Hooked: habits, hooks, and the nine times better rule

Nir Eyal wrote one of the most influential books on product management in 2014, named Hooked. It addresses how products can captivate users and become habits. These are my notes on the introduction and first chapter.

Hooks and habits

Core to the book, the author introduces two concepts:

• Hooks — connect a user’s problem with a company’s solution, performed frequently enough to form a habit.
• Habits — behaviors that are done with little to no conscious thought, and are estimated to account for nearly half of our daily actions.

For a product to be successful, it must achieve unprompted user engagement, bringing users back repeatedly without costly advertising or aggressive messaging.

Habit-forming products drive three benefits for the company:

1. Higher customer lifetime value — customers stay with your product longer.
2. Greater price sensitivity — customers depend on the product and increase their willingness to pay for it.
3. Increased sharing — customers become brand evangelists and tell their friends, bringing new users at little to no cost.

But old habits die hard

New products or services need to offer dramatic improvements to shake users away from their current routines. The new entrant cannot just be better. The author states they must be nine times better.

John Gourville at Harvard put it this way: innovations fail because consumers irrationally overvalue the old, while companies irrationally overvalue the new. Products that require a high degree of behavior change are doomed to fail, even with clear and substantial benefits.

Our new habits also have a short shelf life. Habits are LIFO: last in, first out. Any new habit you develop is statistically likely to revert to a previous one, as the user fights neural pathways already etched in the brain.

Two examples from the book

These are ten years old now, but the concepts still ring true.

Google versus Bing. The search results and speed performance are nearly identical, but when users search, they don’t think — they just do. So when you set out to beat a competitor, you cannot beat them on specs alone. Milliseconds matter, but they don’t hook users.

The book talks about the cognitive effort required to switch. Something as small as a different pixelation is enough cognitive load to send users back to the safe and known existing habit.

Amazon and Progressive Insurance. Both built loyalty by showing competitors’ pricing. This drove tremendous growth for Progressive and was likely a boon for Amazon ten years ago. Progressive still does it; I am not sure Amazon does, or needs to.

The virtuous cycle

When data is tracked on users based on their past behaviors, it leads to more accurate and personalized experiences.

More product usage, better personalization, more product usage. Repeat.

Why do products fail?

Products fail for many reasons. The company runs out of money. The product hits the market at the wrong time. Consumers do not want it.

But a product can also simply not be used often enough to develop into a habit. Infrequent behaviors remain conscious actions and never create the automatic responses that characterize habits.

The book compares the frequency of searching on Google against the infrequency of shopping on Amazon. In the ten years since, you could argue shopping on Amazon — and searching for products there — has become as ubiquitous as searching on Google. A testament to Amazon’s ability to deliver habit-forming products that solve real user needs.

Successful innovations solve problems

Is your product a vitamin or a painkiller?

• Painkillers solve obvious needs, relieving a specific pain.
• Vitamins appeal to users’ emotions rather than functional needs.