Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products

An external trigger is something outside of the consumer’s mind which prompts them to engage with a product. Examples of external triggers include website links, company newsletters, app icons, notifications and emails, and advertisements. According to Eyal’s Hook Model, users must experience successive Hook cycles prompted by external triggers before they develop the internal triggers necessary to form a subconscious habit.

Eyal borrows psychologists’ definition of habits as “automatic behaviors triggered by situational cues” (1). He observes that habits are, by definition, unconscious behaviors; he argues that users should find products so engaging and useful that they integrate them into their daily routines by forming subconscious feelings and reactions around them. Eyal’s work explains why humans have developed the capacity for habitual responses and some of the mental biases and phenomena that inform their habits. In an effort to defend his work from accusations of harmful manipulation, he claims that habits can be either positive or negative.

Eyal defines heuristics as “the mental shortcuts we take to make decisions and form opinions;” people rely on these to make quick decisions in everyday life (85). Eyal describes these shortcuts as “brain biases;” he discusses the endowed progress effect, the scarcity effect, the framing effect and the anchoring effect as examples. Eyal discusses heuristics to support his argument about how products become the most successful and popular.

An internal trigger is a thought or feeling from a user’s own mind that prompts them to engage with a product. These triggers are often subconscious and therefore do not require conscious thought or deliberation. For instance, boredom or anxiety may provoke a user to browse Pinterest or check their email without consciously deciding to do so. Eyal encourages the reader to use his Hook Model to create internal triggers for users, as these are a crucial aspect of habit formation. Companies greatly benefit from users’ internal triggers because they no longer need to rely on marketing or notifications to generate user engagement. 

In Eyal’s Hook Model, a user’s investment in a product can manifest in many ways, including time, data, social networking, skill building, reputation building, content, and money. These investments, which Eyal also calls “stored value,” are crucial to increasing the user’s fondness for a product and ensuring that they feel incentivized to use it again. According to Eyal, the more the user invests in a product the more likely they will revisit it, thus forming a habit. Investment can also function as a way to create the next external or internal trigger for the user.