Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products

What were the moral implications of building potentially addictive products?

The investment phase increases the odds that the user will make another pass through the cycle in the future. The investment occurs when the user puts something into the product of service such as time, data, effort, social capital, or money.

Notable companies were making hundreds of millions of dollars selling virtual cows on digital farms while advertisers were spending huge sums of money to influence people to buy whatever they were peddling. I admit I didn’t get it at first and found myself standing at the water’s edge wondering, “How do they do it?”

A trigger is the actuator of behavior—the spark plug in the engine. Triggers come in two types: external and internal.

Cognitive psychologists define habits as “automatic behaviors triggered by situational cues”: things we do with little or no conscious thought.

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What habits does your business model require? What problem are users turning to your product to solve? How do users currently solve that problem and why does it need a solution? How frequently do you expect users to engage with your product once they are habituated? What user behavior do you want to make into a habit?

However, products utilizing infinite variability stand a better chance of holding on to users’ attention, while those with finite variability must constantly reinvent themselves just to keep pace.

Following the trigger comes the action: the behavior done in anticipation of a reward.

Instead of relying on expensive marketing, habit-forming companies link their services to the users’ daily routines and emotions.