Every morning when I get up, I reach out for my mobile phone on the side table and check the notifications (mostly social media, news, and emails). Products like Facebook, Twitter, (and even Aarogya Setu for Indian users) these days have become an inseparable part of our daily lives. Did you ever consciously notice this transformation, how your routine changed from getting up and brushing your teeth, to getting up and sharing memes on Instagram? Even if you try to remember, you, most likely, won’t because this transformation happened unconsciously.
Businesses are changing. More than the sales and revenue figures, companies are competing for user attention. With attention spans getting shorter every year, the challenge is bigger than ever before. Products that are targeted to solve user pain points with minimum effort, and maximum or rather more exciting rewards, are getting that share of the attention. They successfully induce a habit for their products.
To help create such products, Nir Eyal introduced the world to a new framework - a framework that helped understand why some products got such wide acceptance within a short span of time, and how other products could gain the same acceptability. He called it the Hook Framework.
And, today, we will understand the framework in 5 simple “What, Why and How” questions.
What is Hook Framework?
Why is it so important?
How to measure Hook Potential?
What are the components of the Hook Framework?
How do you maintain your ethical standards when you are a part of someone’s daily life?
1. What is Hook Framework?
This framework talks about connecting a user’s problem to your solution with enough frequency to make it a habit. In even simpler words, Hook Framework basically intends to help make your product become a habit, an unconscious behavior for your user and become a part of their daily lives.
2. Why is Hook Framework so important?
For businesses that require user engagement as a success metric, getting users hooked to your product is critical to success. When your product becomes a habit for the user, his engagement in terms of frequency and duration increases, thereby, increasing the total Customer Lifetime Value. Along with that, when a user becomes hooked to a product, he is much more likely to become brand evangelists. It creates a value that is non-transferable and thus restricts movement/migration of users to other platforms. Hence, the Hook framework overall increases the customer lifetime value, price flexibility, growth, and a loyal user base.
3. How to determine the Hook Potential of your product?
Fogg explains the behavior as a product of motivation, ability, and trigger.
High motivation, less ability: Lack of ability makes the triggers appear frustrating
Less motivation, high ability: Lack of motivation makes the triggers appear annoying
As long as there is an optimal amount of motivation and ability, irrespective of the frequency of engagement and the perceived utility, the user will get hooked to the product. Take, for example, Google Search and Amazon Shopping. For Search, the frequency of engagement is high and the consciously perceived utility is low while for Amazon Shopping, the frequency of engagement is low and the perceived utility is high. Both of these products have optimal motivation and ability, and both have their user base hooked to itself.
4. What are the components of the Hook Framework?
Depicted in the diagram above, there are 4 components in Hook Framework:
Trigger
Action
Variable Reward
Investment
Trigger:
For a product manager or creator, it basically means finding both external and internal triggers to prompt the intended action. An internal trigger is a reason/emotion why you would want to use an app while an external trigger is something that is associated with some external factors like email alerts, notifications, etc.
External triggers can be Paid (Advertisements, Search Engine Marketing, Remarketing, etc.) or Relationship (e.g. Word of mouth, Referrals), Owned (Notifications, newsletters, etc.) or Earned (Viral videos, featured product, etc.).
Internal trigger, on the other hand, is about a user’s mind, the emotions that influence actions or will trigger them to take an action. Empathy maps can be a great way to learn about potential users. Product managers often take the help of the “5-Whys” technique to understand the actual pain point or emotion that can possibly be tied to a trigger, and then they focus on how to leverage that trigger.
Take for example, for a social media app, the internal trigger is the user getting bored and logging into the app to feel indulged while the external trigger is receiving a notification regarding your friends sharing their travel stories. For a payment app, the internal trigger is to make easy and hassle-free payments while the external trigger might be the notification received to pay upcoming credit card bills.
So, how do you find a good trigger? Ask yourself the following questions:
1. What is your target audience and what are the appropriate internal and external triggers for them?
2. Which of those external and internal triggers can your product cater to?
3. How to increase the frequency and intensity of triggers?
4. How to measure if your target audience is turning to your product during that trigger?
Action:
It is the minimum interaction the user needs to have with your product to get the reward. For example, for a bing/google user, the reward is finding what he is searching for and the action is going to the website and typing the search query. With Instagram/Facebook, it is logging in to the app.
User’s inclination towards action is decided by their motivation and ability. Fogg, in his behavioral model, has mentioned that 6 factors can increase or decrease the ability of a user:
Time: How long does it take to complete the intended action?
Money: What’s the monetary cost of taking an action?
Physical Effort: What’s the amount of labor involved in taking the action?
Brain Cycles: What level of mental effort and focus is required to take action?
Social Deviance: How accepted is this behavior by others in society?
Non-routine: How much does the action match with the user’s routine?
Ask yourself the following questions before finalizing or deciding on an action:
1. How quick and effortless is the action?
2. Is there another way to minimize the effort to perform that action? e.g. Voice assisted Google Assistant shortcut in smartphones has lesser effort in a search than going to the app/website and then typing in your search query
(Variable) Reward:
A reward is a reason why the user will use your product. It is getting redefined with newer products entering the market. Hook Framework takes it a level above by redefining rewards as Variable rewards - Something that focuses less on the reward and more on increasing the attention, interest, or rather craving for the reward.
Variable rewards can be subclassified into three types:
Tribe Rewards: Social rewards connected to social (Tribe) acceptance, e.g. number of likes, retweets, etc.
Hunt Rewards: Finding new information e.g. Google Search or Facebook Newsfeed
Self Rewards: Rewards that give self-satisfaction like decluttering your inbox or unlocking a new level in a game.
To decide a good reward, brainstorm over the following questions:
How do you reward the user?
Are the rewards variable in intensity?
Are there different types of rewards?
Are the rewards interesting for the users and increases anticipation?
Investment:
It is about asking your users to perform some actions, provide more data or opt for a paid service, etc. With users taking actions, they invest their time and effort, which in turn helps create investments in the form of content, data, followers, reputation, etc. It is basic human psychology that the more effort we put into something, the more we are to value it and the more consistent we will be with it. Asking data from users is a great way to create a hook, and it mostly ignites anticipation to receive greater returns in the future.
How do you get the users to invest? Well, by answering the following questions.
Does your product store the value of user investment?
How do your users load the next trigger and create preference by investing efforts into your product?
What opportunities may be improved?
5. How do you maintain your ethical standards when you are a part of someone’s daily life?
With hooking the customer and becoming a part of their daily lives, comes the question of an ethical intention and approach.
Nir Eyal introduced a drug dealer matrix for the same:
As Nir Eyal explained, the first rule of drug dealing is, “Never get high on your own supply.”
But if you want to build an ethical product, you have to break this rule. The companies that are most successful at building ethical habit-forming products are those where founders were the facilitators. These founders created products that materially and significantly improved the user’s life, and they didn’t just sell it to other users, they themselves were the first users of their products, e.g. Google, Facebook, Slack, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc.
That brings us to the end of this topic, and again to 5 final questions.
What are the 5 questions that you need to ask yourself to create an effective hook for YOUR product?
Finally, here is a Hook model for Facebook for your reference:
Image source: medium.com
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