The document summarizes key insights from Nir Eyal's book 'Hooked,' focusing on strategies to create user habits and engagement. It emphasizes the importance of triggers, actions, and variable rewards in making users return to a product without prompting. Additionally, it discusses the ethical implications of manipulating user behavior for engagement.

1. Making Products to
get users “Hooked”
By Gaurav Gupta

2. Credits: Hooked by Nir Eyal
Everything you see in the slideshow is a summary
of my learnings from the awesome yellow book
called Hooked by Nir Eyal.
I highly recommend that everyone should read it.

3. Old habits die hard.
- People don’t like to change habits.
- First to mind solution always wins.
- New products fail, even if the benefits
are obvious.
- Example: Bing vs Google.
Did you know?
A new product must be
atleast 9x better than
the previous one to
shake users out of their
old routines.

4. The ultimate objective
Keep throwing consecutive hooking strategies at your users so that
eventually they lead to unprompted user engagement.
i.e. Users come back on their own, without the need of any advertising
or messaging.
If you achieve that, you have truly made your users “HOOKED”

5. The Hook-ing Strategy
Variable
Rewards
Triggers Action Investment

6. An external trigger communicates the next
action that the user should take.
Paid: Ads, SEM
Earned Triggers: Press Mentions, Viral
Videos, “Featured Apps”
Relationship Triggers: Virality features,
Word of mouth
Owned Triggers: Notifications/email the
user has subscribed to
1. Triggers - External and Internal
Internal triggers:
Boredom
Need to be entertained etc.
Scratching his itch /
Eliminating pain

7. Keep repeating external
triggers so much that the
your product forms an
association with an internal
trigger
That’s when a habit has been formed and your users have been hooked.

8. A successful trigger leads to a finite action.
After the user encounters a Trigger, the likelihood of an action being performed
by your user depends on the following factors
1. Motivation (We try to identify and increase this)
2. Ability to complete the action (We try to make this simpler)
2. Actions

9. Identify what could be the user’s motivations in completing the actions?
- Seek pleasure or avoid pain
- Seek hope / Avoid fear
- Seek social acceptance / Avoid rejection
Q: How to do increase the ability of a user to complete a particular action?
- Significantly reduce the number of steps required to complete a task
- Can you think of some examples around you where this has been done?
2. Actions

10. What more can you do to ensure that your users are doing the actions that you
want them to do?
- Scarcity effect
- Framing effect
- Anchoring effect
- Endowed progress effect
2. Actions

11. The brain does not get activated when the reward is
received. It is activated in the anticipation of the reward!
3. Variable Reward

12. Types of rewards:
Tribe: Likes and Upvotes
Hunt: Gambling
Self rewards: Playing a game and improving, E-Mail (Inbox Zero), Writing online
code (Instant feedback)
3. Variable Reward

13. Giving users a feeling that they have “invested” in a product.
- Followers
- Content
- Skill
- Data
- Reputation
4. Investment

14. Think about it.
The morality of this manipulation. Ethical or not?
Thank you!