Jul 5, 2021 5 min read Book Summaries

Hooked - Review

“79 percent of smartphone owners check their device within 15 minutes of waking up every morning.”

Hooked gave a very interesting insight into what makes the products we use every day so successful and also taught me about the psychology behind consumer behaviour.

It is a fantastic framework of how to design your products so that the user forms habits around them.

Key Takeaways

The “Habit Zone”: What is a habit and what enables a product to become habitual
The “Hook Model”: The process of how to create products that become an ingrained habit of the user.
The “Manipulation Matrix”: The morality of habit forming products and a framework to assess your involvement.

The Habit Zone

The Hook Model

The hooked model has four stages:

Trigger -> Action -> Reward -> Investment

Trigger: What prompts user to take an action

External Triggers

Paid: These are usually only to acquire users, but not so much to retain users as this would be too expensive. You can pay more to acquire customers based on the lifetime value of a customer, this is why you see such big rewards on credit cards for example.
Earned: These are triggers that you can’t buy directly, for example, a featured app store listing or a viral video. These triggers tend to see a temporary surge in users but can not be relied on for sustainable growth.
Owned: These are triggers that are agreed to or chosen by the user. It may be through a newsletter subscription, or a push notification after the user has downloaded your app.
Relationship: Examples of relationship triggers are word of mouth or social media sharing. Hooked users will become your greatest ambassadors, sharing the product they love with friends and family.

Internal Triggers

Internal Triggers appear automatically in the mind of the user. Connecting your product with the user’s internal triggers are the “brass ring” of habit forming technology
For example, Instagram was able to manufacture a predictable response due to an internal trigger. Through repeated conditioning, the need to take a picture cued the urge to use the app on the ever present mobile device.
Negative emotions are very compelling internal triggers. Feelings of boredom, loneliness, frustration, confusion and indecisiveness instigate a slight pain or irritation and prompt an instantaneous, often mindless action, to quell the discomfort.
Depressive symptoms correlated with high email usage, video watching, gaming and chatting. People suffering from symptoms of depression seek the internet for relief

Action: The intended behaviour you want the user to make

Behaviour can be predicted using the following factors. This originates from the Fogg behaviour model. The formula is B=MAT

Motivation: Is there sufficient motivation to do something?
Ability: Can the user perform an action?
Trigger: What prompts the user to take an action.

For a trigger to be effective, which means it results in an action from the user, there needs to be sufficient motivation paired with the ability to take an action.

What motivates people?

The book outlines three core motivators that drive behaviour in most people. We can observe these in advertising, as outlined in the below examples.

Desire for pleasure vs Avoidance of pain

Example: Scantily clad women in tv advertisements or magazines.

Desire for hope vs avoidance of fear

Example: Successful US presidential campaigns such as Obama in 2008 and Trump’s 2016 “Make America Great Again”.

Desire for social acceptance vs avoidance of rejection

Example: Budweiser advertisements showing three guys together enjoying themselves, proclaiming good times, social inclusion and fun with the boys.

It is important to note that you need to consider this in the context of what demographic your user(s) belong to. Scantily clad women will instil motivation in teenage boys, but will likely be seen as distasteful or inappropriate to a middle aged soccer mum.

Even when there is a compelling motivation to take an action, the user needs to be able to take the action.

How do we measure the user’s ability to take an action?

The book outlines six components of the user’s ability to take an action

The time it takes
The money it costs
The degree of perceived effort involved
The level of mental labour needed
The product’s social acceptability
The degree to which it matches or disrupts current routines

Popular apps endeavour to make action as easy as possible for the user, even actions that may be trivial, like the autofill feature on Google search. It is interesting to consider how perceived effort can vary, for example, signing in to a website with your Google/Facebook account enables the user to skip the pesky sign up stage, but it could also be perceived as more effort as the user may be wary of the data sharing / privacy issues on these platforms, leading to friction in the sign up process.

It is a lot harder for a user to switch products despite it potentially being better for the user. The perceived benefit would need to be ~9 times better to compel change, due to the old adage that old habits die hard. For example, let’s say a google chrome user is worried about how their internet usage is being tracked, so they want to switch to a more privacy focused browser, but they have already saved all their bookmarks and saved accounts into Chrome. There is a trade off here with perceived benefit vs perceived effort.

Increasing motivation and ability - cognitive bias

The scarcity effect: People's motivation to purchase a product increases if it is scarce.

Amazon telling you there is limited stock of the item you are browsing

The Framing effect: Context literally increases people's pleasure about a product

There was a study where subjects blind tasted the same wine while hooked up to an FMRI. They were told one was more expensive than the others and as a result, it was observed that the areas in the brain relating to pleasure increased, meaning that the subjects literally enjoyed it more because they thought it was more expensive.

The anchoring effect: undue importance

People tend to buy products of a brand that is discounted, even if it is a similar price to similar competing products

The endowed progress effect: Rewarding user progress towards a goal

LinkedIn's your profile strength
Google Maps level up for reviewing

Reward: Manufacturing desire

What makes hooks so compelling is the variable nature of the reward. Predictable feedback loops are not so compelling. The predictable response of opening your fridge is not so interesting, but if a mystery treat appeared each time you open it, there is intrigue.

Dopamine surges when the brain is expecting a reward and variability multiplies this effect.

Investment

This is where the user is asked to do a bit of work. The investment is in some combination of time, data, effort, social capital or money.

These investments will help make the service better. Every time you watch a Youtube video, it gives you more personalised content. Someone who has used Spotify and receives interesting new song recommendations is much less likely to switch to a competing service.

People typically value something they worked on more, at times to an irrationally high extent. This is known as the 'IKEA effect'.

These investments can be leveraged to make the trigger more engaging, the action easier, and the reward more exciting with every pass through the Hook.