It takes four steps to form a habit. Trigger is the spark plug in the engine, externally and internally. The new habit becomes customers, daily routine when they automatically cue their behaviour, transforming the external trigger into internal one.
Action draws upon the art and science of usability design to reveal how products drive specific user actions. By completing the simple click, user will be amazed by whet he/she sees next, that’s when the next phase happens. Variable reward is the various content that users expect and even beyond their anticipation.
Next thing they know is that they’ve already browsing over forty minutes on the site. The final step is investment. As a saying goes, when you don’t pay for the product, you are the product. The investment doesn’t need users to open their wallet and pay for using a service on the site. Instead, they give out their personal preferences to the big data, which strengthen the bond between the user and the site and wrap users tightly in the hook.
The four phases complete the hooked model, which is used to describe an experience designed to connect the user’s problem to a company’s product frequently enough to form a habit.
A behaviour occurs with enough frequency and perceived utility enters the Habit Zone, helping to make it a default behaviour. Some behaviours never become habits despite how much utility is involved due to the lack of frequency.
The reason why we use certain product so frequently is that they kill instant pains rather than providing nutrition in long-term. All companies are aiming at building painkillers, not vitamins, so that it could merit the invested time, money, people.
However, today’s most popular tech companies like Instagram, Pinterest and Facebook all started as vitamins, and become a painkiller when they become part of our daily lives. Therefore, a habit is when not doing an action causes a bit of discomfort.
The habit-forming products create associations in users’ minds and that the solution to their pain may be found in your product’s use. In other word, those companies create the pain that users didn’t have in the past and use their products to fix this pain.
But overall, habit is fundamentally different from addiction. Habits are done with little or no deliberation while addiction is hurting and self-destructive. In conclusion, if we want to build a habit-forming product, it must be useful and start with the intention to help people form healthy habits.
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