 Pleasure to be here today. So we're going to switch to the front end here and try and analyze what is it about these products, about these companies, that over the past few years, maybe the past five to 10 years, started out as toys, started out as nice to haves, started out as these products that everyone dismissed at first, and yet within the span of a few short years are touching the lives of hundreds of millions of users, if not billions of users, and making hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars. So who am I talking about here? I'm talking about Facebook, and Twitter, and Instagram, and WhatsApp, and not just on the consumer web, but in the enterprise, companies like Slack. What is it about the design of these products and services? What is it about the user experience that makes them so habit-forming? Well, that's been the core of my study for the past several years. I read a book called Hooked, How to Build Habit-Forming Products. It's on Amazon for 14 bucks. If you don't have 14 bucks, no problem. You guys know where to pirate this kind of stuff. Just go get it somewhere. I don't care if you pay for it or not. We're going to do a kind of a brief overview today of how these products form habits in their users. So that we're all on the same page, let's make sure we define habits as a behavior done with little or no conscious thought. Now this is about half of what you do every single day is done purely out of habit. These behaviors done with little or no conscious thought. And I believe that we are on the precipice of an age where we can use these habits for good, where we can help people live happier, healthier, more productive, more connected lives by designing these habits. Turns out that what is at the core of every single one of these companies that I just mentioned, what is at the core of their user experience is what's called a hook. A hook is an experience designed to connect the user's problem with your product, with your solution, with enough frequency to form a habit. Connecting the user's problem with your product with enough frequency to form a habit. Now it's through successive cycles through these hooks that our preferences are shaped, that our tastes are formed, and that our habits take hold. So we're gonna spend a few minutes and analyze how you build these hooks into your user experience. Hooks have four parts. A trigger, an action, a reward, and finally an investment. So we're gonna walk through these four basic steps. The first step of every hook is a trigger. And there are two types of trigger. The first type of trigger you'll be very familiar with. These are called external triggers. External triggers are things that tell the user what to do next with some piece of information. Designers, product developers, PMs, we know all about these external triggers. This is our craft, this is what we do for a living. We make these buttons that say click here and buy now and play this. These are all examples of external triggers. We know all about these, right? We see them every day as users of these products. But what we don't think about enough and what turns out to be absolutely critical in forming these long-term habits is creating an association with what's called an internal trigger. An internal trigger prompts the user to action, tells us what to do next, but the information is not in the trigger itself. The information is in the user's brain. So what we do in response to being in a certain place, a certain situation, partaking in a certain routine around certain people, and most frequently when we experience certain emotions, tells us what to do next. Now, the most frequently occurring internal trigger are these emotions, but not just any emotion. They are specifically negative emotions, negative emotions. So what we do when we're feeling bored or lost or indecisive or lonely or fearful, what we do when we experience these negative emotions, prompts us to turn to our devices with little or no conscious thought. Now, there's a lot of studies that show this. One of my favorites was a study a few years ago that found that people suffering from depression check email more. I just saw three or four people put away their phones. What happened there? Why did this study conclude this? What did this study found? This study found that people suffering from clinical depression experience what psychologists call negative valence states. They felt down more frequently than the general population. What were they doing when they felt those negative emotions, when they felt those negative valence states? They were turning to their devices. They were going online. They were checking email more often than the rest of the population. But of course we all do this. You don't have to be clinically depressed. There is only one reason and one reason alone that people use any product or service. You know what that one reason is? To modulate their mood. To make them feel something different. Let me ask you, what website or app do you check when you're feeling lonely? Where do you go? Facebook, right? This guy said Tinder. Also true. Where do we go? Where do we go when we're feeling uncertain? When we're looking for the answer for something before we ask our brain if we know the answer, what are we doing? We Google it, right? And what about when we're feeling bored? You know between two and four o'clock in the afternoon you have that big project you don't feel like working on right now. Where do you go? You go to Reddit. You check New York Times. You check stock prices. You look at sports scores. You look at YouTube. You check out what's happening in the news. All of these products and services are triggered. They cater to this uncomfortable feeling of boredom. And before our brain understands why we are on these sites, why we are checking these apps, we're already on them. So if you're building the kind of product or service that you want to turn into a habit, that you want people to turn to with little or no conscious thought, you have to be able to articulate what is that frequently occurring itch that prompts a user to find relief with your product or service? That's what the internal trigger, that's what the trigger phase is all about. After we've defined our triggers, the next step of the hook is the action phase. The action phase is defined as the simplest behavior done in anticipation of a reward. The simplest behavior the user can do to get some kind of relief from that itch, from that psychological pain they experience in that internal trigger phase. Now, this is something as simple as scrolling on Pinterest or a quick search on Google or simply what could be easier than pushing the play button on YouTube. These incredibly simple behaviors done in anticipation of an immediate reward. Turns out there's actually a formula to help us predict the likelihood of these singular behaviors. It comes to us from a psychologist at Stanford by the name of BJ Fogg. And Fogg tells us that for any human behavior B, any human behavior B, we need three things to occur. We need the user to have sufficient motivation. We need the user to have sufficient ability. Ability is how easy or difficult the behavior is to do. And the trigger must be present. We just talked all about triggers. Let's talk about motivation and ability. Motivation is the energy for action, how much I want to do a particular behavior. Now, when it comes to user motivation, there's only six factors that we can use to increase user motivation. Because all of us as human beings, we seek pleasure, we avoid pain. We seek hope, we avoid fear. We seek social acceptance and we avoid social rejection. So there's only six ways to manipulate user motivation. All of us have these same core six drivers of motivation. Now, let's talk about ability. Ability is the capacity to do a particular behavior, how easy or difficult something is to do. And here again, we have a few levers that we can pull on that make a behavior more likely to occur by making it easier to do. Okay, that is a carnal rule of user experience design. The easier something is to do, the more likely people are to do it. So if you reduce the amount of time, money, physical effort, cognitive load, this is a big one when it comes to tech products, the harder something is to understand the less likely you are to do it. Social deviance, non-routine, all of these factors of ability, all of these things that make something hard to do make it less likely that the user will do it. So we can actually plot these three things on a graph, on a conceptual graph and ask ourselves, if the user isn't doing the thing you want them to do, they're not clicking, they're not progressing, they're not buying any single or human behavior we can put on this graph and we can ask ourselves, does the user have sufficient motivation on the y-axis, high motivation, low motivation? Does the user have sufficient ability if something is easy to do, it's on the far right, on the x-axis? If something is hard to do, it's on the left. And when the user has sufficient motivation and sufficient ability, if the trigger is present, the behavior will occur every single time. They cross that red threshold and if the trigger is there, the behavior will occur. Let me demonstrate here. Think of the last time that a phone rang, phone rings in your life, phone rang and you did not pick up the phone. Give me a reason, why didn't you pick up the phone? That's not a reason. You didn't know the number. So somebody said like a telemarketer, you didn't know the number. Right, so you look at the phone, it's right there in front of you, high ability, way over on the right, very easy to do, the phone was right there in front of you, you heard it ring, but you lacked motivation. Somebody you didn't want to talk to. What's another reason why you may not pick up the call? What's another reason? Somebody said you were in the middle of my talk, exactly, right? So let's say you're in the middle of my talk, the phone rings, you hear it ring, the trigger was present, okay? You had somebody you wanted to talk to, high motivation, but you lack ability. You don't want to be that one person in the middle of the aisle that crawls through and says, oh, I gotta take this call right now, sorry. That's difficult to do, it's hard, right? So you lack ability, you're way over here on the left, even with high motivation. By the way, when people use our tech products and they want to use them, but they don't because they're too difficult, that's in that top left, right? High motivation, low ability. You know what that is called, that little circle there between the red line and the black line? That's called frustration, right? High motivation, low ability. So the best thing we can do to make a behavior more likely to occur is not start with motivation. Many people think, particularly when it comes to enterprise products, that if we just talk to the user, if we convince the user, if we show them more testimonials and videos, then we'll boost motivation and they'll do the thing we designed for them to do. But that's not the first place to start. The first place to always start is to make sure a clear trigger is present. I can't tell you how many times I work with my clients and I say, where's the trigger? What do you want me to do here? Or remove the cognitive clutter. This happens a lot of times when engineers design products, folks. There are six million things you could do but no clear call to action. I see this every single day. The easiest thing you can do if you want to get a behavior to occur more frequently is to make that behavior easier, increase user ability, okay? The next step of the hook is the reward phase of the hook. This is where the user gets what they came for. Now, when we talk about rewards, we have to talk about the brain. And in particular, an area of the brain that we know today as the nucleus accumbens. Now the nucleus accumbens was first studied by two Canadian researchers by the name of Olden Milner back in the 1940s. And Olden Milner did some very interesting experiments. They took electrodes and they inserted these electrodes inside the brains of lab animals. And they connected those electrodes to a little lever that the lab animals could push on. And every time the lab animal pushed on this lever, they would receive an electrical jolt to their nucleus accumbens. What Olden Milner discovered was that these lab animals wanted nothing but stimulating their nucleus accumbens. They would forgo food and water. They would run across painful electrified grids just to continue to activate this part of the brain. In later experiments done on people, they observed similar results that when people were given these little buttons to press on and every time they pressed on these buttons, they would receive an electrical jolt to their nucleus accumbens. They did so hundreds of times. Some of the people in the studies had to have the machines forcibly removed from them to get them to stop pressing on these buttons. Now, turns out we don't need electrodes in people's brains to get people to push buttons today. Today, you know where I'm going with this, all sorts of things activate the nucleus accumbens. Junk food, sex, luxury goods, and of course, these devices. All of these things activate the very same part of the brain, the nucleus accumbens. Now, for decades, the psychology community believed that the purpose of the nucleus accumbens was to stimulate pleasure, right? Why else would lab animals and later people incessantly activate this part of the brain if it wasn't because it felt good, right? Not exactly. What we now know is that the nucleus accumbens becomes most active in anticipation of the reward, but when we actually get the thing we want, the thing that's gonna make us feel good and finally make us happy, that's when the nucleus accumbens becomes less active. So the way the brain gets us to act is not by stimulating pleasure. It's by stimulating this itch that we seek to scratch. And it turns out, folks, that there is a way to supercharge this desirous response. Did you know that there is a way to manufacture desire? And I can tell you how to do it. Does anybody here want to know how to manufacture desire? I'm doing it to you right now. So when I took that 10-second pause and I stopped talking for a second, some of you perked up. Why isn't he talking anymore? What's going on? Did he forget what he was going to say? What's gonna happen next? And it turns out that the unknown is fascinating. A bit of uncertainty, a bit of mystery causes us to engage, causes us to focus, and it is highly habit-forming. This comes from the work of B.F. Skinner. Back in the 1940s and 50s, Skinner took his little pigeons, he put them in a little box, and he gave them a disk to peck at. And every time the pigeon pecked at the disk, they would receive a reward, a little food pellet. So very quickly, Skinner could train his pigeons to peck at the disk, receive a reward. This is called operant conditioning, right? Terrific, worked great. But then Skinner wanted to see what would happen if he gave these food pellets every once in a while. So sometimes a pigeon would peck at the disk, no food pellet, no reward. The next time the pigeon would peck at the disk, they would receive a reward. And what Skinner observed was that the rate of response, the number of times that these pigeons pecked at the disk increased when the reward was given on a variable schedule of reinforcement. And so when we look at the world around us and we think about the things that are most engaging, most habit-forming, the things that capture your attention and won't let go, you will find one or more of these three types of variable rewards. What I call rewards of the tribe, rewards of the hunt and rewards of the self. Let me show you some examples. Let's start first with rewards of the tribe. Rewards of the tribe are things that feel good, that have this element of variability and come from other people. Best example online is of course social media. When you open up Facebook, you're never quite sure what you're going to see. What did people post? What are the comments going to say? How many likes does something get? High degree of variability when we use a site like Facebook, by the way, we see the same exact thing on Stack Overflow with all those upvotes. Same exact phenomenon going on. The next type of variable reward is what we call rewards of the hunt. Rewards of the hunt are about the search for material possessions and we buy these material possessions with money and today also that information is used to get money and material rewards. When many people think of variable rewards, they think about slot machines, right? They think about Las Vegas casinos where the uncertainty involves what we might win when we play one of these games of chance, right? Well, I'm here to tell you that the exact same psychology at work on these slot machines is at work online. Consider for a moment, the feed. Have we all noticed how prevalent the feed is today? Every product today somehow has this feed mechanic. LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Slack. Everything today is a feed. Why is that? Well, let's take a look at Twitter just as an example but you could substitute on any number of different apps here. If I look at that first tweet, yeah, that's not that interesting. Maybe the second tweet, that's not interesting. Maybe the third or fourth tweet is interesting though. So what do I have to do to see more interesting content? What do I have to do? Scroll. All I gotta do is scroll and that's scrolling and scrolling uses the exact same psychology as pulling on a slot machine. Both variable rewards of the hunt at work. Searching and searching and never done searching for the next variable reward. That next interesting piece of information. The third type of variable reward is what I call rewards of the self. Rewards of the self are things that feel good that have this element of variability but they don't involve other people and are about these material or information rewards. These are things that are intrinsically pleasurable. They feel good in and of themselves. It's about the search for mastery, consistency, competency and control. Best example online is game play, right? So when people play Clash of Clans or Angry Birds or any of these other online games, they're not necessarily playing them with other people. They're not really winning anything in terms of any kind of material goods but there's something fun about getting to the next level, the next accomplishment, the next achievement. And I know many of us here we're very serious business people. We don't play these online games but I bet you play this game every day. Does this look familiar? Getting to that unread message in your inbox? Finishing the to-dos on your to-do list or the thing that always gets me is clearing that one notification on my home screen so I can open it and clear it away. Those are all examples of rewards of the hunt, the search for mastery, consistency, competency and control. Finally, the fourth step of the hook is the investment phase. This is probably the most overlooked of the four steps of the hook. The investment phase is where the user puts something into the product that makes it better and better with use. And this is what is so magical and different about tech products versus physical goods. Physical goods, things made out of atoms as opposed to things made out of bits, they depreciate with wear and tear. My clothing, these chairs, everything in the material world loses value with wear and tear, right? But habit-forming technology should do the opposite. Habit-forming products should appreciate with use. They should get better and better the more we use them, right? That's amazing. So based on how much content we give to a site, how much data we give into them, how many followers follow us, how much our reputation increases on a site, all of these things make the product better and better and better with use. That investment phase is critical to forming these long-term habit-forming products. Now, as you notice, through these investments, the products become a little bit stickier. They become a little bit harder to stop using, in fact, even if a better product or service comes along, which brings me to this cold, hard fact you are not gonna like. There is a myth that's been perpetuating our industry that all we need to do is to have the best technology because the best technology will win. That's a lie. It's not the best product that wins. It's the product that captures the monopoly of the mind, the product that we turn to first. That's the product that captures the market because it's through successive cycles through these hooks that trigger action-reward investment. This is how product preferences are shaped, how our tastes are formed, and how these habits take hold. Now, many folks, when I tell them about this hook model and how it's built into many of the world's most habit-forming products and services like Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and WhatsApp and Slack and Snapchat, the reaction is like, ooh, that's kind of mind control. I'm not sure, is this ethical? Is this okay to do to people? And I think that's missing the point because that's not my audience, right? The gaming companies and the social media companies, they already know all this. That's who I studied to be here with you today. I'm here to help all sorts of other products be more habit-forming because let's face it, most technology out there, it doesn't suck us in the way Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp and Snapchat do. No, no, no, it doesn't suck us in, it just sucks. So my incentive, the reason I'm here with you today, the reason I study habit-forming technology is because I believe that we can build a world where technology products help people do things they want to do but for lack of good product design don't do. And to show you I put my money where my mouth is, let me give you one quick example before I go. This is a company called Seven Cups. The founder is a guy by the name of Glenn Moriarty. He's a psychotherapist out of Virginia Beach. He called me up a few years ago after he read my book and he said, look, Nia, I got this idea for an app I wanna share with you. Here's my hook. As a psychotherapist, I know lots of folks don't come get the service they need, right? A parent of a child with a disability, a soldier suffering from PTSD. They don't go get therapy because it's hard, it's expensive, there's social stigma around it. So here's the app I'm going to build. Here's my hook. The internal trigger is seeking connection. It's loneliness. It's when someone needs to connect with another human being. The action phase of the hook is to just open the app, doesn't cost a dime. You push one button and you're instantly connected to another person that's ready to listen. That's the variable reward, rewards of the tribe. This communication that you get, this variable reward from another human being. And finally, the investment phase, the more you interact with seven cups hook, the more you begin to be offered this opportunity to learn how to be a trained listener yourself. And it turns out that people who use this product have found it to be as effective, according to a third party study, as traditional psychotherapy. This one app conducts 180,000 sessions every single week. Talk about the amazing power of habit forming technologies. So with that, I encourage you to build the change you want to see in the world, to find one of the world's problems to fix, because I truly do believe that using the power of habit forming technology, we can help use habits for good. Thank you very much. One more quick thing. Yeah, no, no, go for it. One more quick thing. I saw lots of people taking pictures of the slides. That's fantastic. I want to make it easier for you. If you want the slides you just saw, please go to this URL, opinion2.us, opinion2.us, not .com, opinion2.us. There's a very, very short survey. I just have five questions. Would love to know what you thought of the presentation. As soon as you click submit, you'll be taken to my slide share page, where you can have all the slides you just saw. Look for the one that says hook talk. That's the slide presentation you just saw. There's also a lot of other resources there. For example, if you work at an enterprise company and you say, oh, these are lots of consumer web examples, look for the presentation that says hooked in the enterprise. All kinds of enterprise examples in that presentation. And one more announcement. Tomorrow evening at 6 p.m., I will be giving a three-hour workshop on this material for a small group of folks. There are still a few tickets available. We're gonna be doing it at the hotel, at the Marriott. And those tickets are available at that URL. And with that, thank you so much. All right. I have one quick question before you go, you know. And I think you already answered it. I know what some of these folks are thinking, wow, the consumer thing. And then your definition of enterprise might be a CRM application. Their definition of enterprise is underlying infrastructure software, right? Cloud management tool. So it's really about frequency. That's the critical question. It's not industry sector. It's not consumer web or enterprise. It's frequency. If you're building the kind of product that is kind of bought and then tucked away somewhere and never used again, like insurance, for example. Insurance, car insurance, does not need to be a habit. Geico's never gonna become a habit. Of course, the problem with those type of products is that it's very easy. Geico comes in and says, we're gonna save you 15% on car insurance. It's very easy for the next person to come in and say, oh yeah, we're gonna save you 20% on car insurance. And they take you away. So it's not that non-habit forming products are bad businesses. They're perfectly fine businesses. It's just that they operate in a different way. Whereas these habit forming products build in customer loyalty and retention in a way that doesn't require them to spend a ton of money on constantly advertising and spamming people. People are using these products on their own. So to qualify and see if you even need to form a habit, the first question is, is your product used with sufficient frequency? Got it, great tip. Thank you. Get the book. We can always improve the habit forming nature of open source software. Thank you very much.