Hooked Nir Eyal Quotes

Users who continually find value in a product are more likely to tell their friends about it.

79 percent of smartphone owners check their device within 15 minutes of waking up every morning.

Buffett and his partner, Charlie Munger, realized that as customers form routines around a product, they come to depend upon it and become less sensitive to price.

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.

Many innovations fail because consumers irrationally overvalue the old while companies irrationally overvalue the new.

Habit-forming products often start as nice-to-haves (vitamins) but once the habit is formed, they become must-haves (painkillers).

products that require a high degree of behavior change are doomed to fail

To change behavior, products must ensure the user feels in control. People must want to use the service, not feel they have to.

Gourville claims that for new entrants to stand a chance, they can’t just be better, they must be nine times better. Why such a high bar? Because old habits die hard and new products or services need to offer dramatic improvements to shake users out of old routines. Gourville writes that products that require a high degree of behavior change are doomed to fail even if the benefits of using the new product are clear and substantial.

If it can’t be used for evil, it’s not a superpower.

Too many choices or irrelevant options can cause hesitation, confusion, or worse—abandonment.

One method is to try asking the question "why" as many times as it takes to get to an emotion. Usually this will happen by the fifth “why.” This is a technique adapted from the Toyota Production System described by Taiichi Ohno as the “5 Whys Method.” Ohno wrote that it was "the basis of Toyota's scientific approach ... by repeating ‘why?’ five times, the nature of the problem as well as its solution becomes clear.

The study demonstrated that people suffering from symptoms of depression used the Internet more. Why is that? One hypothesis is that those with depression experience negative emotions more frequently than the general population and seek relief by turning to technology to lift their mood.

The mind takes shortcuts informed by our surroundings to make quick and sometimes erroneous judgments.

A habit is when not doing an action causes a bit of pain. It

Companies who form strong user habits enjoy several benefits to their bottom line.

Instead of relying on expensive marketing, habit-forming companies link their services to the users’ daily routines and emotions.

there are three ingredients required to initiate any and all behaviors: (1) the user must have sufficient motivation; (2) the user must have the ability to complete the desired action; and (3) a trigger must be present to activate the behavior.

the first place for the entrepreneur or designer to look for new opportunities is in the mirror.

Reducing the thinking required to take the next action increases the likelihood of the desired behavior occurring unconsciously.

Make your product so simple that users already know how to use it, and you’ve got a winner.

Painkillers solve an obvious need, relieving a specific pain and often have quantifiable markets.

Internet is, “a giant machine designed to give people what they want.

A habit is when not doing an action causes a bit of pain.

For new behaviors to really take hold, they must occur often.

Users take their technologies with them to bed.[cxiv] When they wake up, they check for notifications, tweets, and updates, sometimes even before saying “Good morning” to their loved ones.

The ultimate goal of a habit-forming product is to solve the user’s pain by creating an association so that the user identifies the company’s product or service as the source of relief. First,

The Hook Model is designed to connect the user’s problem with the designer’s solution frequently enough to form a habit. It is a framework for building products that solve user needs through long-term engagement.

In contrast, vitamins do not necessarily solve an obvious pain-point. Instead they appeal to users’ emotional rather than functional needs. When we take our multivitamin each morning, we don't really know if it is actually making us healthier.

Without variability we are like children in that once we figure out what will happen next, we become less excited by the experience. The same rules that apply to puppies also apply to products. To hold our attention, products must have an ongoing degree of novelty.

In a classic Aesop’s Fable, a hungry fox encounters grapes hanging from a vine. The fox desperately wants the grapes. But as hard as he may try, he can not reach them. Frustrated, the fox decides the grapes must be sour and that he therefore would not want them anyway.

Motivation or Ability — Which Should You Increase First? After uncovering the triggers that prompt user actions and deciding which actions you want to turn into habits, you can increase motivation and ability to spark the likelihood of your users taking a desired behavior. But which should you invest in first, motivation or ability? Where is your time and money better spent? The answer is always to start with ability.

Once a technology has created an association in users’ minds that the product is the solution of choice, they return on their own, no longer needing prompts from external triggers.

Consequently, any technology or product that significantly reduces the steps to complete a task will enjoy high adoption rates by the people it assists. For

Take a human desire, preferably one that has been around for a really long time . . . Identify that desire and use modern technology to take out steps.” Blogger

For an infrequent action to become a habit, the user must perceive a high degree of utility, either from gaining pleasure or avoiding pain. Take

For some businesses, forming habits is a critical component to success, but not every business requires habitual user engagement.

Companies that successfully change behaviors present users with an implicit choice between their old way of doing things and a new, more convenient way to fulfill existing needs.

We often think the Internet enables you to do new things … But people just want to do the same things they’ve always done.

Building habit-forming products is an iterative process and requires user behavior analysis and continuous experimentation.

According to a study by a mobile analytics firm, 26 percent of mobile apps in 2010 were downloaded and used only once.

If you’re skeptical that Google is habit-forming (and you are a frequent Google user), just try using Bing.

It’s the pull to visit YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter for just a few minutes, only to find yourself still tapping and scrolling an hour later.

When users start to automatically cue their next behavior, the new habit becomes part of their everyday routine. Over time, Barbra associates Facebook with her need for social connection.

new behaviors have a short half-life, as our minds tend to revert to our old ways of thinking and doing. Experiments show that lab animals habituated to new behaviors tend to regress to their first learned behaviors over time.

The invention of the telephone was also dismissed at first. Sir William Henry Preece, the chief engineer of the British post office, famously declared, “The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys.

So why haven’t more Google users switched to Bing? Habits keep users loyal. If a user is familiar with the Google interface, switching to Bing requires cognitive effort. Although many aspects of Bing are similar to Google, even a slight change in pixel placement forces the would-be user to learn a new way of interacting with the site. Adapting to the differences in the Bing interface is what actually slows down regular Google users and makes Bing feel inferior, not the technology itself. 

Habit Testing.” It is a process inspired by the build-measure-learn methodology championed by the lean startup movement. Habit Testing offers insights and actionable data to inform the design of habit-forming products. It helps clarify who your devotees are, what parts of your product are habit-forming (if any), and why those aspects of your product are changing user behavior.

Why #1: Why would Julie want to use e-mail? Answer: So she can send and receive messages. Why #2: Why would she want to do that? Answer: Because she wants to share and receive information quickly. Why #3: Why does she want to do that? Answer: To know what’s going on in the lives of her coworkers, friends, and family. Why #4: Why does she need to know that? Answer: To know if someone needs her. Why #5: Why would she care about that? Answer: She fears being out of the loop. Now

As the machine scanned the blood flow in the various regions of their brains, the tasters were informed of the cost of each wine sampled. The sample started with a $5 wine and progressed to a $90 bottle. Interestingly, as the price of the wine increased, so did the participant's enjoyment of the wine. Not only did they say they enjoyed the wine more but their brain corroborated their feelings, showing higher spikes in the regions associated with pleasure. Little did the study participants realize, they were tasting the same wine each time.

You are now equipped to use the Hook Model to ask yourself these five fundamental questions for building effective hooks:   1.   What do users really want? What pain is your product relieving? (Internal Trigger) 2.   What brings users to your service? (External Trigger) 3.   What is the simplest action users take in anticipation of reward, and how can you simplify your product to make this action easier? (Action) 4.   Are users fulfilled by the reward, yet left wanting more? (Variable Reward) 5.   What “bit of work” do users invest in your product? Does it load the next trigger and store value to improve the product with use? (Investment)

The Endowed Progress Effect Punch cards are often used by retailers to encourage repeat business. With each purchase, customers get closer to receiving a free product or service. These cards are typically awarded empty and in effect, customers start at zero percent complete. What would happen if retailers handed customers punch cards with punches already given? Would people be more likely to take action if they had already made some progress? An experiment sought to answer this very question.[lxvi] Two groups of customers were given punch cards awarding a free car wash once the cards were fully punched. One group was given a blank punch card with 8 squares and the other given a punch card with 10 squares but with two free punches. Both groups still had to purchase 8 car washes to receive a free wash; however, the second group of customers — those that were given two free punches — had a staggering 82 percent higher completion rate. The study demonstrates the endowed progress effect, a phenomenon that increases motivation as people believe they are nearing a goal. Sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook utilize this heuristic to encourage people to divulge more information about themselves when completing their online profiles. On LinkedIn, every user starts with some semblance of progress (figure 19). The next step is to “Improve Your Profile Strength” by supplying additional information.

What do users really want? What pain is your product relieving? (Internal Trigger) 2.   What brings users to your service? (External Trigger) 3.   What is the simplest action users take in anticipation of reward, and how can you simplify your product to make this action easier? (Action) 4.   Are users fulfilled by the reward, yet left wanting more? (Variable Reward) 5.   What “bit of work” do users invest in your product? Does it load the next trigger and store value to improve the product with use? (Investment)

79 percent of smartphone owners check their device within 15 minutes of waking up every morning.[1] Perhaps more startling, fully one-third of Americans say they would rather give up sex than lose their cell phones.[2]

Entertainment is a hits-driven business because the brain reacts to stimulus by wanting more and more of it, ever hungry for continuous novelty. Building an enterprise on ephemeral desires is akin to running on an incessantly rolling treadmill: You have to keep up with the constantly changing demands of your users.

Wherever new technologies suddenly make a behavior easier, new possibilities are born. The

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. For

Users who continuously find value in a product are more likely to tell their friends about it. Frequent usage creates more opportunities to encourage people to invite their friends, broadcast content, and share through word of mouth.

How do companies, producing little more than bits of code displayed on a screen, seemingly control users’ minds?” Nir Eyal, a prominent Valley product consultant, asked in his 2014 book, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. “Our actions have been engineered,” he explained. Services like Twitter and YouTube “habitually alter our everyday behavior, just as their designers intended.” One of Eyal’s favorite models is the slot machine. It is designed to answer your every action with visual, auditory, and tactile feedback. A ping when you insert a coin. A ka-chunk when you pull the lever. A flash of colored light when you release it. This is known as Pavlovian conditioning, named after the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov, who rang a bell each time he fed his dog, until, eventually, the bell alone sent his dog’s stomach churning and saliva glands pulsing, as if it could no longer differentiate the chiming of a bell from the physical sensation of eating. Slot machines work the same way, training your mind to conflate the thrill of winning with its mechanical clangs and buzzes. The act of pulling the lever, once meaningless, becomes pleasurable in itself. The reason is a neurological chemical called dopamine, the same one Parker had referenced at the media conference. Your brain releases small amounts of it when you fulfill some basic need, whether biological (hunger, sex) or social (affection, validation). Dopamine creates a positive association with whatever behaviors prompted its release, training you to repeat them. But when that dopamine reward system gets hijacked, it can compel you to repeat self-destructive behaviors. To place one more bet, binge on alcohol—or spend hours on apps even when they make you unhappy. Dopamine is social media’s accomplice inside your brain. It’s why your smartphone looks and feels like a slot machine, pulsing with colorful notification badges, whoosh sounds, and gentle vibrations. Those stimuli are neurologically meaningless on their own. But your phone pairs them with activities, like texting a friend or looking at photos, that are naturally rewarding. Social apps hijack a compulsion—a need to connect—that can be even more powerful than hunger or greed. Eyal describes a hypothetical woman, Barbra, who logs on to Facebook to see a photo uploaded by a family member. As she clicks through more photos or comments in response, her brain conflates feeling connected to people she loves with the bleeps and flashes of Facebook’s interface. “Over time,” Eyal writes, “Barbra begins to associate Facebook with her need for social connection.” She learns to serve that need with a behavior—using Facebook—that in fact will rarely fulfill it.

However, industry insiders believe that number is closer to an astounding 150 daily sessions.4 Face it: We’re hooked.

As Evan Williams, co-founder of Blogger and Twitter said, the Internet is, “a giant machine designed to give people what they want.”[48] Williams continued, “We often think the Internet enables you to do new things … But people just want to do the same things they’ve always done.

Unlike its competitors who sell preassembled merchandise, IKEA puts its customers to work. It turns out there’s a hidden benefit to making users invest physical effort in assembling the product—by asking customers to assemble their own furniture, Ariely believes they adopt an irrational love of the furniture they built, just like the test subjects did in the origami experiments.

Art is often fleeting; products that form habits around entertainment tend to fade quickly from users’ lives.

products that require a high degree of behavior change are doomed to fail even if the benefits of using the new product are clear and substantial. For

many innovations fail because consumers irrationally overvalue the old while companies irrationally overvalue the new.”10

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?

A company can begin to determine its product’s habit-forming potential by plotting two factors: frequency (how often the behavior occurs) and perceived utility (how useful and rewarding the behavior is in the user’s mind over alternative solutions).

one-third of Americans say they would rather give up sex than lose their cell phones.

HABIT AS STRATEGY Sometimes a behavior does not occur as frequently as flossing or Googling, but it still becomes a habit. For an infrequent action to become a habit, the user must perceive a high degree of utility, either from gaining pleasure or avoiding pain.

For one, new behaviors have a short half-life, as our minds tend to revert to our old ways of thinking and

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.

Habits are defined as “behaviors done with little or no conscious thought.

Another example of motivation in advertising relates to the old saying “Sex sells.” Long an advertising standard, images of buff, scantily clad (and usually female) bodies are used to hawk everything from the latest Victoria’s Secret lingerie to domain names through GoDaddy .com and fast food chains such as Carl’s Jr. and Burger King (figure 4). These and countless other ads use the voyeuristic promise of pleasure to capture attention and motivate action.

If you are building a habit-forming product, write down the answers to these questions: What habits does your business model require? What problem are users turning to your product to solve? How do users currently solve that problem and why does it need a solution? How frequently do you expect users to engage with your product? What user behavior do you want to make into a habit?

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.”10

Our brains have evolved over millennia to help us figure out how things work. Once we understand causal relationships, we retain that information in memory. Our habits are simply the brain's ability to quickly retrieve the appropriate behavioral response to a routine or process we have already learned. Habits help us conserve our attention for other things while we go about the tasks we can perform with little or no conscious thought. However, when something breaks the cause-and-effect pattern we've come to expect — when we encounter something outside the norm — we suddenly become aware of it again.[72] Novelty sparks our interest, makes us pay attention, and — like babies encountering friendly dogs for the first time — we seem to love it.

Seventy-nine percent of smartphone owners check their device within fifteen minutes of waking up every morning.1 Perhaps more startling, fully one-third of Americans say they would rather give up sex than lose their cell phones.2 A 2011 university study suggested people

mente toma atajos informado por nuestro medio ambiente para generar rápidos y a veces juicios errados.

When there is a mismatch between the customer’s problem and the company’s assumed solution, no amount of gamification will help spur engagement.

We often think the Internet enables you to do new things . . . But people just want to do the same things they’ve always done.” These

the salve for the itch they came to scratch.

theory, defines motivation as “the energy for action.”2 The nature of motivation is a widely contested topic in psychology, but Fogg argues that three Core Motivators drive our desire to act. 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.

The enemy of forming new habits is past behaviors, and research suggests that old habits die hard.

The nature of motivation is a widely contested topic in psychology, but Fogg argues that three Core Motivators drive our desire to act. 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.

The unsurprising response of your fridge light turning on when you open the door doesn’t drive you to keep opening it again and again.

As companies combine their increased connectivity to consumers, with the ability to collect, mine, and process customer data at faster speeds, we are faced with a future where everything becomes potentially more habit forming. As famed Silicon Valley investor Paul Graham writes, “Unless the forms of technological progress that produced these things are subject to different laws than technological progress in general, the world will get more addictive in the next 40 years than it did in the last 40.

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.

People must want to use the service, not feel they have to.

When we feel overly stressed, we seek serenity, perhaps finding relief in sites like Pinterest. When we feel lonely, destinations like Facebook and Twitter provide instant social connections.

When harnessed correctly, technology can enhance lives through healthful behaviors that improve our relationships, make us smarter, and increase productivity.

Though patented in 1932, the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard was written off. QWERTY survives due to the high costs of changing user behavior.

At the intersection of these two industries dependent on mind manipulation, I embarked upon a journey to learn how products change our actions and, at times, create compulsions. How did these companies engineer user behavior? What were the moral implications of building potentially addictive products?

Facebook’s success was, in part, a result of what I call the more is more principle—more frequent usage drives more viral growth.

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.10

WHY HABITS ARE GOOD FOR BUSINESS If our programmed behaviors are so influential in guiding our everyday actions, surely harnessing the same power of habits can be a boon for industry. Indeed, for those able to shape them in an effective way, habits can be very good for the bottom line. Habit-forming products change user behavior and create unprompted user engagement. The aim is to influence customers to use your product on their own, again and again, without relying on overt calls to action such as ads or promotions. Once a habit is formed, the user is automatically triggered to use the product during routine events such as wanting to kill time while waiting in line. 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. While the viability of some products depends on habit-formation to thrive, that is not always the case. For example, companies selling infrequently bought or used products or services do not require habitual users—at least, not in the sense of everyday engagement. Life insurance companies, for instance, leverage salespeople, advertising, and word-of-mouth referrals and recommendations to prompt consumers to buy policies. Once the policy is bought, there is nothing more the customer needs to do. In this book I refer to products in the context of businesses that require ongoing, unprompted user engagement and therefore need to build user habits. I exclude companies that compel customers to take action through

multi-screen world of ad-wary consumers has rendered Don Draper’s big budget brainwashing useless to all but the biggest brands.

With every post, tweet, or pin, users anticipate social validation. Rewards of the tribe keep users coming back, wanting more. Sites that leverage tribal rewards benefit from what psychologist Albert Bandura called “social learning theory.”[lxxvi] Bandura studied the power of modeling and ascribed special powers to our ability to learn from others. In particular, Bandura showed that people who observe someone being rewarded for a particular behavior are more likely to alter their own beliefs and subsequent actions. Notably, Bandura also showed that this technique works particularly well when people observe the behavior of people most like themselves, or those who are slightly more experienced (and, therefore, role models).[lxxvii] This is exactly the kind of targeted demographic and interest-level segmentation that social media companies such as Facebook and industry-specific sites such as Stack Overflow selectively apply.

on sites such as Pinterest, whenever the user nears the bottom of a page, more results automatically load. Users never have to pause as they continue scrolling through pins or posts without end

Simply put, Google reduced the amount of time and the cognitive effort required to find what the user was looking for.

Does your users’ internal trigger frequently prompt them to action? Is your external trigger cueing them when they are most likely to act? Is your design simple enough to make taking the action easy? Does the reward satisfy your users’ need while leaving them wanting more? Do your users invest a bit of work in the product, storing value to improve the experience with use and loading the next trigger? By identifying where your technology is lacking, you can focus on developing improvements to your product where it matters most.