This is my third and final post from the Qualtrics X4 Summit.

Author Nir Eyal is known in the tech community for his 2013 bestseller Hooked: How To Build Habit-Forming Products and its more recent antidote, Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life.

Eyal defines a habit as the impulse to do a behavior with little or no conscious thought. A hook is an experience designed to connect a user's problem to your product. Eyal explains that a hook is formed through the following four steps:

1. Trigger

   • External: the information for what to do next.

   • Internal: the information for what to do next is informed through an association in the user's memory.

     • Negative emotions are powerful internal triggers. 

       • People who are depressed check email more.

       • When we feel lonely, we use Facebook.

       • When we feel unsure, we use Google.

       • When we are bored, we use YouTube, etc. 

   • Do you know your customer's internal trigger?

     • What makes Instagram so habit forming? It solves the pain of losing the moment.

2. Action

   • Ex: Scroll, search, play.

   • According to BJ Fogg, for any behavior to occur, we need motivation, ability, and a trigger. 

     • Motivation - seek pleasure, hope, acceptance to avoid pain, fear, rejection. 

     • Ability - capacity to do a particular action depending upon time, money, physical effort, brain cycles (cognitive load), social deviance (bandwagon), non-routine.

     • Levels of motivation and ability determines if actions will occur.

   • Frustration is the gap between when motivation is high but it’s too hard or difficult to do (getting a phone call when you’re busy).

3. Reward 

   • The nucleus accumbens (the part of the brain that mediates reward behavior-—thought to be directly involved in reinforcing and addictive behaviors) is activated when we crave, stimulating the stress of desire. Our reward system is activated with anticipation and settles when we get it. There’s a way to supercharge the stress of desire. 

     • Ex: Eyal asked, “Who would like to learn how to manufacture desire?” Then he paused for an unnaturally extended period of time. He manufactured our desire as he made us wait for the answer.

   • The nucleus accumbens is sparked by variability. 

     • Three types of variability:

       • Tribe (social rewards)

       • Hunt (search for resources, gambling, variable information rewards on a social feed)

         • Scrolling through a feed is the same psychology as pulling on a slot machine

       • Self (leveling up, inbox or task management)

   • However, one must build variable rewards that satiate the users itch but leave them wanting more. 

4. Investment

   • Users invest for future benefits in: personal data, time, money, social capital, effort, and emotional commitment.

   • Investments increase the likelihood of the next pass through the hook in two ways:

     • Loading the next trigger of the hook

       • Ex: New messages

     • Storing value, improving the product with use. 

       • Ex: Twitter followers, reputation as an eBay seller, or airbnb host 

At the end of the presentation, Eyal posed the question as to the morality of manipulation. In other words, is it ethical to use hidden psychology to make people do what we want? Designing habit-forming products is a form of manipulation. His defense for designing habit forming product is that persuasion is perfectly ethical. He cautioned that we have to be careful about how we use these techniques and that when we change or influence user behavior we have a responsibility to help others find meaning and engage them in something important. We can design healthy habits.

I left the session (and the Qualtrics X4 Summit!) motivated and inspired to apply what I learned to my daily work. I hope it helps you, too!