Hello, I'm with Nir Eyal,
the author of Hooked, How to Build Habit Forming Products.
Thank you for joining us.
>> My pleasure. Good to be here.
>> So, tell me a little bit about the book.
>> Sure.
So, my book is really about how do products engage users?
How do we build products and
services To keep people coming back, not every business needs to form a habit.
But every business that forms a habit needs a hook, and so that's what
the book is really about, it's about this pattern that I call the hook model.
This four step process of trigger, action, reward, investment
that keeps people coming back and using these various products and services.
And my hope here is that we can use the psychology of
what makes products engaging to help people live happier, healthier,
more productive, more connected lives by using habits for good.
>> And now, I as an entrepreneur use this model?
>> Right. So
if you're building a product that requires a habit, so
if you think about products.
Some of the most successful companies over the past several years.
Companies like Facebook, and Google, and Instagram, and WhatsApp and Snapchat,
and Slack these companies have all formed habits in users.
Now that's not a requirement lot's of businesses can do just fine without
forming a habit, but if you're the type of company who's business model relies
upon a habit just like those companies I just mentioned they would go out of
business if they had to send advertising every time just to bring people back.
So if you're that kind of company,
if you're an entrepreneur building a product that requires people to
come back on their own, you can use this framework to figure out, hey do I have
the fundamental elements that I need to form, to build a habit-forming product?
>> Is this only for consumer products?
>> No. So whether it's enterprise products or
consumer products, doesn't matter.
What matters is, is the product something that people use
throughout their day with little or no conscious thought?
So if you're building an enterprise application that, you know,
might be some piece of software that's put into some server farm somewhere and
nobody actually uses that piece of software, that's fine.
That's a great business, you know, you should keep doing that,
but you just don't need to have it for that, because that's not used regularly.
On the other hand if you're building an enterprise product like a communication
tool, like Slack, or GitHub, or Stack Overflow, or Sales force.
All of these are enterprise facing products that necessitate habits.
They require people to come back on their own.
And for those types of products, you need a hook.
So these hooks, this four step process,
starts with a trigger to an action and a reward and then an investment.
So every hook starts with a trigger.
A trigger prompts the habit and we have these two types of triggers,
an external trigger or an internal trigger.
External triggers are things in our environment that tell us
what to do next.
They give us some piece of information.
Click here.
Buy now. A friend telling you about this great
new app through word of mouth.
All examples of external triggers.
These external triggers prompt us to action.
That's the habit itself.
Open an app, scroll through pinterest, search on google,
push the play button on YouTube.
These are these actions that we do with little or
no conscious thought that are these very simple behaviors
these very small behaviors that we do seeking a reward.
Which brings me to the third step of the hook the reward stage.
Is where the user's itch is scratched, where they get what they came for.
And yet there's a bit of mystery around what they might find
next time they engage with the product.
So it's not just a reward.
It turns out that habit-forming technologies integrate what's called
a variable reward.
So this comes from the classic work of B.F.
Skinner, the father of ‎operant conditioning.
Skinner found that when he gave rewards to his pigeons and
these little boxes on a variable basis.
So, sometimes the pigeons would peck at the disk,
they wouldn't receive a reward.
The next time, they would receive a reward.
What Skinner observed was, at the rate of response,
the number of times his pigeons peck at the disk, increased
when the reward was given on an intermittent schedule of reinforcement.
And so in all sorts of products that we find most habit-forming,
most engaging, we find this bit of mystery, this bit of variability.
So searching, and scrolling and scrolling on a newsfeed, or what makes
sports fun to watch is the uncertainty of will our team win the game.
Or what makes for a great TV show or a movie?
The uncertainty about how the happy ending is going to unwind.
All these are examples of variable rewards.
And finally, the investment phase, the last step of the hook.
The investment phase is where the user is prompted to put something into
the product, to invest in the product In anticipation of a future benefit.
So, the purpose of investments is to increase the likelihood fo
the next pass.
That's what the investment phase is for, and it does this in two ways.
The investments load the next trigger.
So, loading the next trigger, an example of that would be, when I send someone
a message on WhatsApp I don't get any immediate rewards.
Right? There's no leader boards,
there's not badges, there's no points, nothing really happens.
What I'm doing is I'm loading the next trigger because I'm likely to
get a reply.
>> Right. >> And that reply comes coupled with
an external trigger.
Hey, here's a message from your friend which prompts me to use the hook
once again.
The second way that investments increase the likelihood of an x-pass
is by storing value, and this is a big deal.
Storing value is when the product gets better and better with use,
it appreciates in value.
And it does this by storing data, followers,
reputation, content >> Photos.
>> Right. Anything that I'm putting into the app
that gets better and better over time.
And so it's through successive cycles,
through these hooks trigger action reward investment
that now an association has built with that second type of trigger.
Remember I told you there was two types of triggers: external triggers and
internal triggers.
The internal trigger are these things in our life
that prompt us to action like a place, a situation, a routine, a certain person.
And most frequently, emotions that prompt us to do this next action,
this next habit with little or
no conscious thought, but without any explicit information.
So over time,
through successive cycles through these hooks, now we use the product.
Not with a message that tells us, hey click here, but
>> With a need.
>> With a need, exactly.
We internally trigger ourselves.
We have these associations, so, I'm lonely, I check Facebook.
I'm uncertain, I Google.
I'm bored and I'm on YouTube or Reddit or
checking stock prices or sports scores, right?
We do these things instantaneously because of the successive cycles
through these hooks.