Design + Tech

Question 1

The importance of habits in business

Answer 1

For many companies, turning their products into habits – behaviors requiring no conscious thought – drives a lot of value. This makes loyalty as important as gaining millions of customers.

Once a product has become a habit, it does not require extensive advertising to ensure usage; it is linked to users’ emotions and routines.

The result is that users begin considering these products indispensable, which ensures repeated use and, in turn, continued success for the companies that manage to create such products.

But how do successful companies actually go about creating habit-forming products? Is this all chance, or is there a technique to it? This book covers some of the key aspects that any designer or seller of a habit-forming product would do well to keep in mind.

Question 2

What are hooks?

Answer 2

Hooks are a series of experiences that can together modify user behavior and encourage formation of new habits.

As we will see, greater accessibility, more data and improved speed of delivery have increased the likelihood of hooks being employed to drive habit formation in our times.

The hooks employed by companies essentially follow a four-phase process called the Hook Model.

Successful products go through multiple cycles of these four phases to reach a refined stage where users keep coming back for more on their own, without any need for aggressive marketing by the company.

Question 3

The four phases of the Hook Model are:

Answer 3

Question 4

The four phases of the Hook Model are:

Answer 4

Trigger – External or internal cues that prompt certain behavior

Action – Use of the product, based on ease of use and motivation

Variable Reward – The reason for product use, which keeps the user engaged

Investment – A useful input from the user that commits him to go through the cycle again

We will look at these four phases in greater detail in chapters after the next one, and also explore some ideas related to this whole field of user manipulation.

Question 5

Benefits of habit-forming

Answer 5

Getting consumers to form habits related to their products can be critical for many companies to succeed, but it is not necessary for every single company.

For cases where it is needed, and where a company successfully manages to achieve it, habit forming can have a number of benefits. These include:

Increased customer lifetime value (CLTV) – the amount of money that the company can make from customers before they move to competing offerings

More flexibility in raising prices or charging for premium services

Supercharged growth by word-of-mouth publicity (characterized by

Viral Cycle Time – the amount of time taken by a user to invite another user)

Greater competitive edge, because the competition finds it difficult to make inroads, e.g. people continue to use the QWERTY keyboard despite better keyboards available

But people are creatures of habits, and creating new ones requires them to forget certain old ones.

This means that for new types of behavior to really become ingrained into our decision-making systems, they need to be reinforced again and again.

The benefit is that once you have succeeded in turning your product into a habit, another competing product will find it tougher to displace your product, e.g. Google’s ubiquity and synonymity with Internet search has meant that products that are not particularly bad, like Bing, have failed to become as popular.

Question 6

How to test the habit-forming potential of your product?

II

Answer 6

Use the frequency-vs.-perceived utility plot. If the product falls in the Habit Zone, i.e. is used often and has a high enough utility compared to competing solutions, then using it can become default behavior for a consumer.

In one of the two examples marked in the figure, a single search result on any engine other than Google is not noticeably poorer than what you would get on Google, but Google is used so frequently that it is the option most of us turn to.

On the other hand, purchasing on Amazon is nowhere as frequent as much of our other online activity, but its perceived utility is higher because we know that every time we log on to Amazon, the likelihood of finding the product we are looking for is high and it is also going to be available at a competitive price.

Question 7

How to test the habit-forming potential of your product?

Answer 7

The position of a product on this chart is not static - many habit-forming products start off as vitamins, but with repeated use, turn into painkillers that satisfy the itch to use them.

Vitamins are products that do not solve an obvious problem, but feel nice to have, while painkillers are products that cater to a very obvious need.

Many products that are habits for us now because of their perceived utility to us might have been less important to begin with.

Before we delve further into the Hook Model, an important caveat: In the quest to encourage consumers to form habits, product designers and sellers should not forget that this is a type of manipulation. Conscientious sellers always need to ensure that the habits, or addictions, they encourage are healthy. We will consider this very important aspect a few chapters later.

Question 8

Trigger (Phase 1)

Answer 8

Habits, much like pearls, need a foundation and layer upon layer (of continued behavior change) to be completely formed. Triggers are the cue or the foundation for this behavior change.

Triggers can be of two types: external and internal.

Question 9

External triggers

Answer 9

These are bits of information from users’ surroundings that prompt them to perform an action. Types include:

Paid triggers – channels like advertising that capture attention, but are too expensive for the long run

Earned triggers – continued media presence, like viral video and press mentions, which can be difficult to sustain for any product

Relationship triggers – come from engaged users who enthusiastically share information with other potential users

Owned triggers – most useful, as these employ tacit permission from users to send triggers like app updates and periodic notifications into their personal space

Question 10

Internal triggers

Answer 10

For a product to truly become a habit, its triggers need to move from the external forms to the internal.

Internal triggers are driven by users’ emotions and associations stored in their memory.

Trying to rid oneself of negative emotions like boredom and loneliness are powerful triggers for using a particular product.
As a product relieves these negative emotions repeatedly, our mind subconsciously begins to associate it with this relief.
This gradually strengthens the bond with a product, resulting in the formation of a habit, e.g. our reliance on Facebook or Twitter for instant social connection.

Designing a habit-forming product requires an understanding of the emotions that are tied to these internal triggers, as well as knowledge of how external triggers can be used effectively to urge a user to perform a certain action.

Question 11

Internal triggers

Answer 11

The Behavior Model developed by Dr. B.J. Fogg of Stanford University says that the user’s behavior (or action) depends on three prerequisites (B = MAT):

M – sufficient motivation

A – ability to perform a certain action

T – a trigger to prompt the action
Therefore, for a clear trigger to be effective, the user should be motivated enough and should be able to perform the action with minimal effect.

Question 12

What motivates people?

Answer 12

There are three Core Motivators that drive behavior in most humans:

Desire for pleasure and/or avoidance of pain, e.g. use of scantily clad models in print and TV ads acts as a motivator based on pleasure for certain demographics like teenage boys

Desire for hope and/or avoidance of fear, e.g. Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign used the plank of hope to great success

Desire for social acceptance and/or avoidance of rejection, e.g. showing friends shown cheering for a sports team in a Budweiser ad makes people identify the product with getting together with friends to watch a game

One or more of these core motivators provide the motivation to a user to perform an action.

Question 13

What factors moderate the ability of people?

Answer 13

Even when there is a successful trigger and a compelling enough motivation, a person needs to be able to perform an action. The easier it is to perform it, the greater is the likelihood of it becoming a habit, e.g. the boom in blogging in the 2000s after Blogger made it possible to open a blogging account within minutes or the ease of taking photos with an iPhone.

There are six elements of simplicity that have an effect on the ease-of-use of a product:

The time it takes to use it
The money it costs

The degree of physical effort involved

The level of mental labor needed

The product’s social acceptability

The degree to which it matches or disrupts current routines

The lower the time, money, physical effort or mental labor involved, or the more socially acceptable it is, or the least deviation it requires from a user’s existing routine, the easier it is for him to perform an action.

Consequently, the greater is the likelihood of the product becoming a habit.

Question 14

Increasing motivation

Answer 14

How to increase motivation and ability?

Between motivation and ability, it is easier to target the latter. Design your products such that it reduces the effort involved for the user, instead of trying to build motivation levels.

Both motivation and ability can also be increased using counter-intuitive methods called heuristics.

These are mental shortcuts that all of us employ to make quick decisions. Examples include:

The scarcity effect – the scarcer a product is, the higher is its perceived value, e.g. the ‘limited stock’ tag on Amazon products ends up increasing sales for those products.

The framing effect – context can alter the desirability of a product, e.g. the same wine is reported to be tastier if the price is increased

The anchoring effect – one aspect of a product is given undue importance over other features, e.g. people end up buying more products of a brand that has a discount sticker on it, even if its quality and the effective cost might be no different than other competing products in the vicinity

The endowed progress effect – in case of reward programs, the closer users feel they are to the goal the more motivated they become, e.g. the ‘Improve Your Profile Strength’ step in LinkedIn has a completion bar that starts off all users with part of the bar already filled, strengthening their belief that a full profile is not far away.

Question 15

Reward (Phase 3)

Answer 15

Variable rewards, and not just any rewards, make users come back to a product again and again by reinforcing the motivation.

Finite variability can become boring after a while, while infinite variability sustains user interest.

Thus, variable rewards should not only satisfy one or more user needs, but also keep them interested in engaging again (and again) with the product.
There are three types of variable rewards:

Rewards of the tribe – those that satisfy our social needs by making us feel more important and accepted, e.g. Likes, shares and comments on Facebook

Rewards of the hunt – those that satisfy our basic survival instincts by helping us acquire things we consider important, like cash and information, e.g. the mix of mundane and relevant content on
Twitter entices users to keep looking for more
Rewards of the self – those that help us in self-determination by providing a sense of accomplishment, e.g. apps like
Mailbox that segment emails into neat folders, helping achieve a state of ‘inbox zero’, giving a sense of completion and mastery

But gamification, or the introduction of rewards, cannot be used blindly to drive user engagement. It is extremely important for product designers to figure out the kind of reward that will motivate their intended users, e.g. Mahalo, a Q&A forum gave monetary rewards to answerers, but bombed, while Quora, a similar service, only provides upvotes, and is very successful.

It is also important to provide users with a sense of autonomy or choice – a reward when they feel constrained might not work. If they feel that they are being forced to adapt a certain behavior, they can rebel – a phenomenon known as reactance.

Question 16

User Investment Leads To Increased Product Usage

Answer 16

The fourth step in the Hook Model is the investment phase. Unlike the action phase, which delivers immediate gratification, the investment phase is driven by a user’s anticipation of future rewards. Therefore, this step involves prompting users to put something of value into the system.

Here are five ways a user can store value within a product or service:

Content – A growing collection of information, interactions, memories, and experiences can make a service more valuable over time.

Data – Adding personal data into the system, either passively or actively, can make users feel more committed to a product or service over time.

Followers – Taking time to follow the right people, and build a following for oneself, can improve a service and make it costly to leave.

Reputation – Time invested in building a personal reputation as a buyer, seller, or member of a community can make users more likely to stick with a service.

Skill – Once users have invested time and effort to learn how to use a product or service, they are less likely to switch to a competing product.

Note, the investment phase requires careful planning. Designers must consider whether users have the motivation and ability to make the intended investment. It’s generally best to stage the investments you want users to make into small chunks of work. Start with easy tasks and building up from there.

Also, such investments should only come after the variable reward phase. That way users are primed to reciprocate by making their first small investment into the product or service. Done properly, such investments will increase the likelihood of users passing through the Hook Model again and again.

Question 17

Are You A Facilitator, Peddler, Entertainer, or Dealer?

Answer 17

The Hook Model is designed to connect a user’s problem with a designer’s solution frequently enough to form a habit. It’s a framework for serving user needs through long-term engagement. But of course, the creation of habits can be a force for positive change or for creating harmful addictions.

Therefore, we must consider the following two questions before proceeding:

Would I use the product myself?
Will the product help users materially improve their lives?
If you find yourself squirming as you review these questions, or needing to qualify or justify your answers, stop and be honest with yourself. It’s only by accurately addressing these questions that you can assess which of the following four categories best describe your situation:

The Dealer – Those that do not plan to use the product and do not believe it will help others are often only in it to make money. Such an approach has the lowest chance of finding long-term success, and it creates a morally precarious position for the business. This is exploitation and it should be avoided.

The Entertainer – If you’re creating something that you plan to use, but that is unlikely to improve users’ lives, you are likely making entertainment. Such a venture can be successful, but without making the lives of others better in some way, this approach often lacks staying power.

The Peddler – If you’re creating something that you believe will help others, but that you do not plan on using yourself, there is an increased risk of failure. There’s nothing inherently wrong with peddling, many companies do so out of purely altruistic ambitions. However the odds of success, when it comes to solving a problem for which you don’t have first-hand experience, is depressingly low.

The Facilitator – If you’re creating something that you intend to use, and that you believe makes life better for those that use it, you are likely facilitating a healthy or productive habit. This approach has the highest chance of success because you are more likely to understand the needs of your users.

Question 18

Testing Designs

Answer 18

Instead of asking ‘what problem should I solve?’ ask ‘what problem do I wish someone else would solve for me?’

Observing your own behavior can inspire the next habit-forming product or inform a breakthrough improvement to an existing solution. Below, you’ll find other hotbeds for innovation opportunities.

Nascent Behaviors. Behaviors that start with a small group of users can expand to a wider population, but only if they cater to a broad need. By looking to early adopters who have already developed nascent behaviors, entrepreneurs and designers can identify niche use cases, which can be taken mainstream.

Enabling Technologies. Identifying areas where a new technology makes cycling through the Hook Model faster, more frequent, or more rewarding provides fertile ground for developing new habit-forming products.

Interface Change. Many companies have found success in driving new habit formation by identifying how changing user interactions can create new routines.

Question 19

HABIT TESTING AND WHERE TO LOOK FOR HABIT-FORMING OPPORTUNITIES

Answer 19

The process of developing successful habit-forming technologies requires patience and persistence. The Hook Model can be a helpful tool for filtering ideas with low habit potential as well as a framework for identifying room for improvement in existing products. However, after the designer has formulated new hypotheses, there is no way to know which ideas will work without testing them with actual users.

Habit Testing offers insights and actionable data to inform the design of habit forming products. It helps clarify who your devotees are, what parts of your product are habit-forming (if any), and why those aspects of your product are changing user behavior.

The following steps assume you have a product, users, and meaningful data to explore.

Identify. First, define what it means to be a devoted user. How often “should” one use your product? Once you know how often users should use your product, dig into the numbers and identify how many and which type of users meet this threshold. As a best practice, use cohort analysis to measure changes in user behavior through future product iterations.

Codify. If at least five percent of your users don’t find your product valuable enough to use as much as you predicted they would, you may have a problem. But if you have exceeded that bar and identified your habitual users, the next step is to codify the steps they took using your product to understand what hooked them. Every product has a different set of actions that devoted users take; the goal of finding the Habit Path is to determine which of these steps is critical for creating devoted users so that you can modify the experience to encourage this behavior.

Modify. Armed with new insights, it is time to revisit your product and identify ways to nudge new users down the same Habit Path taken by devotees.

Question 20

WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO WITH THIS?

Answer 20

You are now equipped to use the Hook Model to ask yourself these five fundamental questions for building effective hooks:

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 actions 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 waning 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)

Question 21

INVESTMENT in Design

Answer 21

Before users create the mental associations that activate their automatic behaviors, they must first invest in the product.

The more users invest time and effort into a product or service, the more they value it.

Business that leverage user effort confer higher value to their products simply because their users have put work into them. The users have invested in the products through their labor.

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.

The big idea behind the Investment Phase is to leverage the user’s understanding that the service will get better with use (and personal investment).

Storing Value. The stored value users put into the product increases the likelihood they will use it again in the future and comes in a variety of forms.

Content. The collection of memories and experiences, in aggregate, becomes more valuable over time and the service becomes harder to leave as users’ personal investment in the site grows.

Data. The more data collected, the more the service’s stored value increases.

Followers. For many users, switching services means abandoning years of investment and starting over. No one wants to rebuild a loyal following they have worked hard to acquire and nurture.

Reputation. Reputation is a form of stored value that increases the likelihood of using a service. Whether a buyer or seller, reputation makes users more likely to stick with whichever service they have invested their efforts to maintain a high quality score.

Skill. Investing time and effort into learning to use a product is a form of investment and stored value. Once a user has acquired a skill, using the service becomes easier and moves them to the right on the Ability axis.

If users are not doing what the designer intended in the Investment Phase, the designer may be asking them to do too much. I recommend that you progressively stage the investment you want from users into small chunks of work, starting with small, easy tasks and building up to harder tasks during successive cycles through the Hook Model.

The more users invest in a product through tiny bits of work, the more valuable the product becomes in their lives and the less they question its use.

Question 22

ACTION

Answer 22

The trigger, driven by internal or external cues, informs the user of what to do next; however, if the user does not take action, the trigger is useless. To initiate action, doing must be easier than thinking. Remember, a habit is a behavior done with little or no conscious thought. The more effort — either physical or mental — required to perform the desired action, the less likely it is to occur.

There are three ingredients required to initiate any and all behaviors: (1) he user must have sufficient motivation; (2) the user must have the ability to complete the desired action; and (3) a trigger must be present to activate the behavior.

While internal triggers are the frequent itch experienced by users throughout their days, the right motivators create action by offering the promise of desirable outcomes.

The easy or difficulty of doing a particular action impacts the likelihood that a behavior will occur. To successfully simplify a product, we must remove obstacles that stand in the user’s way.

There are many counter intuitive and surprising ways companies can boost users’ motivation or increase their ability by understanding heuristics — the mental shortcuts we take to make decisions and form opinions.

The Scarcity Effect. A product can decrease in perceived value if it starts of as scarce and becomes abundant.

The Framing Effect. Perception can form a personal realty based on how a product is framed, even when there is little relationship with objective quality.

The Anchoring Effect. People often anchor on one piece of information when making a decision.

The Endowed Progress Effect. A phenomenon that increases motivation as people believe they are nearing a goal.

Question 23

EXTERNAL TRIGGERS

Answer 23

Types of External Triggers:

Paid Triggers. Advertising, search engine marketing, and other paid channels are commonly used to get users’ attention and prompt them to act. Since paying for re-engagement is unsustainable for most business models, companies generically use paid triggers to acquire new users and then leverage other triggers to bring them back.
Earned Triggers. Earned triggers are free in that they can not be bought directly, but they often require investment in the form of time spent on public and media relations. Favorable press mentions, hot viral videos, and features App Store placements are all effective ways to gain attention. For earned trigger to drive ongoing user acquisition, companies must keep their products in the limelight — a difficult and unpredictable task.
Relationship Triggers. One person telling others about a product or service can be a highly effective external trigger for action. Proper use of relationship triggers requires building an engaged user base that is enthusiastic about sharing the benefits or the product with others.
Owned Triggers. Owned triggers consume a piece of real-estate in the user’s environment. The consistently show up in daily life and it is ultimately up to the user to opt into allowing these triggers to appear.
While paid, earned, and relationship triggers drive new user acquisition, owned triggers prompt repeat engagement until a habit is formed. Without owned triggers and users’ tacit permission to enter their attentional space, it is difficult to cue users frequently enough to change their behavior.

When a product becomes tightly coupled with a thought, and emotion, or a preexisting routine, it leverages an internal trigger.

Users from find a product that alleviates their pain will form strong, positive associations with product over time.

Once a technology has created an association in users’ minds that the product is the solution of choice, they return on their own, no longer needing prompts from external triggers.

When it comes to figuring out why people use habit-forming products, internal triggers are the root cause, and “why?” is a question that can help drill right to the core.

Question 24

The Six Minds

Answer 24

This book is trying to establish a foundation for using human psychology in every design process phase. It is elaborating a method that can benefit everyone involved in designing an experience. Whalen breaks down the elements of an experience by introducing six cognitive processes. He also shows how to understand user needs better and what can be done to meet those needs.

His methodology is called “The Six Minds.”
The book has three sections where he explains (1) each one of the cognitive processes so the audience can understand them better, (2) contextual interviews and how to conduct them, and (3) how to organize and categorize the findings to extract insights, also segmenting the users. Whalen is a great storyteller who backs up his claims with facts and leveraging many examples and case studies to prove his points. He introduces a dataset that he deliberately uses in explaining each step of The Six Minds so it would be easier to understand them practically. He also provides “Further Reading” at the end of each chapter, a valuable source for going into depth about the subject.

As product and service managers and designers, we need to think about all the steps along an individual customer’s mental journey and be ready to answer the questions that come up along the way.
The six mental processes are introduced in section one, so designers, product managers, and developers better understand them. Here is a picture of these six processes and their unique place in the brain

Question 25

Contextual Interviews:

Answer 25

Whalen argues that contextual interviews can shed light on the why behind people’s behaviors, as well as what they are saying or what they are doing. He believes knowing the why behind the what is the success key to create a meaningful experience, product, and service.
In separate chapters of section two, he demonstrates the way to do the contextual interview for each of the Six Minds, how to extract insights from the findings, what clues to look for, and how to get the most out of this research.
Vision:
There are many unspoken strategies and expectations that users employ, which is why we can only learn through observing users in their natural flow. These insights, in turn, help us with our visual design, layout, and information architecture by clarifying what the steps are, how they should be represented, where they should be in space, etc.
Language:
As product and service designers, what we really want to know is, what is our typical customer’s understanding of the subject matter? Then we can level-set the way we’re talking with them about the problem they’re trying to solve.
Wayfinding:
In designing our products or services, we need to make sure we take into account not only our product but the constellation of other “helpers” and tools — search engines are just one example — that our end users are employing in conjunction with our product. We need to consider all of these to fully understand the big picture of how they believe they can go from Point A to Point B.
Memory:
We want to look out for moments of surprise that reveal our audience’s representation, or the memories that are driving them.
Decision Making:
We want to know not just the overall decision our customers are making, but also all the little decisions they have to make along the way.
Emotion:
We want to know what our consumers are thinking about themselves at a deep level, what might make them feel accomplished in society, and what their biggest fears are. Our challenge is then to design products for both the immediate emotional responses as well as those deep-seated goals and fears.