps. First, Hauptly states, understand the reason people use a product or service. Next, lay out the steps the customer must take to get the job done. Finally, once the series of tasks from intention to outcome is understood, simply start removing steps until you reach the simplest possible process.” (p. 67)

“Evan Williams, cofounder of Blogger, Twitter, and Medium, echoes Hauptly’s formula for innovation when he describes his own approach to building three massively successful companies: ‘Take a human desire, preferably one that has been around for a really long time . . . Identify that desire and use modern technology.’” (p. 70)

“Unfortunately, too many companies build their products betting users will do what they make them do instead of letting them do what they want to do. Companies fail to change user behaviors because they do not make their services enjoyable for its own sake, often asking users to learn new, unfamiliar actions instead of making old routines easier.” (p. 123)

“Wherever new technologies suddenly make a behavior easier, new possibilities are born.” (p. 210)