Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products

Seeking pleasure and avoiding pain are two key motivators in all species.

By cycling through successive hooks, users begin to form associations with internal triggers, which attach to existing behaviors and emotions. When users start to automatically cue their next behavior, the new habit becomes part of their everyday

Rather, the investment implies an action that improves the service for the next go-around. Inviting friends, stating preferences, building virtual assets, and learning to use new features are all investments users make to improve their experience. These commitments can be leveraged to make the trigger more engaging, the action easier, and the rewar

As we will learn in chapter five, users also increase their dependency on habit-forming products by storing value in them

The Hook Model describes an experience designed to connect the user's problem to a solution frequently enough to form a habit. - The Hook Model has four phases: trigger, action, variable reward, and investment.

useful and rewarding the behavior is in the user’s mind over alternative solutions).

Habit-forming products often start as nice-to-haves (vitamins) but once the habit is formed, they become must-haves (painkillers).

Gourville writes that products that require a high degree of behavior change are doomed to fail even if the benefits of using the new product are clear and substantial.

longer good enough. Companies increasingly find that their economic value is a function of the strength of the habits they create. In order to win the