May 7, 2019

📚 Book Notes: Hooked - How to Build Habit-Forming Products

Here are my notes from Hooked - How to Build Habit-Forming Products:

1. 79 percent of smartphone owners check their device within 15 minutes of waking up every morning.
2. Amassing millions of users is no longer good enough. Companies increasingly find that their economic value is a function of the strength of the habits they create.
3. What distinguishes the Hook 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. 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. However, add some variability to the mix—suppose a different treat magically appears in your fridge every time you open it—and voilà, intrigue is created.
4. Although the fear is palpable, we are like the heroes in every zombie film—threatened but ultimately more powerful.
5. As customers form routines around a product, they come to depend upon it and become less sensitive to price.
6. Are you building a vitamin or painkiller?
   Painkillers solve an obvious need, relieving a specific pain, and often have quantifiable markets.
   Vitamins, by contrast, do not necessarily solve an obvious pain point. Instead they appeal to users’ emotional rather than functional needs.
   Investors and managers want to invest in solving real problems or meeting immediate needs by backing painkillers.
   Habit-forming technologies are both. These services seem at first to be offering nice-to-have vitamins, but once the habit is established, they provide an ongoing pain remedy.
7. We often think the Internet enables you to do new things . . . But people just want to do the same things they’ve always done.
8. You’ll often find that people’s declared preferences—what they say they want—are far different from their revealed preferences—what they actually do.
   When the research focuses on what people actually do (watch cat videos) rather than what they wish they did (produce cinema-quality home movies) it actually expands possibilities.
9. It is the fear of losing a special moment that instigates a pang of stress. This negative emotion is the internal trigger that brings Instagram users back to the app to alleviate this pain by capturing a photo. As users continue to use the service, new internal triggers form.
   Yet Instagram is more than a camera replacement; it is a social network. The app helps users dispel boredom by connecting them with others, sharing photos, and swapping lighthearted banter.
   Like many social networking sites, Instagram also alleviates the increasingly recognizable pain point known as fear of missing out, or FOMO. For Instagram, associations with internal triggers provide a foundation to form new habits.
10. To initiate action, doing must be easier than thinking.
11. 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.
12. Influencing behavior by reducing the effort required to perform an action is more effective than increasing someone’s desire to do it. Make your product so simple that users already know how to use it, and you’ve got a winner.
13. 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.
14. Without variability we are like children in that once we figure out what will happen next, we become less excited by the experience.
    To hold our attention, products must have an ongoing degree of novelty.
    Novelty sparks our interest, makes us pay attention, and—like a baby encountering a friendly dog for the first time—we seem to love it.
15. We haven’t had time to develop societal “antibodies to addictive new things.
16. 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?
17. Look for a Habit Path—a series of similar actions shared by your most loyal users.
    For example, in its early days, Twitter discovered that once new users followed thirty other members, they hit a tipping point that dramatically increased the odds they would keep using the site.
18. Instead of asking ‘what problem should I solve?’ ask ‘what problem do I wish someone else would solve for me?

If you liked the above content, I’d definitely recommend reading the whole book. 💯

Until We Meet Again…
🖖 swap