books--hooked-nir-eyal

What is a habit?
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Cognitive psychologists define habits as “automatic behaviors triggered by situational cues”: things we do with little or no 
conscious thought. You can also say, A habit is when not doing an action causes a bit of pain.

Why it is important to create habits?
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- Lower customer retention cost( Because habits mean returning users without external triggers. Essentially users come back without spending further money) 
- Higher CLTV (Because customers stay with your product longer)
- Greater Pricing Flexibility (Because people would not like to leave the product because of price)
- Supercharged growth (Because of virality)
- Better competitive Edge with higher entry barrier for competitors (Because of network effect)

Hook Model consists of the following steps: 
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- Triggers
- Action
- Variable Rewards
- Investment 

Objective of a company should be to have many frequent cycles of these steps. The more they are and more frequent they are, 
more likely it is that the product turns out to be habit forming.

Triggers
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- External (External triggers tell the user what to do next by placing information within the user’s environment)
  - Relationship (A recommendation from friend, A photo shared by a friend)
  - Earned (An entry in news, blog site)
  - Owned (App icon on the mobile phone, Push notification)
- Internal (Internal triggers tell the user what to do next through associations stored in the user’s memory)
  - Emotions, particularly negative ones, are powerful internal triggers and greatly influence our daily routines. 
  - Feelings of boredom, loneliness, frustration, confusion, and indecisiveness often instigate a slight pain or irritation 
    and prompt an almost instantaneous and often mindless action to quell the negative sensation.
    
New habits are sparked by external triggers, but associations with internal triggers are what keeps users hooked. 
To build a habit-forming product, makers need to understand which user emotions may be tied to internal triggers and know how to leverage 
external triggers to drive the user to action.

Actions
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What determines the likelihood of an action: (B=MAT)
- The motivation to do it
  - Seek pleasure and Avoid pain 
  - Seek hope and Avoid fear
  - Seek social acceptance and Avoid rejection 
- The ease of performing the action 
  - Time— how long it takes to complete an action. 
  - Money— the fiscal cost of taking an action. 
  - Physical effort— the amount of labor involved in taking the action. 
  - Brain cycles— the level of mental effort and focus required to take an action. 
  - Social deviance— how accepted the behavior is by others. 
  - Non-routine— according to Fogg, “How much the action matches or disrupts existing routines.”
- The presence of a trigger to activate the behavior

As a product designers we should 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. 

Other than the above there are certain biases as well which determine user actions
- The scarcity effect (If something is scarce, we percieve that as more valuable)
- The framing effect (Context shapes perception. Eg. Higher price makes us value things more)
- The anchoring effect (People anchor to one piece of information to make decision. Eg. In a sale, we just consider the products with sale 
  and ignore other products which could be without sale but cheaper)
- The endowed progress effect (A phenomenon that increases motivation as people believe they are nearing a goal)
Stephen Anderson, author of Seductive Interaction Design, created a tool called Mental Notes to help designers build better products 
through heuristics(cognitive shortcuts we take to make quick decisions). This contains flash cards for human biases.

Variable Rewards
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Variable rewards come in three types: 
- the Tribe (We seek rewards that make us feel accepted, attractive, important, and included)
- the Hunt (There is always a need to acquire physical objects, such as food and other supplies that aid our survival)
- the Self (The rewards of the self are fueled by “intrinsic motivation”. In general, people desire, among other things, 
to gain a sense of competency. Adding an element of mystery to this goal makes the pursuit all the more enticing)

Variablity in terms of duration can be:
- Finite (Eg. the games which are played with machines) - Experiences with finite variability become less engaging because they eventually become predictable.
- Infinite (Eg. the games which are played with other people, FB because the content is always variable)

Only by understanding what truly matters to users can a company correctly match the right variable reward to their intended behavior.
Rewards must fit into the narrative of why the product is used and align with the user’s internal triggers and motivations. 
Variable rewards must satisfy users’ needs while leaving them wanting to reengage with the product.

Investment
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Investment means making users to put some effort/time in the product or store some value in the product for long term reward.
(Eg. following a user or reassembling the IKEA furniture ). 

By making them invest some time/effort in the product we are leveraging the following humar tendencies:
- The more effort we put into something, the more likely we are to value it
- We are more likely to be consistent with our past behaviors
- We change our preferences to avoid cognitive dissonance (The state of having inconsistent thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes, 
especially as relating to behavioural decisions and attitude change. Eg, fox thinks that grapes are sour to make itslef reconcile with the
fact that it cannot reach it) 

These tendencies of ours lead to a mental process known as rationalization, in which we change our attitudes and beliefs to adapt 
psychologically. Rationalization helps us give reasons for our behaviors, even when those reasons might have been designed by others.

The big idea behind storing value is to leverage the user’s understanding that the service will get better with use (and 
personal investment). Like a good friendship, the more effort people put in, the more both parties benefit. The forms of values people 
store in products are:
- Content (Eg. Photo, video in FB)
- Data (Eg. Online resume in Linkedin, Personal finance data in mint.com)
- Followers (Eg. twitter followers)
- Reputation (Eg. Reputation of a BnB in AirBnB, or a supplier in eBay or a driver in Uber)
- Skill (Eg. Learning photoshop)

The timing of asking for user investment is critically important. By asking for the investment after the reward, the company has an 
opportunity to leverage a central trait of human behavior. Also, please note that habit-forming technologies leverage the user’s past 
behavior to initiate an external trigger in the future. This essentially completes the Habit forming loop. 

Action vs Investment
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- Investments are about the anticipation of longer-term rewards, not immediate gratification.
- Also in contrast to the action phase, the investment phase increases friction.

The fundamental questions every product designer/creator should ask are:
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- What do users really want? What pain is your product relieving? (Internal trigger)
- What brings users to your service? (External trigger)
- What is the simplest action users take in anticipation of reward, and how can you simplify your product to make this action easier? (Action)
- Are users fulfilled by the reward yet left wanting more? (Variable reward)
- 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)

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

Process for product designers
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The Hook Model helps the product designer generate an initial prototype for a habit-forming technology. It also helps uncover potential 
weaknesses in an existing product’s habit-forming potential. Once a product is built, Habit Testing helps uncover product devotees, 
discover which product elements (if any) are habit forming, and why those aspects of your product change user behavior. Habit Testing 
includes three steps: identify, codify, and modify. First, dig into the data to identify how people are using the product. 
Next, codify these findings in search of habitual users. To generate new hypotheses, study the actions and paths taken by devoted users. 
Finally, modify the product to influence more users to follow the same path as your habitual users, and then evaluate results and 
continue to modify as needed.


Misc Thoughts
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- You can determine the strength of a business over time by the amount of agony they go through in raising prices.
- Many innovations fail because consumers irrationally overvalue the old while companies irrationally overvalue the new
- New behaviors have a short half-life, as our minds tend to revert to our old ways of thinking and doing.
- 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.
- When our autonomy is threatened, we feel constrained by our lack of choices and often rebel against doing a new behavior. 
  Psychologists refer to this as reactance. Maintaining a sense of user autonomy is a requirement for repeat engagement.