Hooked

Tags: #books #non-fiction #development #psychology #apps

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

This book is about the psychology of modern web apps and how we get people "hooked" to the apps and websites. It goes into detail about the steps required to get people invested in the product they are using and how to maintain that investment.

🎨 Impressions

I was not that impressed, to be honest; felt it was a bit too high-level and not that deep into how the basic first principles work.

How I Discovered It

Hacker news, or some article about tech.

Who Should Read It?

Tech bros.

☘️ How the Book Changed Me

More interested in the investment part of getting people hooked to your platform, most of the other things are things that I know about from before.

✍️ My Top Quotes

• 79 percent of smartphone owners check their device within 15 minutes of waking up every morning.

• Perhaps more startling, fully one-third of Americans say they would rather give up sex than lose their cell phones.

• A 2011 university study suggested people check their phones 34 times per day.[iii] However, industry insiders believe that number is closer to an astounding 150 daily sessions.

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

• Variable rewards are one of the most powerful tools companies implement to hook users; chapter four explains them in further detail.

• “If it can’t be used for evil, it’s not a superpower.”

• The Hook Model has four phases: trigger, action, variable reward, and investment.

• When a product becomes tightly coupled with a thought, an emotion, or a pre-existing routine, it leverages an internal trigger. Unlike external triggers, which use sensory stimuli like a morning alarm clock or giant “Log-In Now” button, you can’t see, touch, or hear an internal trigger. Internal triggers manifest automatically in your mind. Connecting internal triggers with a product is the brass ring of consumer technology.

• Like nail biting, many of our daily decisions are made simply because that was the way we have found resolution in the past.

• Fostering consumer habits is an effective way to increase the value of a company by driving higher customer lifetime value (CLTV).

• Warren Buffett once said, “You can determine the strength of a business over time by the amount of agony they go through in raising prices.”

• Facebook’s success was, in part, a result of what I call the more is more principle — more frequent usage drives more viral growth.

• “Many innovations fail because consumers irrationally overvalue the old while companies irrationally overvalue the new.”

• Two-thirds of alcoholics who complete a rehabilitation program will pick up the bottle, and their old habits, within a year’s time.

• Which demonstrated that consumers’ preference for an online retailer increases when they are offered competitive price information.

• Habits are like pearls. Oysters create natural pearls by accumulating layer upon layer of a nacre called mother-of-pearl, eventually forming the smooth treasure over several years.

• But what causes the nacre to begin forming a pearl? The arrival of a tiny irritant, such as a piece of grit or an unwelcome parasite, triggers the oyster’s system to begin blanketing the invader with layers of shimmery coating.

• More choices require the user to evaluate multiple options. Too many choices or irrelevant options can cause hesitation, confusion, or worse, abandonment.

• Unfortunately, some companies utilize viral loops and relationship triggers in unethical ways by deploying so-called “dark patterns.” When designers intentionally trick users into inviting friends or blasting a message to their social networks, they may see some initial growth, but it comes at the expense of the social currency of users, including their goodwill and trust.

• “We identified several features of Internet usage that correlated with depression,” wrote Sriram Chellappan, one of the study’s authors.[xlvii] “For example, participants with depressive symptoms tended to engage in very high email usage…Other characteristic features of depressive Internet behavior included increased amounts of video watching, gaming, and chatting.”

• As Fogg describes it, non-routine is a factor of simplicity, and the more familiar a behavior is, the more likely the user is to do it.

• If you want to build a product that is relevant to folks, you need to put yourself in their shoes and you need to write a story from their side. So, we spend a lot of time writing what's called user narratives.

• Dorsey believes a clear description of users — their desires, emotions, the context with which they use the product — is paramount to building the right solution. In addition to Dorsey's user narratives, tools like customer development, usability studies, and empathy maps are examples of methods for learning about potential users.

• One solution popularized by the digital pinboard site, Pinterest, is the infinite scroll. In the past, getting from one web page to the next required clicking and waiting. However on sites such as Pinterest, whenever the user nears the bottom of a page, more results automatically load.

• Instead, influencing behavior by reducing the effort required to perform an action is more effective than increasing someone’s desire to do it. Make your product so simple that users already know how to use it, and you’ve got a winner.

• People often anchor to one piece of information when making a decision. I almost bought the shirts on sale assuming that the one feature differentiating the two brands

• Stephen Anderson, author of Seductive Interaction Design, created a tool called Mental Notes to help designers build better products through heuristics.

• Ability is influenced by the six factors of time, money, physical effort, brain cycles, social deviance, and non-routineness. Ability is dependent on users and their context at that moment.

• To combat the trolls, the game creators designed a reward system leveraging Bandura’s social learning theory, which they called Honor Points (figure 23). The system gave players the ability to award points for particularly sportsmanlike conduct worthy of recognition.

• Early humans killed animals using a technique known as “persistence hunting,” a practice still common among today’s few remaining pre-agrarian societies. One of these groups, the San people of Southern Africa, hunt for kudu, a large deer-like animal, using a technique similar to the way Lieberman believes humans hunted for the vast majority of our species’ history. The way we evolved to hunt wild game may help explain why we find ourselves compelled to use certain products today. In Africa, the chase begins when a group of San hunters separate a large kudu bull from the herd. The animal’s heavy antlers slows him down, making him less agile than the female kudus. Once the animal is isolated from the pack, a single San hunter begins the hunt, keeping a steady pace as the animal leaps ahead in fear. At first, it appears the man will never catch up to the bounding beast. At times he struggles to keep the animal in sight through the dry brush. But the hunter knows he can use the animal’s weaknesses to his advantage. The powerful kudu is much faster in short sprints, but the kudu’s skin is covered with fur and can not dissipate heat like the runner’s skin can. According to Lieberman, “Quadrupeds can not pant and gallop at the same time.”[lxxxiii] So while the kudu must stop to catch his breath, the hunter begins closing in, not to catch it but to run it to exhaustion. After being tracked for a sweltering eight hours under the African sun, the beast is finally ready to give up, collapsing in surrender with barely a struggle. The meager hundred-pound San hunter outlasts the powerful 500 pound beast with little more than his persistence and the biomechanical gifts evolution has given him.

• Online games like FarmVille suffer from what I call “finite variability” — an experience that becomes predictable after use. While Breaking Bad built suspense over time as the audience wondered how the series would end, eventually interest in the show would wane when it finally concluded.

• Fundamentally, variable reward systems must satisfy users’ needs, while leaving them wanting to re-engage. The most habit-forming products and services utilize one or more of the three variable rewards types of tribe, hunt and self. In fact, many habit-forming products offer multiple variable rewards.

• In a satirical take on Zynga’s FarmVille franchise, Ian Bogost created Cow Clicker, a Facebook app where users did nothing but incessantly click on virtual cows to hear a satisfying “moo.”[cxxiii] Bogost intended to lampoon FarmVille by blatantly implementing the same game mechanics and viral hacks he thought would be laughably obvious to users. But after the app’s usage exploded and some people became frighteningly obsessed with the game, Bogost shut it down, bringing on what he called “The Cowpocalypse.”

• Capsaicin, the compound that creates the sensation of heat in spicy food.

• Also in contrast to the Action Phase, the Investment Phase increases friction. This certainly breaks conventional thinking in the product design community that all user experiences should be as “easy” (and effortless) as possible.

• Tinder quickly captured the attention of millions of people looking for love with a simple interface, generating 3. million matches from 350 million swipes each day.

• What do users really want? What pain is your product relieving? (Internal Trigger) 2.   What brings users to your service? (External Trigger) 3.   What is the simplest action users take in anticipation of reward, and how can you simplify your product to make this action easier? (Action) 4.   Are users fulfilled by the reward, yet left wanting more? (Variable Reward) 5.   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

• Ian Bogost, the famed game creator and professor, calls the wave of habit-forming technologies the “cigarette of this century” and warns of their equally addictive and potentially destructive side-effects.

• According to famed Silicon Valley investor Paul Graham, we haven’t had time to develop societal “antibodies to addictive new things.”[cxvii] Graham places responsibility on the user: “Unless we want to be canaries in the coal mine of each new addiction — the people whose sad example becomes a lesson to future generations — we’ll have to figure out for ourselves what to avoid and how.”

• Facilitators use their own product and believe it can materially improve people’s lives. They have the highest chance of success because they most closely understand the needs of their users.