This article is an excerpt from the Shortform summary of "Hooked" by Nir Eyal and Ryan Hoover. Shortform has the world's best summaries of books you should be reading.
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What are habit-forming products? How does building habit-forming products help your business?
Building habit-forming products is a strategy to help enhance customer loyalty and longevity. If your products are part of the consumer’s habits, they’re less likely to leave.
Read more about building habit-forming products.
Testing Habit-Forming Products
Now that you have ideas for habit-forming products, you need to test them with real users. The author proposes the Habit Testing process for building habit-forming products, similar to “build, measure, learn” from Lean Startup.
- Identify
- Define what it means to be a devoted user. How often should she use your product? What does this person do?
- Use cohort analysis to figure out how your users are meeting this benchmark.
- Nir Eyal argues 5% of habitual users is a good benchmark to exceed – fewer and you may have a problem.
- Codify
- Identify the steps your habitual users took to find patterns to what hooked them.
- Twitter found that following 30 people reached a tipping point
- Modify
- Modify the same Habit Path identified above – update the conversion funnel, remove features that block action, strengthen features that increase investment.
Discovering Habit-Forming Opportunities
You might be wondering what kind of product to build and how to get your users to build habits. How can you find ideas for habit-forming experiences?
- Start with your own problems
- Ask why you do or don’t do certain things, and how you can make those tasks easier or more rewarding.
- Be aware of your behaviors and emotions as you use products.
- What triggered you to use these products? Were they external or internal triggers?
- Am I using these products as intended?
- How can these products improve their onboarding funnels, increase motivation or ability, provide better variable rewards, reengage through external triggers, or encourage users to invest in the product?
- Find what early adopters are doing
- Many inventions like airplanes, the telephone, and the Internet were mocked as unnecessary. Often it was a lack of imagination for the new possibilities.
- Early adopters show you niche use cases that can eventually be taken mainstream.
- Facebook started with just Harvard students.
- Consider what new technologies enable
- New technology waves establish an infrastructure first, enabling new applications to reach massive penetration.
- Figure out what behaviors new technologies make easier.
- The camera integrated into the smartphone made photo-taking far easier, giving rise to Instagram.
- Find how user interfaces can drive new habit formation
- Apple and Microsoft turned text-based terminals into GUIs modifiable with a mouse.
- Google simplified the search interface of Yahoo.
- Pinterest created an infinite-scrolling canvas of images that was more addictive than smaller fixed galleries..
- Consider “living in the future.”
- Ask three people outside your social circle what apps occupy their phone’s home screen. Ask them to use their favorite app and observe any nascent behaviors.
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Like what you just read? Read the rest of the world's best summary of Nir Eyal and Ryan Hoover's "Hooked" at Shortform .
Here's what you'll find in our full Hooked summary :
- The 4 key steps that addictive tech products use to ensnare you
- Why user rewards need to be random and variable to have the strongest effect
- How to build irresistible apps yoruself
