• External Triggers come from our environment. Engagement with a product can be initiated externally through triggers like paid advertising, viral marketing, publicity, word-of-mouth, etc. External triggers are usually too expensive or uncertain to rely on forever, but they’re great for getting new users.
  • Owned Triggers are a highly valuable sub-category of external triggers—these are triggers which our users have given permission to receive like email newsletters and app notifications. They allow us to repeatedly contact a user, which is very useful for building a habit.
• Internal Triggers come from inside the user. These include their emotions, thoughts and mental associations. For example, when we feel bored waiting in line, that feeling may trigger us to pull out our phone and begin scrolling a newsfeed. Negative emotions are frequent triggers for product usage, from loneliness to irritation. We use apps to “scratch” these emotional itches or disturbances.

To get started with internal triggers, put yourself in your customer’s shoes. Imagine exactly where someone would be and what they would be doing before opening your app. What specific emotions, frustrations or pain points could they use your product as a solution for? The founder of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, says a major reason for their success is this technique which he calls writing “user narratives.” (Stanford)

The first step of creating habits are triggers, which nudge people to take some action like visiting our app. External triggers come from outside like paid advertising, email newsletters and app notifications. Internal triggers include their own feelings, thoughts and mental connections.

👆 3. Make Action Easy: By making user actions simple and intuitive, you increase likelihood of repeated use

The second step of a habit is action, what the user does after receiving the trigger because they expect some reward. Desired actions may include a person opening your app, going to your website, sharing your brand with their friends, etc. How can we encourage users to take the right actions?

According to Dr. B.J. Fogg, a director at Stanford University, the 3 parts of every action include: Motivation, Ability and Triggers. Let’s understand these one-by-one:

1. Motivation: How strongly someone desires the reward of taking the action. Most products tap into a few core human motivations like the desire for pleasure, social acceptance, sex appeal, etc. Equally motivating are things we desire to move away from like pain, rejection, terror, etc.
2. Ability: How difficult it is to complete the action. The easier something is to do, the more likely we will do it. New technologies often succeed through removing steps compared to the old way of doing things. We can increase our users ability to take an action by making it faster, simpler, cheaper or automatic.
3. Triggers: Something that initiates the action. We talked about this in the last lesson.

The best way to encourage our users to take an action is to make it simpler or easier to do by removing steps. It is difficult to increase motivation, but there are countless ways we can make our products more intuitive, usable and friendly.

For example, Google succeeded with a focus on simplicity. When Google first launched, there were countless big competitors including Yahoo and Altavista. However, the other search engine home pages were crammed full of distractions. Google removed everything but the essentials, making their website the easiest to use.

The second step of user habits is action. Encourage your users to take the right action by making it as simple as possible. Reduce any steps or distractions. Google is a great example of doing this right.

🎁 4. Implement Variable Rewards: Keeping users more highly engaged and interested through unpredictable payoffs

The third step of user habits are variable rewards—the satisfaction of a desire which causes people to repeat the behavior in the future. Watching a funny video, viewing a sensual image or getting social likes all stimulate the dopamine reward center in our brain. (Harvard)

Research shows our desire is greatly increased when the reward is variable or unpredictable. The influential psychologist BF Skinner was conducting an experiment, getting pigeons to tap levers so they could get pellets of food. He discovered the pigeons became far more motivated to tap the lever when the food rewards were made to be uncertain—meaning sometimes they received the food and sometimes they didn’t. This may be the same mechanism that makes gambling so addictive, because it offers unpredictable rewards.

Nir Eyal says there are three major types of rewards:

1. Rewards of the tribe. This is feeling social acceptance, approval or connection. One of our deepest evolutionary drives is to belong to a tribe. Well, it’s no secret some of the most addictive apps are highly social. Users interact with others and they are motivated to receive more likes, shares, retweets, etc.
2. Rewards of the hunt. Another basic drive all humans have is to hunt and gather resources. In our modern worlds, this drive can be expressed by hunting for information such as the perfect image on Pinterest.
3. Rewards of the self. This is chasing the feeling of personal competence or accomplishment. For example, many video games reward players with achievements for finishing a quest or reaching a high score.

Our brains are adapted to seek rewards that make us feel accepted, attractive, important, and included.

Ongoing novelty is a final critical ingredient for a product to hold our attention. If we feel like we fully understand or know something, then we usually become bored with it. That’s why the most habit-forming products always have an element of endless novelty.

Interaction with other users is a great source of novelty. We can’t watch the same movie every day, no matter how good it is. However, we can visit Youtube every day and usually be entertained because other users are always creating something new.

The third step of user habits are variable rewards—the (somewhat unpredictable) satisfaction of a desire. Common rewards include social acceptance, sensory stimulation and personal accomplishment. Continuous novelty is also important and it can be provided through user-generated content or interaction.

🤝 5. Engineer User Investment: When people invest time or effort, their connection to the product deepens

The fourth and final step of a user habit is investment. This means getting the user to do a some work and contribute to the product through their effort, data, social connections, etc.

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.

The most engaging apps become more valuable to us as we spend more time in them. For example:

• Youtube logs your preferences as you watch more videos. So just by using Youtube, it becomes smarter about recommending cool new videos you will enjoy.
• Amazon Kindle lets you build a virtual library you can access anywhere. The more books you buy, the valuable your Kindle becomes. However, with each new purchase, you become less likely to switch to another service and lose all your old books.
• Twitter is valuable primarily because all the users have invested in it. The core app itself would be very simple for most programmers to build. However, Twitter users have already invested so much of their time building followers and following other users, so they are unlikely to switch to a new platform.

The fourth step is investment, which means having the user contribute something into the product like their data, social connections, money, etc. The more someone uses your product, the more valuable and customized it should become to them.

🧪 6. Habit Testing: Test and measure new elements designed to increase your product’s engagement

Habit testing is a practical process to help us apply “The Hook Model” to our own products. In a nutshell, this is about finding your most engaged users and creating more of them. It contains three steps: identify, codify and modify.

1. Identify: Find out who your product’s most engaged users are right now. This is best done using analytics tools like cohort analysis. (Appcues blog)
2. Codify: Determine what common actions those users are taking. This is called the Habit Path—the actions users need to take to create a habit of using your app. For example, if you’re working on a calendar app, then people may become engaged users after they add five events to their schedule.
3. Modify: Make it easier for more users to take the same actions that lead to habit formation. This can be done through a simpler design, more emphasis on certain features, a beginner tutorial or onboarding process, strategic notifications, etc.

Habit testing is finding our most engaged users and creating more of them. First we must identify who our most passionate users are, then codify which behaviors they have in common, then modify our product to nudge more users down the same path.

Conclusion

This book provides a wide variety of ideas and tools we can use to create user habits. However, I’m sure many of us feel troubled by some of the ethical implications. Perhaps we should be asking not only “How do we hook users?” but also “should we?”

Nir Eyal addresses these concerns in a chapter at the end of the book. He says there is a simple test to check if we are using these tools for good or evil. We must ask ourselves two questions:

First, “Would I use the product myself?” and second, “Will the product help users materially improve their lives?”

Generally, if we can answer yes to these two questions, then we’re building a product that will improve our user’s lives in some way. And in the end, that’s what we should all be aiming for, isn’t it? Helping others to create habits that are positive, healthy and constructive.