DEV Community: Iker Macaya Faber

Hooked Book #8 - Habit testing

Iker Macaya Faber — Sat, 30 Dec 2023 15:15:00 +0000

Building a habit-forming product is an iterative process and requires user-behavior analysis and continuous experimentation.

It is a process inspired by the “build, measure, learn” methodology championed by the lean start-up movement. Habit testing offers insights and actionable data to inform the design of habit forming products.

The are three steps: Identify, codify and modify.

Identify Who are the product’s habitual users? Define what it means to be a devoted user and how often should one use your product.

Codify Your are looking for a Habit Path. A series or similar actions shared by your more loyal users.

Modify Tracking users by cohort and comparing their activity with that of habitual users should guide how products evolve and improve.

Hooked Book #6 - What are you going to do with this?

Iker Macaya Faber — Fri, 29 Dec 2023 23:02:54 +0000

You may asking. “When it is wrong to manipulate users?”

The author set four categories where you work can fits into: facilitator, peddler, entertainer and dealer.

Facilitators use their own product and believe it can improve people’s lives. They truly understand the needs of their users and design a solution for that.

Peddlers don’t use their own product but believe it can improve people’s lives. So they are building a solution for people that they don’t understand firsthand.

Entertainers use their product but do not believe it can improve people’s lives. Can be successful products but often lack staying power.

Dealers neither use their product nor believe it can improve people’s lives. They have the lowest chance of finding long-term success and often find themselves in morally precarious positions.

But what happens when an addiction takes place in the mid or long term? What happens with all the hours that people spend in front of a screen? What happens with all the personalized marketing? What happens when technology grows so fast while ethical or psychological concerns progress at a slower pace?

While technology is very useful in our lives, we still need to understand how to design and use it in a healthy way.

Hooked Book #5 - Investment

Iker Macaya Faber — Thu, 21 Dec 2023 06:15:21 +0000

The more users invest time and effort into a product or service, the more they value it.

The investment phase is the fourth step in the Hooked model. These phase concerns the anticipation of rewards in the future.

Before users create the mental associations that activate their automatic behaviors, they must first invest in the product. For these behaviors to become routines, they must occur with significant frequency and perceived utility.

Understanding human psychology helps designers to build these habit-forming products. There are three tendencies that leads us to a mental process known as rationalization and influence in our future actions: the more effort we put into something, the more likely we are to value it; we are more likely to be consistent with our past behaviors and we change our preferences to avoid cognitive dissonance.

Habit forming technologies leverage the user’s past behavior to initiate an external trigger in the future.

User habits are hard to break and confer powerful competitive advantages to any company fortunate enough to successfully create them.

Hooked Book #4 - Variable rewards

Iker Macaya Faber — Wed, 20 Dec 2023 14:15:00 +0000

All businesses help users to achieve a goal

Variable reward is the third phase of the Hooked model, and there are three types: the tribe, the hunt and the self.

Rewards of the tribe involve the search for social rewards fueled by connectedness with other people.
These rewards keep users coming back and wanting more because our brains are adapted to seek rewards that make us feel accepted, attractive, important, and included. Examples of these kinds of rewards can be found on platforms like Facebook, Stack Overflow, or the video game League of Legends.

Rewads of the hunt is the search for material resources and information. Our need to acquire physical objects, such as food and other supplies that aid our survival, is part of our brain's operating system. This mechanism keeps us wanting and buying.

Rewards of the self is the search for intrinsic rewards of mastery, competence and completion. Here, we seek a more personal form of gratification.

Variable rewards are not a free pass. Understanding what truly matters to users is key to matching the right variable reward to their intended behavior.

Additionally, users need to maintain a sense of autonomy. If our autonomy is threatened, we feel constrained by our lack of choices and often rebel against engaging in a behavior. Experiences with finite variability become less engaging because they eventually become predictable

Hooked Book #3 - Action

Iker Macaya Faber — Mon, 18 Dec 2023 23:19:04 +0000

If the user does not take action, the trigger is useless.

Action it's the second step in the Hooked model and it's the simplest behavior in anticipation reward. So, doing must be easier than thinking.

As described by Dr. B. J. Fogg's behavior model:

B = M A T

A given Behavior will occur when Motivation, Ability and a Trigger are present at the same time.

Where motivation is the level of desire to take that action or the energy for that action and ability is the capacity to do a particular behavior and is influenced by six factors: time, money, physical effort, brain cycles, social deviance and non-routineness.

Every behavior is driven by one of three Core Motivators: seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, seeking hope and avoiding fear, and seeking social acceptance while avoiding social rejection.

Product designers can utilize many of the hundreds of heuristics to increase the likehood of their desired action like: the scarcity effect, the framing effect, the anchoring effect, the endowed progress effect and many others.

Hooked Book #2 - Trigger

Iker Macaya Faber — Sun, 10 Dec 2023 14:00:00 +0000

Facebook demonstrates the increasing power of habit-forming technology

The chain reaction that forms a habit always start with a trigger. Triggers could be external or internal.

A external trigger is embedded with information, guiding users what to do next through a call to action.

Reducing the cognitive load required to take the next action increases the chances that users will do what the company wants.

External triggers could be of four types: paid, earned, relationship, or owned.

Internal triggers are tightly coupled with a thought, an emotion, or a preexisting routine. These kinds of triggers manifest automatically in our minds and are those that companies aim to create in users through their products.

The goal of a habit-forming product is to solve the user’s pain by creating an association between the problem and the solution solved by the product or service.

The author highlight six points:

Triggers are the first step in the Hooked Model.
Triggers come in two types: External and internal.
External triggers guide the user to the next action.
Internal triggers stored associations in user memory.
Negative emotions frequently serve as internal triggers.
Makers need to link their solution to a frequently felt internal trigger and leverage it by a external one.

Hooked Book #1 - The habit zone

Iker Macaya Faber — Fri, 08 Dec 2023 18:02:30 +0000

Habit formation is good for business in several ways, but are good for our society?

The author highlight 6 key points:

Not all business require a huge user engagement but for some forming habits is a critical component of success.
Former string user habits can have several business benefits like higher CLTV (Customer Lifetime Value), greater pricing flexibility, max growth and a sharper competitive edge.
Behavior occurs in the habit zone with high frequency and perceived utility.
Some of this products start like a nice to have and ends like a must have product.
Products alleviate users pains and problems.
Designing habit-forming products is a form of manipulation. Products builders must ensure that they are hooking users with healthy habits, not with unhealthy addictions.

The last point is the key one for me. Are these companies thinking on that, or are they just in it for the business?

A crucial aspect here is the business model of that companies. A standard and vital metric for some of the most used apps is the time users spend on the app and the intervals between uses of that app.

So, if they are trying to maximize their gains by growing these key metrics, are they thinking about the health of their users?

The answer to this question takes us to a society where more and more people are hooked on a screen from a very early age.

And now I go back to the beginning... Is this good for our society?

Hooked Book #0 - Introduction

Iker Macaya Faber — Thu, 30 Nov 2023 23:14:16 +0000

“A must read for everyone who cares about driving customer engagement” Eric Ries

Smartphones, wearables, apps, etc have changed our habits and by definition our lives.

We are hooked by all those loops of distractions that compete for our attention, because the companies economics value are fully correlated with the strength of the habits they create.

The author, Nir Eyal, talk about a new model call: The Hooked Model, base on a trigger, follow by an action, a variable reward and an investment.

Following the model and driving all the decision by heavy amounts of data, these companies create really addictive products. Here is where the discussion if it’s ethical create products with this model appear.

The answer sounds like this: technology enhance our lives, improving our relationships, make us smarter and increase our productivity. But… is that true? Do we need this king of products?

A phrase that resonated with me a lot in the introduction was:

… how certain products change what we do and, by extension , who we are

This proves the power of these companies and her products.

The author also highlights these 5 points:

Habits are defined as “behaviors done with little or no conscious thought”
Access to heavy amounts of data and speed, is making the world a more habit-forming place.
Business that create habit-forming products gain competitive advantages.
The Hooked model connect the user problem or pain with the company product or solution.
The Hooked Model = trigger - action - variable reward - investment