Creating habit forming products

We all (ok, most of us) are hooked to Facebook, Google, WhatsApp and other similar apps. Such is our hook that some of us are actually addicted to these apps. What is the secret of these habit forming apps? Nir Eyal in his book Hooked tries to provide an answer.

He explains that any habit forming app has 4 parts as depicted in following image-

Lets see this with an example of Facebook –

1. Trigger

• First time trigger for downloading FB app could be –
• You heard it from one of your friends via word of mouth
• Saw some online ad for FB
• An automated email from one of your friends who has been using FB for some time. 
• Some product ad that has a FB page and has a campaign etc running that you would like to be part of 
• Once you have downloaded FB and have started using it, the external trigger would be the app notifications for one among many of the following
• Friend requests, 
• Video recommendations, 
• Friend suggestions, 
• Likes on your picture, posts etc. 
• The internal trigger could be that you are feeling bore and therefore would like to see Facebook. Notice that in this case Facebook has successfully mapped an emotion in your mind with their app. 

2. Action

• Comes in form of user opening the app and viewing updates from others, sharing his own. 
• Nir talks about making action task as frictionless as possible and that’s what Facebook has been good at - App is available on mobile and desktop, provides infinite scroll and for people in countries with limited data speed, it even provides for a Facebook Lite app. 

3. Variable reward

• Reward in Facebook comes in form of 
• “Reward of Tribe” which is a rewards that make us feel accepted, attractive, important, and included in our community.
• “Reward of Hunt” which is to do with reward that makes us feel that we have acquired new knowledge, maybe about our friends, new skills (through some video, group pages etc. )

4. Investment

• Comes in form of user storing his personal photos, his check-in details, his posts with Facebook. 
• Also comes in form of user inviting more of his friends
• Eventually, user forms a network of friends who like or provide comments to his stuff and thus giving him a trigger to come back later to check what his friends have written and who all of them liked his stuff. 

Similar to Facebook, Hook model can be applied to other products too.


However, there are few cases where Hook Model doesn’t seem to have an answer. In my opinion, these are products which are not "social" in nature. As an example, if we were to apply Hook model to a successful product of last decade, say Acrobat Reader, this is what I get -

• External trigger- I receive a PDF from a friend/office etc. or I download a pdf from some site
• Internal trigger- The pain is related to ability to read content of pdf document.
• Action- Motivation is to read the doc and ability is ease of opening at no cost to buy a software (via free Acrobat Reader) to open pdf
• Reward- I can read content and that's possibly a reward but it doesn't fit into tribe, Hunt or Self category and there doesn't seem to be variability.
• Investment- I don't seem to store anything with Acrobat. I am probably inclined to use any other software which can let me open pdf. For that matter, I am ok to use any product A which lets me open a document of type B. 

As can be seen, reward and investment is not very obvious but still Acrobat has been a very successful product.