 much. It is great to be here. Let me tell you why it's so great to be here. It's great to be here because I'm a New Yorker too now. I moved here to April. Yeah! For Silicon Valley, I left there. So now I'm here. It's great to be here. I love the Silicon, I love the Silicon Alley vibe. It's fantastic. I've been super impressed with the start of folks here and I'm really excited to teach you all about habit-forming products and how we make our products more and more engaging. Just out of curiosity, how many of you have by chance read my book or seen my talk on YouTube already? Okay, wow. Thank you. Anyway, breathable. Fantastic. So here's what I think I'm going to do. I'm going to give, for the sake of folks who maybe don't know the material, I want to give just like a very quick overview just so we're kind of all on the same page. I'm not going to have time to go very deep today. That's what the book's for. There's a longer talk online that you can see on YouTube as well. What I really want to spend the most time doing tonight is answering questions, right? That's where I get the most benefit. I get to hear what's on your minds and I want to talk about what you're struggling with, what engagement challenges are on your mind so we can kind of get the kind of thing that you can't just get in the book. Okay, does that sound good? All right, so real quick, what are we talking about? We talk about building habit-forming products. What's the definition of a habit? It's a behavior done with little or no conscious thought. Now, why do I teach this stuff? Why do I care so much about building habit-forming products? Because, you know, I'm not teaching this to Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and the gaming companies. They already know all this stuff. The reason I teach what I teach, the reason I wrote this book, is because I saw how many products out there are building solutions for people who genuinely want to change their behavior. They want to do something in their life. But because of poor product design, the product doesn't facilitate that behavior, right? The real problem out there that I see is not that a few companies, you know, a lot of companies see that I teach how to build habit-forming products and that people equate that with addiction, right? Which is including not about addiction. May you be so lucky that people would get addicted to your products because the vast majority of you, right, are working on products and solutions where your product, your problem is not that a few people use it too much. Your problem is that nobody gives a shit, right? Nobody uses it enough. And so what I really wanted to do is to figure out how to bring these techniques out of Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and WhatsApp and Slack. How do we learn from these companies that are so successful at making these habit-forming products so that we can use the same psychology, the same techniques, the same behavioral patterns in our products and services to help people save money, to help people connect with friends and family, to help people exercise more, live better lives. We use the exact same psychology that these big companies use in our products as well, okay? So we can do that by designing the kind of products and services that become integral to people's lives by building these habit-forming products. What I found in my research is that all of these habit-forming products have what's called a hook embedded into the user experience. So any of these companies that I just mentioned, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp, Slack, Enterprise or Consumer Web, if it's the kind of product that people use time and again with little or no conscious thought out of habit, you'll find these hooks, okay? So I'm going to walk you through the four steps of the hook model. Every hook starts with a trigger, to an action, to a reward and finally an investment. And it's through successive cycles through these hooks that our preferences, our shape, that our tastes are formed and that these habits take hold, okay? Let's start with triggers. There are two types of triggers. The first type of trigger is called an external trigger. An external trigger is something that tells the user what to do next with some piece of information inside the trigger itself. Click here, buy now, play this, a friend telling you through word of mouth about this great app. They just found out about all examples of external triggers. Now, we in the product design community, we know all about external triggers. These are the notifications, the pings, the dings. We design these every day. We use them as consumers every day. But what product people don't think about enough and what turns out to be absolutely critical to forming long-term habits is creating an association with an internal trigger. Internal triggers are things that tell us what to do next. But where the information for what to do is not in the trigger, as is the case of the external trigger, but instead the information for what to do is stored as a memory or an association inside the user's head. And what we do when we're in a particular place, a certain situation, partaking in a routine around certain people and most frequently when you experience certain emotions, dictate what we do next. Dictate the technologies that we turn to with little or no conscious thought. Now, the most frequently occurring internal triggers are these emotions, but not just any emotions. They're negative emotions. And some of the evidence that shows us this is the case came to us from a study that found that people suffering from depression, check email more. I just saw two or three people put away their phones. What's going on there? Why do people suffering from depression check email more? Well, what's going on here is that people suffering from depression experience what psychologists call negative valence states. They feel down more frequently than the rest of the population. And what are they doing to change their mood, to get out of that negative valence state? They're going online. They're checking their devices. They're looking at email more often than the rest of the population. But if we're honest with ourselves, we all do this. You don't have to be clinically depressed to use products to change your mood. In fact, let me tell you something. Every thing that we use, everything that we buy, every product or service has one function. That function is to modulate our mood, to make us feel something different. And so what you have to do if you're building a habit-forming product is that you have to be able to identify what is your internal trigger? What's that moment in time? What's that consumer pain point that when the user feels that pain point, you're the solution. You're what they look for, for relief. So to give you some examples with products you use, if you're feeling lonely. What app or website do people check if they're feeling lonely? Facebook. Somebody said Tinder. Also true. Different kind of lonely, but also lonely. What about when feeling unsure about something? If we're uncertain, what do we do before we search our brain for the answer? What are we doing? We're googling it. What about when feeling bored? Where do we go? Twitter. We go to Twitter. We go to YouTube. We check Reddit. We check stock prices, sports scores. We see what's happening in the news. All of these products and services fundamentally have an internal trigger. And before we understand why we're using these products and services, we're already checking and scrolling and using these products. So for your product and service to build a healthy habit in your customer's life, you have to be able to articulate what's that itch? What's that pain point? What's that internal trigger? And does it occur with sufficient frequency? Frequency is super important. The number one reason that a product will not become a habit is that it does not occur with sufficient frequency. And that frequency has to occur within a week's time or less. A week's time or less. It's almost impossible to change a consumer habit if that behavior does not occur within a week's time or less. We can talk about during the Q&A, what do you do? And many people say, well, the product that I'm building is not the kind of thing you would use once a week. What do you do? We can talk about it. There's a few strategies for that. But if you think about the habit-forming potential of the companies I mentioned earlier, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp, Slack, how often do we use these products? More than every day. They're intra-daily habits. The average person looks at their smartphone home screen 150 times a day. So very, very high habit-forming potential when we use these products so frequently. 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 thing the user can do to get relief from that discomfort. And there's a formula to help us predict the likelihood of these singular behaviors. It comes to us from a researcher at Stanford by the name of BJ Fogg. Fogg tells us that for any behavior B, we need three things. By the way, online, offline doesn't matter. Any human behavior, we need three things. We need sufficient motivation, sufficient ability. Ability is how easy or difficult something is to do. And the T stands for trigger. We just talked all about those triggers. Let's talk about motivation and ability. We can plot these three things of motivation, ability, and triggers on this graph and in a product development context. If you build this amazing website, this unbelievable app, this wonderful thing for your consumers, but damn it, they're not doing the thing you want them to do. They're not clicking, they're not doing the behavior you anticipated. There's only three reasons. Either they lack motivation on the Y axis, high motivation, low motivation, or they lack ability if something is easy to do, it's over here. If something is hard to do, it's over here. And if we have sufficient motivation and sufficient abilities, we have enough motivation, something is easy enough to do, we cross this red threshold, and if the trigger is present, the behavior will occur. Every single time. Online, offline doesn't matter. And let me make this concrete. Think of the last time that a phone rang in your life, phone rings, and you did not pick up the phone. Tell me why you didn't pick up the phone. Give me a reason. It was a private number. It was a private number, right? So you thought maybe it was a telemarketer, somebody you didn't want to talk to. You heard the phone ring, trigger was present. The phone was right there next to you, high ability, super easy to pick it up, but you lacked motivation. You didn't want to talk to that person right now. Probably a telemarketer, somebody you didn't want to talk to. You lacked motivation, you never crossed the red threshold. What's another reason? There are two more potential reasons why you didn't pick up that phone. So you're sitting in an event like this. You're sitting in an event like this, perfect. You're sitting in my talk. You really want to pick up that call, right? You see who it is, it's your significant other. It's somebody you really want to talk to. High motivation, you hear it ring, the trigger is present. You lack ability, it's hard to do. You don't want to be that one person that picks up the phone and has to go through the aisles and an IQ. One second, I got to take this call. It's hard to do. You lack the ability. It's too hard to do that behavior. What's one more reason? Somebody said a second ago, why you don't pick up the phone. It was on silent. It was on silent, exactly. I'm not the only person this happens to, right? Where I really wanted to pick up that call. The phone was right there next to me, but I never heard it ring, okay? Happens all the time. If the customer or the user is not doing the design behavior, it's only because they lack motivation, they lack ability or the trigger is not present. Nine times out of 10, it's not motivation. Everybody thinks it's motivation. We have to tell the customer why our product is so great. We have to show them a video and testimonials and convince them, make them more motivated. Nine times out of 10, the customer is plenty motivated. What we have to do is increase ability, make it easier to do that intended behavior and have that trigger that tells them what to do next. And there's lots of examples in the book about how different companies did this Twitter and Facebook, how they actually put this principle to use as well. Let's move on to the next step of the hook, the reward phase. The reward phase is where the user's itch is scratched, where they get what they came for. Now, there's a lot of interesting neuroscience about the reward phase. Part of this neuroscience comes to us from two Canadian researchers by the name of Olden Milner. And Olden Milner did these studies back in the 1940s where they implanted electrodes inside the brains of lab animals. And they allowed these lab animals to press on a little lever. And every time they pressed on this lever, they would get electrical jolt to a very special part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens. What they found was that every time that they allow these pigeons to simulate this part of the brain by pressing on this lever, they wanted nothing else. They would press on these lever hundreds and hundreds of times, they would forego food and water just to stimulate 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 that sent an electrical jolt to their nucleus accumbens, they did so hundreds and hundreds of times. Some of the people in the studies had to have a machine forcibly removed from them to get them to stop stimulating their nucleus accumbens. Of course, you don't need electrodes in people's brains to stimulate the nucleus accumbens. Your nucleus accumbens is stimulated every single day with things like junk food, sex, certain chemicals, and of course our technologies. All of these things activate the very same part of the brain. But what we now know that Olds and Milner never did is that the nucleus accumbens becomes most active in anticipation of a reward. But when we get the thing we want, the thing that we think is gonna make us finally feel good and make us happy, that's when the nucleus accumbens becomes less activated. So the way the brain gets us to act is not by stimulating pleasure. People think that the brain wants pleasure, pleasure, pleasure, that's not exactly true. It's not the shot of dopamine, that's not actually how the brain works. The brain creates this desire, this wanting, this craving that is actually experienced as pain, and that craving reflex is what drives us to action. And there's a way, not so secret way, to create that desire, to supercharge that wanting reflex. In fact, I can tell you right now how to manufacture desire. Does anybody wanna know how to manufacture desire? Yeah. I'm doing it to you right now. So when I took that long pause just now, and I stopped talking, and I did something a little bit different, some of you perked up. Why did this dude stop talking? What's going on? What's gonna happen next? And it turns out that a bit of variability, a bit of the unknown is fascinating. Variability causes us to engage, it causes us to focus, and it is highly habit forming. This comes out of the classic work of B.F. Skinner. Many of you remember Skinner from your Psych 101 class, right? Skinner took these pigeons, he put them in a box, he gave them a little disc to peck at. And every time the pigeon pecked at the disc, they would receive a little food pellet, a little reward. So very quickly Skinner could train these pigeons to peck at the disc whenever they were hungry. But then Skinner started to run out of these little food pellets. So he started giving them every once in a while. So sometimes the pigeon would peck at the disc and they would get a reward. But the next time they pecked at the disc, they wouldn't get anything. And what Skinner observed was that the rate of response, the number of times that these pigeons pecked at the disc increased when the reward was given on a variable schedule of reinforcement. We see these variable schedule of reinforcement in all sorts of things that we find engaging, captivating, the things that hold on to our attention and won't let go. It's what makes sports interesting. Think about it, if you boil down spectator sports, we're talking about a ball or a puck bouncing around. It's all about where is that ball or puck gonna end up? It's the variability around that. Think about romance, what makes romance romantic? It's the uncertainty of what the other person might do. Do they like me? Do they not like me? What are we gonna do? That's the excitement. But when you've been married to somebody, as I have for over 17 years, you look for other things other than that excitement that you had, those butterflies in your stomach that come from the variability of romance. Gambling, what makes gambling so habit-forming and addictive to some people, is that there's uncertainty of what you might win when you play these games of chance. They're just like the Skinner box. And of course, online, we see the same exact psychology at work. When you think about LinkedIn or Twitter or Facebook or Instagram, you ever notice this feed, right? Why is the feed so ubiquitous today? The feed is everywhere. Why do so many products use this feed mechanic? Well, when I open up one of these apps, I see the first thing, it's not that interesting. Maybe the second post, not that interesting. But maybe the third or fourth is interesting. And what do I have to do to see more of those posts? What do I have to do? Scroll them. And that scrolling and scrolling use the same psychology as pulling on a slow machine, okay? All variable rewards. There are three types of variable rewards. Rewards of the tribe, which is all about social rewards. There's rewards of the hunt, which is all about the search for material possessions or information. And then there's rewards of the self, which is all about the search for mastery, consistency, competency, and control. Now, not every product has to have all three. Sorry, here's the three types. Not every product has to have all three. In fact, very rarely do you see a product that has all three. But of course, some of the most habit-forming products have all three. When you think about email, right? The mother of habit-forming technology. It has all three, tribe, hunt, and self. Tribe is the fact that we communicate with other people that we know, right? There's uncertainty around the hunt. When you get an email, what's in the email? Is it good news? Is it bad news? Is it promotion? Am I being fired? What's going on? What's going on around that information? And then there's the self. There's this need to finish, master, control your inbox, finish the tasks in your inbox. Those are all about mastery, control, and competency. Rewards of the self. And finally, the last step of the hook is the investment phase. This is probably the most overlooked of the four steps of the hook. The investment phase where the user puts something into the product. Oops, sorry. Into the product. In anticipation of a reward. This is where the user invests in the product for some kind of future benefit. Not about immediate gratification. That's what the action phase is for. So what do investments look like? Investments can take a few forms. They can be in the form of content. The more content I upload to my Google Drive or my Dropbox account, for example, the more valuable it becomes with use. The more information, the more data I give to a company, the more valuable it becomes. So, for example, if you were to log into my Pinterest account or my Facebook account, it actually wouldn't be all that interesting for you because it's been built, it's been propagated based on the data I gave those companies. Reputation is another form of investment. On Airbnb or eBay, for example, my reputation on those sites dictates what I can charge for my goods and services. So what the investment phase has to do is two things. It loads the next trigger, it loads the next trigger, brings the user back through the hook once again. So, for example, when I send someone a message on WhatsApp, when I send that message, there's no immediate gratification. Nothing happens right away. But when I invest in the platform by sending that message, I'm loading the next trigger because I'm likely to get a reply. And that reply comes coupled with an external trigger that prompts me through the hook once again. The second thing that the investment has to do is to improve the product with use. And this is what's so amazing about the investment phase. This is what's so amazing about the age we live in today where technology gets better and better. If you think about things made out of atoms, right? These chairs, your clothing, everything in the physical world depreciates with wear and tear. The more you use these products, the less they are worth, right? That's how things in the physical world work. But habit-forming products do the opposite. Habit-forming products have to appreciate with use. They get better and better because of this idea of stored value that the investment brings. That's what makes these products so special. They get better and better and better the more we use them. So if you're not asking for customer investment, that's a big wasted opportunity. The metaphor I like to give here is imagine you go out to lunch with a friend of yours and you sit down and you have a nice conversation and you tell each other what's going on in your life and they tell you about how work is going and about how family life is going and you tell them the same and you disclose and it feels good to be a little vulnerable with them. You have a great conversation. You give them a hug, you say goodbye and then you meet up again a few weeks later. And when you sit down with them, you realize they don't remember a thing you told them, okay? How would you feel if you sat down with a friend after you bared your soul and now they don't remember a thing you told them? How would you feel about that friend? Either they have amnesia or they're not gonna be your friend very long, right? We do this to our customers all the time, right? They tell us about their preferences but we do nothing with them. That's what the investment phase is all about, is making the product better and better with use, to tailor the product to the customer's needs with use and that's what all these world changing, habit-forming companies do. So the goal of my work, what I really want to achieve by propagating this information about habit-forming products is not that the problem isn't that a few companies have built the kind of products that suck us in. The real problem out there is that far too many technologies just plain old suck, right? And when we think about how hard it is to use the average website for the average business let alone government services or local business, I mean they're so far behind in terms of the kind of usability that people expect to engage with these businesses. There is so much opportunity to make these products things that people want to use to get the jobs that they need done. And to show you I put my money where my mouth is I wanted to show you one quick example of a company that I invest in. I invest in a lot of companies in this space that use habit-forming product design. This is a product called Seven Cups. A few years ago I got a call from a gentleman by the name of Glenn Moriarty. Glenn called me up. I do these office hours every week. On Thursdays you can book time as well. I do these 15 minute increments. You can book time right on my website. He calls me up a few years ago and he says, Nia, I read your book and I built a hook for a potential app. Can I share my hope with you? Of course, let's hear it. So Glenn tells me that he's a therapist in Virginia Beach and he knows that there are far too many people in his community that don't get the kind of therapy they need, right? They don't come in and talk to a psychotherapist. His clientele include parents who have children with a disability. It includes veterans suffering from PTSD. It includes just people who need to talk or suffering who just need someone to vent to. And he knows that there's just too much friction to get therapy, right? If you think about how hard it is to get therapy, it's expensive, it's time consuming. You gotta find the right doctor. There's social stigma around it. So here's Glenn's hook. The internal trigger is loneliness. It's seeking connection. It's when you're feeling down. The action is to just open the app, doesn't cost a dime. You open the app and you're instantly connected to another person ready to listen. The variable reward is rewards of the tribe, right? It's this interaction with another human being. There's variability around what they're gonna say and how they're gonna help you and what's gonna happen next. And the investment, and here's where it gets really good. The more you use a product like Seven Cups, the more you're offered the opportunity to be trained as a listener yourself. And what this product has found, third party studies have found that people who use Seven Cups get better. They get dramatically better. In fact, this free app is as effective as traditional psychotherapy. Talk about the amazing power of using habits for good. So what I encourage you to do is to use some of these techniques in your product design to help people live better lives by using these habits for good. Thank you so much. I apologize for the super quick fly-through, but given that a lot of you have seen parts of this or read the book before, I wanted to leave plenty of time for Q&A. In the meantime, I have these hook stickers to remind you of the four steps of the hook for your laptop, so I'm gonna pass these around as well. Okay, questions, please. So you're talking before about anticipation and I totally believe it, you know, it's all about the chase, not the catch. But then I was thinking about how in like web designs, we, it's like an imperative to make sure that the load times are as quick as possible. And yet, isn't that kind of counter to what you're saying? Well, the, not necessarily, right? It's the, there has to be a connection between the internal trigger and the reward, okay? So we can't just use willy-nilly whatever we think the user wants. The reward has to be rewarding. How do we know if the reward is rewarding? If it scratches the user's itch, right? Fundamentally, it has to give the user what they came for. So if a wait time makes the experience better, for example, in a game, there are settings where you actually don't want a game to progress too quickly. You want to build up anticipation for a second, right? Movies do this all the time, right? The cliffhangers, right? There's, you want to have some distance between when the payoff comes, when the reward is given. So it depends on what type of experience. If I am googling something, I want those results as quickly as possible because I want to scratch the itch of uncertainty. So it all starts with what is the internal trigger? That's the first and most important question you've got to answer. And then all your product decisions flow from what itch you're scratching. Please. Can you see examples of the enterprise software or is it necessary? Yeah, absolutely. In fact, sorry, give me one second here. All right, I want to give you a link so that you can get this exact same presentation for enterprise. So if you go to this URL, opinion2.us, one, I'd love to hear what you thought of the presentation. I'm constantly tweaking it based on your feedback. So please give me what you, tell me what you thought. It's just a very, very short five question survey. As soon as you click submit, you'll be given a link to my slide share page. And on that slide share page, not only will you see the slides you just saw, there's a bunch of other presentations. One of those presentations is called Hooked for the Enterprise. And it's basically, it's a little bit more in-depth presentation with more examples only from enterprise examples. Now, the line of demarcation, the difference is not web versus, consumer web versus enterprise. That's not the difference. The difference between when you want to use this stuff and when you don't want to use this stuff is frequency. Frequency. So if you're building the kind of product that doesn't require a habit, there's lots of products out there that don't need a habit. If you're selling some kind of enterprise software that is installed and then lives on some server farm somewhere and nobody uses unless something breaks, you don't need a habit. That's a one-time sale. That's not a repeat behavior. But if you're building the kind of enterprise software that requires people to engage frequently, at least once a week, Salesforce, GitHub, Stack Overflow, I mean the list goes on and on. So all of this consumerization of IT is all about people on the front lines using software, Slack's probably the best example of all. People started using it on the front lines and then it percolated up the organization. If that's the kind of product you're building, you have to develop a habit or people won't remember to use your product. So same exact rules apply. It's all about frequent or not frequent. I find that in my day-to-day, I come across a lot of other people who think the problem is motivation or not a product that is a behavior change product. And I'm curious what kind of techniques you use to convince other people on your team that maybe you should focus more on the ability or convince them that motivation is a problem. So this is a great book. You may want to give them as a good first step. You know what I'm gonna recommend. So that chapter helps a lot. I'm not trying to do my own horn. In fact, that's not my research, it's BJ Fogg's research. But I think it's very powerful. I think when you see these examples of how the goal of technology in a nutshell, what is technological innovation for? What does it do? All technological innovation, I don't care if it's the cotton gin or the iPhone, shortens the distance between the need and the reward. That's all technology does for the history of mankind. And what we find is that the easier something is to do, the more people do it every time, right? For a given level of motivation, the easier the behavior, the more likely people are to do it. And so that's what's happening today. That's why we use these devices so much.