Modern-day technological applications are frequently blamed for instilling addictive behaviour in their users. Social media and gaming applications are well-known for instilling this addictive behaviour, which is causing plenty of social and personal problems. Fundamentally, these products instil new habits in users and ensure that those habits persist for a longer period of time. Examples include frequently scrolling through Instagram feeds, checking for WhatsApp messages, and being disturbed by alerts thrown by mobile applications. Users make a habit of returning to the application over and over, resulting in an addictive behaviour. Biologically, this causes the release of endorphins, a hormone that is also released by other habits such as smoking or drinking alcohol. Once this habit is established among users, all of these applications look for a way to monetize the behaviour, primarily by serving ads or other contextual information.
As engineers, we frequently explore the innovation or technological aspects of such applications. Sometimes we marvel at the wonderful UI that these applications provide, which results in an excellent User Experience (UX). Beyond technology and UX, however, understanding human psychology and behaviour is critical in developing habit-forming products. Rather, having a solid understanding of human psychology and habit creation comes first before building UX or technology. Because they tap into fundamental human behaviour and how our human mind works, these products quickly scale and become second nature to all of us. In this book ‘Hooked’ author Nir Eyal delves into a model for creating habit-forming products. He divides the model into four major steps to explain it.
The first step is to create a trigger. Any habit-forming product begins with a trigger that prompts the user to take some action. For example, displaying a relevant advertisement in the context of the user. It can be further customized by continuously monitoring the user’s behaviour and prompting the user to act. The component in the hooked model is to assist the user in taking some action. Once a user has been invited into a specific product, taking action must be made easier. The UX / UI plays a critical role in highlighting the benefits of taking action.
Users take actions for a variety of reasons, some of which are as follows:
- Seeking pleasure while avoiding pain
- Seeking hope
- Obtaining social acceptance
By constantly observing user behaviour in terms of heuristics and asking them to take an action with respect to the user’s context, you can increase the user’s motivation to take action. While the trigger and action are important, converting this into a human behavioural model is critical. This model forces the user to visit the application at regular intervals, forming a habit. The author introduces the third component, variable rewards, which he refers to as scratching-the-itch behaviour. When a user logs into the application, he or she is served content or information in a non-uniform manner, with the user’s behaviour taking precedence. Providing them with information in the form of feeds, like, and share options for others in the network creates a repeatable behaviour.
Once the reward is taken care of, the fourth component, user investment, enters the picture. By this point, the user has grown accustomed to the application and returns to it frequently. Now, applications encourage users to create content by constructing a creator ecosystem. This ecosystem is about providing various tools and options for uploading user-generated content such as photos, videos, memes, reels, and so on. According to research, user generated content has a very high reward from the creative’s perspective; thus, he would like to see how his content contribution is behaving or responding by his friends in the network. By expanding the investment ecosystem, habit-forming products such as Instagram, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, and Twitter become second nature in everybody’s life.
Finally, the author delves into the moral implications of these habit-forming products. Whether it is appropriate to modify user behaviour by briefly mentioning privacy. He concludes the book by providing some advice to anyone interested in creating habit-forming products. Overall, I think this is a good book for people who want to understand how to build habit-forming products using a combination of human psychology, user experience, and technology.
It was a very enjoyable read.
