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Hello, I'm with Nir Eyal,

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the author of Hooked,
How to Build Habit Forming Products.

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Thank you for joining us.

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>> My pleasure.
Good to be here.

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>> So,
tell me a little bit about the book.

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>> Sure.

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So, my book is really about
how do products engage users?

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How do we build products and

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services To keep people coming back, not
every business needs to form a habit.

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But every business that forms a habit
needs a hook, and so that's what

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the book is really about, it's about
this pattern that I call the hook model.

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This four step process of trigger,
action, reward, investment

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that keeps people coming back and using
these various products and services.

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And my hope here is that we
can use the psychology of

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what makes products engaging to help
people live happier, healthier,

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more productive, more connected
lives by using habits for good.

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>> And now,
I as an entrepreneur use this model?

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>> Right.
So

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if you're building a product
that requires a habit, so

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if you think about products.

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Some of the most successful companies
over the past several years.

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Companies like Facebook, and Google, and
Instagram, and WhatsApp and Snapchat,

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and Slack these companies have
all formed habits in users.

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Now that's not a requirement lot's of
businesses can do just fine without

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forming a habit, but if you're the type
of company who's business model relies

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upon a habit just like those companies
I just mentioned they would go out of

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business if they had to send advertising
every time just to bring people back.

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So if you're that kind of company,

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if you're an entrepreneur building
a product that requires people to

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come back on their own, you can use this
framework to figure out, hey do I have

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the fundamental elements that I need to
form, to build a habit-forming product?

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>> Is this only for consumer products?

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>> No.
So whether it's enterprise products or

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consumer products, doesn't matter.

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What matters is,
is the product something that people use

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throughout their day with little or
no conscious thought?

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So if you're building an enterprise
application that, you know,

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might be some piece of software that's
put into some server farm somewhere and

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nobody actually uses that piece
of software, that's fine.

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That's a great business, you know,
you should keep doing that,

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but you just don't need to have it for
that, because that's not used regularly.

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On the other hand if you're building an
enterprise product like a communication

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tool, like Slack, or GitHub, or
Stack Overflow, or Sales force.

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All of these are enterprise facing
products that necessitate habits.

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They require people to
come back on their own.

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And for those types of products,
you need a hook.

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So these hooks, this four step process,

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starts with a trigger to an action and
a reward and then an investment.

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So every hook starts with a trigger.

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A trigger prompts the habit and
we have these two types of triggers,

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an external trigger or
an internal trigger.

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External triggers are things in
our environment that tell us

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what to do next.

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They give us some piece of information.

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Click here.

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Buy now.
A friend telling you about this great

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new app through word of mouth.

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All examples of external triggers.

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These external triggers
prompt us to action.

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That's the habit itself.

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Open an app, scroll through pinterest,
search on google,

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push the play button on YouTube.

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These are these actions
that we do with little or

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no conscious thought that
are these very simple behaviors

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these very small behaviors
that we do seeking a reward.

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Which brings me to the third step
of the hook the reward stage.

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Is where the user's itch is scratched,
where they get what they came for.

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And yet there's a bit of mystery
around what they might find

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next time they engage with the product.

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So it's not just a reward.

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It turns out that habit-forming
technologies integrate what's called

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a variable reward.

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So this comes from
the classic work of B.F.

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Skinner, the father of
operant conditioning.

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Skinner found that when he gave
rewards to his pigeons and

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these little boxes on a variable basis.

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So, sometimes the pigeons
would peck at the disk,

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they wouldn't receive a reward.

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The next time,
they would receive a reward.

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What Skinner observed was,
at the rate of response,

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the number of times his pigeons
peck at the disk, increased

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when the reward was given on an
intermittent schedule of reinforcement.

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And so in all sorts of products
that we find most habit-forming,

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most engaging, we find this bit of
mystery, this bit of variability.

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So searching, and scrolling and
scrolling on a newsfeed, or what makes

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sports fun to watch is the uncertainty
of will our team win the game.

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Or what makes for
a great TV show or a movie?

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The uncertainty about how the happy
ending is going to unwind.

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All these are examples
of variable rewards.

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And finally, the investment phase,
the last step of the hook.

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The investment phase is where the user
is prompted to put something into

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the product, to invest in the product
In anticipation of a future benefit.

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So, the purpose of investments
is to increase the likelihood fo

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the next pass.

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That's what the investment phase is for,
and it does this in two ways.

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The investments load the next trigger.

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So, loading the next trigger, an example
of that would be, when I send someone

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a message on WhatsApp I don't
get any immediate rewards.

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Right?
There's no leader boards,

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there's not badges, there's no points,
nothing really happens.

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What I'm doing is I'm loading the next
trigger because I'm likely to

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get a reply.

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>> Right.
>> And that reply comes coupled with

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an external trigger.

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Hey, here's a message from your friend
which prompts me to use the hook

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once again.

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The second way that investments
increase the likelihood of an x-pass

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is by storing value,
and this is a big deal.

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Storing value is when the product
gets better and better with use,

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it appreciates in value.

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And it does this by storing data,
followers,

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reputation, content
>> Photos.

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>> Right.
Anything that I'm putting into the app

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that gets better and better over time.

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And so it's through successive cycles,

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through these hooks trigger
action reward investment

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that now an association has built
with that second type of trigger.

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Remember I told you there was two types
of triggers: external triggers and

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internal triggers.

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The internal trigger
are these things in our life

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that prompt us to action like a place, a
situation, a routine, a certain person.

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And most frequently, emotions that
prompt us to do this next action,

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this next habit with little or

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no conscious thought, but
without any explicit information.

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So over time,

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through successive cycles through
these hooks, now we use the product.

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Not with a message that tells us,
hey click here, but

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>> With a need.

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>> With a need, exactly.

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We internally trigger ourselves.

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We have these associations, so,
I'm lonely, I check Facebook.

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I'm uncertain, I Google.

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I'm bored and
I'm on YouTube or Reddit or

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checking stock prices or
sports scores, right?

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We do these things instantaneously
because of the successive cycles

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through these hooks.