Book SummaryHooked, by Nir Eyal and Ryan Hoover

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of Hooked

Habits are a shortcut for your brain - you execute automatic behaviors without having to think hard about it. Habits develop when the behavior has solved the problem continuously in the past.

Habit-forming products use a 4-step loop to hook you:

• A trigger prompts the behavior.
  • Triggers can be external or internal. External triggers come from outside a person’s thinking (e.g. phone notifications or seeing an advertisement). Internal triggers are internal drives (e.g. relieving boredom or loneliness).
  • For products, behaviors often begin with external triggers. Then, as the habit forms, the behavior becomes associated with internal triggers.
• The trigger prompts an action, which is a behavior done in anticipation of a reward.
  • An action is more likely when there is motivation to do it, and when it is easier to do.
• The action delivers a variable reward.
  • Predictable rewards don’t cause cravings. You don’t crave turning on your faucet since you know what happens every time.
  • In contrast, variable rewards prompt more intense [restricted term] hits and push the user to desire the next hit.
• In completing the action, the user invests in the product, improving her future experience and increasing the likelihood of completing another loop in the future.
  • Investments include inviting friends, storing data, building a reputation, and learning to use features.

Each successive loop makes the next loop more likely to occur, causing a flywheel effect. To explain each in more detail:

Trigger

External triggers are delivered through the environment. They contain information on what the user should do next, like app notifications prompting users to return to see a photo.

Over time, as a product becomes associated with a thought, emotion, or preexisting routine, users return based on internal triggers. Emotions - especially negative ones like boredom, loneliness, confusion, lack of purpose, and indecisiveness - are powerful internal triggers. These triggers may be short and minor, possibly even subconscious.

To build a habit, you need to solve a user’s pain so that the user associates your product with relief.

**To...

Hooked Summary Introduction

Modern technology has us addicted to its use. Cognitive psychologists define habits as “automatic behaviors triggered by situational cues,” and app/tech product usage clearly qualifies in many cases.

Companies that are better at building usage habits are at a clear economic advantage. When hooked, users return to a product without expensive marketing - they return on their own volition, spurred by internal triggers rather than external prompting. People who feel lonely automatically open Facebook. Employees who want to procrastinate automatically open their email. Better access, data, and speed are making things more addictive.

The Hooked model of habit formation consists of 4 steps that form a sequence in a...

Hooked Summary Chapter 1: Why Habits are Powerful

Habits are a way for the brain to conserve resources by executing automatic behaviors without thinking hard about it. Habits are established when the action has continuously solved the problem in the past.

When you get ready for bed, you execute a specific sequence of actions that you don’t have to think very hard about. Likewise, when you feel bored, you may execute a habit of turning on your phone and swiping up to refresh your feed, since this was an effective way of combating boredom in the past.

Habits are valuable for companies because:

• Habits increase lifetime value (LTV).
  • The more they use a product, the more purchases they make and the more ads you can serve.
• Habits provide pricing flexibility, allowing companies to charge more as users deepen their habits.
  • A “smile graph”, with % of signups on y-axis and time on the x-axis, shows an initial plummet but an increase as time passes and habits deepen.
• Habits increase likelihood of word-of-mouth and decrease the viral cycle time.
  • More frequent users initiate more behavior loops in less time for more people (e.g. tagging friends in a Facebook photo).
  • A...

Shortform Exercise: Consider Your User’s Habits

Think about the habit that you want your users to build.

What problems do you solve for your user?

Hooked Summary Chapter 2: Trigger

The next 4 chapters cover each step of the Hooked model for habit-forming products.

The chain reaction that starts a habit always begins with a trigger. Habits form like pearls in oysters. It starts as a tiny irritant, like a piece of sand, triggering continuous layering of coats to produce a pearl (a fully formed habit).

External Triggers

External triggers are delivered through the environment. They contain information on what the user should do next, like app notifications prompting users to return to see a photo.

Types of external triggers include:

• Paid triggers like advertising and marketing
  • Habit-forming companies tend not to rely on paid triggers since paying for reengagement is often financially unsustainable.
• Earned triggers like PR, app store placements
• Relationship triggers like word-of-mouth and social signals
  • Paypal’s message about “money waiting for you” was irresistible
• Owned triggers - the user consents for the product to occupy her attention space
  • App notifications on the phone, email newsletters

Internal Triggers

Over time, as a product becomes associated with a thought, emotion, or...

Shortform Exercise: Create Your Triggers

Think about your user’s pain points to create the best product.

Write 3 internal triggers that could remind your user to take action with your product. Write them this way: “every time the user [internal trigger], she [first action].”

Hooked Summary Chapter 3: Action

After the trigger, the user needs to perform the desired action.

To initiate action in a habit, doing must be easier than thinking. An action has three requirements:

• Sufficient motivation
• Sufficient ability
• A trigger to activate the behavior

Consider how you behave when you hear your phone vibrate. The trigger is there, but you might not have the motivation (it’s the end of the day and you want to shut the world out). Or if the phone is buried at the bottom of your bag, you have insufficient ability to get the phone. And if the phone is muted, you have no trigger to activate the behavior.

Motivation to Take Action

Motivation is the “energy for action.” All humans are motivated to:

• Seek pleasure and avoid pain
• Seek hope and avoid fear
• Seek social acceptance and avoid rejection

Advertising commonly employs these desires.

• Obama’s 2008 campaign posters inspired hope, and publicly belonging to the movement incurred a feeling of social acceptance.
• Sexual imagery is used often, from Victoria’s Secret to Carl’s Jr. (though the target market needs to associate sex as a motivator, like teenage boys).
• Budweiser rarely...

Shortform Exercise: Reduce Your Barriers to Action

Reduce the frictions for your user to take action.

Walk through how your user goes from trigger to action to reward. How many steps does the user need to take? How could you get rid of any steps?

Hooked Summary Chapter 4: Variable Reward

To build a habit, your product must actually solve the user’s problem so that the user depends on your product as a reliable solution. The benefit the user receives is the reward.

When a habit is established, the user comes to crave the solution before actually receiving the reward. In the brain, the nucleus accumbens is responsible for [restricted term] signaling to reward behavior and set habits. Brain imaging studies have found that signaling was activating not when actually receiving the reward, but rather in anticipation of it.

Importantly, variable rewards are more effective than fixed rewards. Fixed rewards don’t change at all, delivering the same reward at unchanging intervals. Variable rewards are more like slot machines, delivering unknown amounts at an unknown frequency. Unpredictable reward sizes and novelty spike [restricted term] levels, which in turn strengthen the development of the habit. Imagine a slot machine that merely paid you $0.99 every time you wagered $1.00 - how fun would that be?

The idea of variable rewards was famously studied by Skinner, who experimented with animals pressing a lever to receive food. In the variable...

Shortform Exercise: Design Your Rewards

Consider how to deepen the rewards that your users get.

What reward does your product give that alleviates the user’s pain?

Hooked Summary Chapter 5: Investment

Investment is the last step of the 4-step model: allowing the user to invest in the product to improve future experiences.

The more effort we put into something, the more we value it, and the more likely we are to return.

Three psychological tendencies cause the investment effect:

• The IKEA effect
  • Investing labor in something causes you to value it more
  • Experiment: People who made origami themselves valued it 5x higher than third party bids.
• Consistency bias
  • We want current behavior to be consistent with past behavior
  • Experiment: People who were asked to place a window sticker for a political cause were then 4x more likely to place a large yard sign, compared to people who were asked to place a large yard sign upfront.
• Cognitive dissonance
  • If you dislike an action you’re doing, you have dissonance in your mind - “why am I doing this if I hate it?” To resolve the dissonance, you tend to value the action: “I must actually like doing this for me to continue doing it.”
  • Acquired tastes like spicy food and bitter beer may stem from this. “This tastes bad, so why am I eating it? Well I must actually enjoy it.”
  • ...

Shortform Exercise: Build User Investments

Get your users to invest in your product by taking action.

What investment does the user do to add value to a future experience?

Hooked Summary Chapter 6: Building Habits Responsibly

With great power comes great responsibility. You’ve now learned how to build products that change people’s behaviors, be persuasive, and manipulate people into doing things they might not naturally do.

This can sound evil. Yet many successful products ranging in morality manipulate people’s behavior. Why is Weight Watchers any better than slot machines? How do we distinguish good habit forming from bad?

Hooked provides the useful Manipulation Matrix, which can help you examine whether you should be attempting to hook your users. Depending on whether you believe your product improves the user’s life and whether you use the product yourself , you fit into these profiles:

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Someone who makes something that improves a user's life, and does...

Hooked Summary Chapter 7: Bible App Example

Having understood the model of building habits, we can now dive into a single business.

The Bible App is the leading Bible app that allows users to study the Bible, providing daily snippets and reading plans as well as the full Bible text. Founded by a pastor and owned by a church group, the Bible App is squarely in the Facilitator category.

With over 200 million downloads, it received a natural advantage by being early to the new App store in 2008, but it also methodically uses Hooked principles to become a habit-forming product.

Triggers

• As a mobile app, Bible App can send notifications where desktop and static videos cannot.
• Users get regular reminders to read their daily verse and the next piece of their study plan. *...

Hooked Summary Chapter 8: Testing Habits with Users

Now that you have ideas, you need to test them with real users. The author proposes the Habit Testing process, similar to “build, measure, learn” from Lean Startup.

1. 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.
2. 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
3. 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...