Nir Eyal Presenting at Bay Area ProductTank Aug 24 2016

All right, can you hear me? All right, so once again, thanks so much to Pendo and EMC for sponsoring this event. Please join me in another round of applause. So now I'm pleased to introduce Nir Eyal, who many of you may know as the author of how to Build Habit Forming Products. Nir has also taught at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and and design School at Stanford. He's started and sold two companies since 2003 and currently works with teams to build more engaging products. So please join me in welcoming Nir.

Is there a hand mic? Is there a hand mic? Yeah, that'd be great, thanks. Maybe I don't need to. Actually, can you hear me in the back? If I don't use the mic, you can hear me? No, use the. Okay. All right. Hi everybody. It's great to see you. Thanks for coming out tonight. This is a fantastic crowd. I'm so happy that so many of you made it out. By the way, for those of you who are standing, there's lots of seats over here. I'm going to be talking for a while, so get comfortable. Let me take a quick poll here. How many of you have seen my talk or read my book before? Show of hands. Oh, wow. Awesome, awesome. And how many of you are building products that are consumer facing versus enterprise customers? Consumer facing, consumer facing, enterprise. Okay, all right, so about 50, 50 split. Okay, let's adapt this on the fly here. Here's what I'm thinking. So it's about. Looks like about half the crowd has seen some of my stuff before, half the crowd hasn't. What I think I might do, if it's okay with you, is go through maybe like 20, 30 minutes of the model just to kind of give you a high level overview. And then I'd love to spend the rest of the time giving you something that you can't read in the book, which is to actually ask me your questions. Right. Let's get some one on one time. So maybe if what we can do, maybe the organizers can move these stands when we can get one on each side of the room. Would that be OK for you guys? And then just come up to the mics afterwards and we'll just take questions as long as we are able to. How's that sound? That sounds all right. Terrific. And during the presentation too, if you have a question, if something doesn't make sense, we're happy to tackle that stuff too. So let me go through real quick a brief introduction of my work over the past few years which has really looked at this phenomenon of how these products that we carry around with us in our pockets, how our digital devices have profoundly changed our behavior. One of the first patterns I noticed in the companies that I looked at was that they tend to start out as toys, these nice to haves, these products that so many of us underestimated. And yet within the span of a few short years, they're touching the lives of hundreds of millions, if not billions of users. And they're 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 Slack and Snapchat. These companies, many of them I mentioned, are in the consumer web space, but there's also several in the enterprise space. Companies like of course Slack, the fastest growing enterprise product in history. I would put Google Docs in that category. I'd put Salesforce in that category as well. These products that have succeeded by changing consumer behavior rapidly and for many, many customers. So the question that I wanted to answer when I started my research was what are the patterns that are indicative to these products? Is there something we can learn about how these products are designed to change user behavior both in the enterprise world as well as consumer facing products? What is it about these products that keeps us coming back again and again and again? So I spent past, what, four years of my life now working on this research and I published this book, how to build Habit forming products. And I adapted this course that I taught at the Graduate School of Business and the Design school at Stanford into this book. And so today I'm going to give you a very brief overview of the model that's described in the book. You know, I'm not going to be able to cover everything, so there's a lot more in there as well. But I'll try and give you the 30,000 foot overview. So the key word in the title is how to build habit forming products. So let's define what I mean by habits. What is a habit? A habit is just an impulse to do a behavior with little or no conscious thought. It's about half of what you do every single day, whether you like it or not, is done out of habit. And I believe that we can use these habits for good, that we can design software leveraging the psychology of habit formation to help people live better lives, of course, in the consumer enterprise, in the consumer space. When it comes to fitness apps, when it comes to apps to help people save money, to live better lives, to connect with each other, all of these things Require us to build habits. And certainly in the enterprise space, I mean, I think we can all agree that the state of enterprise software, it's pretty abysmal, right? This is the kind of software that people feel like they have to use, they don't want to use. But of course we see that a lot of these companies that have profoundly changed user behaviors, they are the companies that started from the ground up, right? When you think about GitHub and stack, overflow and Salesforce even they were adopted by the ground up as opposed to the top down. And so the same exact rules that I'm going to show you in these enterprise, I keep getting confused. The same exact rules that I show you in these consumer examples that we all know about, companies like Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and WhatsApp, the same exact patterns, the same exact rules apply to enterprise products. If, if your product needs to form a habit, needs to form a habit. So let me talk about that for a quick minute. Not every company needs to form a habit, okay? It is not a requirement. This is not magic pixie dust that you pour on any startup and you're going to have the next Facebook. That's not how this works. Lots of companies can find their customers and deliver value to their customers without habits, right? You can bring customers to your door with search engine optimization. You can use ads, you can set up a physical storefront, right? Open up a taco stand to bring customers to your place of business. It's not that you require a habit. It's that if your business model necessitates customers coming back on their own unprompted, just like those businesses we described earlier. Think about this. If Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Slack, WhatsApp, any of these companies, if they lost the customer's habit, they die. A loss of a customer habit for those companies is an existential threat. Why? Because their business model doesn't work. If they had to spend money on ads to bring people back, they must form habits. They must get you to come back on your own or they are not viable. So if that's the kind of business you're in, if you're in the kind of business that requires people to come back on their own. And again, not every business necessarily has to have a habit. It's that every business that needs a habit needs a hook. This is the pattern that we find endemic to these habit forming products they have built within them. And a hook, and that's going to be the core of what I present here today, is how do these hooks form consumer Habits to define this hook. A hook is an experience that connects the user's problem to the company's product with enough frequency to form a habit. With enough frequency to form a habit. Now, that word frequency is super important because what we know about frequency is two things. But you probably have heard all kinds of urban legends on frequency, right? That when it comes to habits, if you type in habits online on Google, you're probably going to see a bajillion urban legends about how to form habits, right? One of the most popular habits is if you do a behavior enough days in a row, right? There's some magic number. You've heard this, right? 29 days, 60 days, 45 days, or some kind of magic number that if you just did a behavior enough, poof would become a habit. That's bunk. There is no scientific evidence for that whatsoever. Here's what we do know. Two things. Number one, the more frequently we do a behavior, the more often in our lives we do this behavior, the more likely it is to become a habit. So when you think about the habit forming potential of these products that we carry around in our pockets, how often do we use products like Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp and Slack? How often? Every few minutes, right? They're intraday habits. The stats are telling us that people check their home screens 150 times a day. Super high habit forming potential. Okay? So that's rule number one when it comes to frequency. The more frequently you can do a behavior, the more likely it is to become a habit. Second, there's a precipitous drop off in the likelihood of forming a habit if the behavior does not occur within a week's time or less. It is almost impossible to change a user's habit. Not totally impossible. Almost impossible to change a consumer's habit if that behavior does not occur within a week's time or less. So some of you might be having an oh shit moment, right? Because you came in thinking, hey, I'm going to make this infrequent behavior, something into a habit that's going to become a habit. I'm here to tell you that's unlikely, okay, that may not happen. Now, what do you do? A lot of times I get this question of, look, my product is not something that's used every day. It's not even used once a week. I'll give you a quick story. So I was in Las Vegas a few months ago and I was invited to give a talk in front of a convention of real estate agents, 700 real estate agents and the woman who hired me said, now we're going to hear from Nir Eyal. He's an expert on forming habits and he is going to tell us how to make home buying and selling into a habit. I got on stage and I said, look, let's be very clear here. There is no way to make home buying and selling into a habit that will never happen. Because think about it. It doesn't occur with a sufficient frequency. This is something that happens every five to 10 years and it's the antithesis of a behavior done with little or no conscious thought. Buying and selling a home is something that we overthink, right? So forget it. Buying and selling a home is never going to become a habit. But now I got a problem, right? Because I only got one real talk. I've been working on the same stuff for about four years now. I don't have something else to tell them. So I gave my talk and it was really interesting because afterwards when I talked about the, the importance of frequency and I walked them through this hook model, many of these real estate agents came up to me later and said, look, I got an idea. I know what we're going to do. We're not going to make home buying and selling a habit. Here's what I'm going to do. One woman told me she is going to make a habit around checking in with her through her website, through her app, or giving her a call. Whenever people in her community feel financial insecurity, she wants them to form this habit of going to her website, checking her app, calling her. Every time someone in her neighborhood feels fear about the stock market going up and down, they're not sure if they're gonna have enough Money in their 401k, their kid's college fund. She wants to be the relief, right? She wants to be the habit. Another person came to me and said, I'm gonna build this newsletter that people in my neighborhood are going to receive a few times a week. And I want them to form this habit of just opening that newsletter. And that newsletter is going to tell them about events in their area. So every couple days when somebody says to themselves, hey, you know what's going on in my neighborhood? Who's the high school team playing in football match or what movies are opening or whatever activities are going on in town, I want them to contact me. But now you might be saying, yeah, but that has nothing to do with real estate. Or does it? The mantra I want you to write down and take back to your teams is that monetization is a result of engagement. Who are those people going to call in these real estate agents neighborhoods when it is time to buy or sell a house? If they can form this habit around financial insecurity or what's going on in my neighborhood? If they can form that habit, the result of that habit will be that when it is time to buy or sell, who are they going to think of? So if you have a product that may not be used frequently enough to form a habit around, that's okay. What we can do is bolt on other habit forming behaviors. And the two Cs here are content and community. We can bolt on content and community, which can become more frequently occurring behaviors. Okay, make sense. All right. Stop me with any questions, by the way. So now that we have our behavior that occurs frequently enough, at least within a week's time or less. Now let's walk through this model. This hook model that we find is endemic to all sorts of habit forming products. A hook has four basic a trigger, an action, a reward and an investment. And it's through successive cycles through these hooks that that customer preferences are shaped and that our tastes are formed. So let me walk you through these four steps. Every hook starts with a trigger and there are two types of triggers. External triggers and internal triggers. External triggers are things that tell the user what to do next with some piece of information. Click here. Buy now. Play this. A friend through word of mouth telling you about this great new app. They should try out all examples of external triggers. The information for what to do is in the trigger itself. We all know about external triggers, right? As product designers, as consumers, we see these every single day. This is our craft. But what not enough product people think about and what turns out to be absolutely critical to forming these long term habits is creating an association with what's called the internal trigger. The internal trigger tells the user what to do next. But that information for what to do is not given explicitly, but instead stored as a memory, an association inside the user's brain. So what we do when we're in a particular place, a certain situation, partaking in a routine around certain people, and most frequently when we experience certain emotions, tells us what to do next. Emotions are the most frequently occurring internal triggers, but not just any emotion. They are specifically negative emotions. Negative emotions. So what we do when we're feeling lonely or bored or indecisive or fatigued or lost, what we do when we experience these negative emotions prompts us to action. These are pain points. These feel bad and we look for relief from this discomfort. Now, if you need further evidence, let me show you an interesting study. There was a study that found that people suffering from depression check email more. I just saw about three people put away their phones. What's going on there? People suffering from depression check email more. Why is that? Well, it turns out that people suffering from depression experience what psychologists call negative valence states. They feel down more frequently than the rest of the population. And so what are they doing to boost their mood, to get taken out of those negative valence states? They're going online, they're checking their devices, they're looking at email more often than the rest of the population. And if we're honest with ourselves, we all do this, don't we? We all use products and services for only one reason, to modulate our mood. That's the fundamental purpose of everything that we consume, to change how we feel, to satiate these negative emotions. Let me ask you, what app or website do we check when we're feeling lonely, where do we go? Facebook. Right. Somebody said Tinder too. Also true. Different kind of loneliness, but that is also true. What about when we're feeling unsure about something before we scan our brains to see if we know the answer, what are we doing? We're Googling it, right? And what about when we're feeling bored? You know, between 2 and 4 o', clock, there's that big project you don't want to work on right now. Where do you go? You check YouTube, you check stock prices, you check sports scores, you see what's happening in the news. What's the latest dumb thing that Donald Trump said? All of these things, right? All of these things cater to this internal trigger of boredom. We don't like that sensation of boredom. It's a negative valence state. And before we even realize why we're doing it, we're already using these sites to scratch that itch. So what do we do with this? A bit of interesting pop psychology. Maybe you'll start analyzing your own behavior, looking at it a little differently. But what do we do with this? As product designers, how do we build better knowing about this, how important these internal triggers are? Well, it fundamentally comes down to being able to articulate what is your customer's internal trigger. I can't tell you how many product teams I meet with in my consulting practice. I go to meet up with a company, we do this big, expensive design review. They show me all the whiz bang features and all the amazing things that the product can do for the customer. But when I ask them, okay, great, but what's the psychological need? What's the itch that you are scratching for your customer that occurs frequently enough to form a habit? They haven't a clue. They can't tell me. So you've got to be able to tell me what that internal trigger is, or you have very little hope of forming a habit. Okay, so let's make this concrete. I like to give examples of how products use this, not just keep it academic. So let's take a look at Instagram. How many of you are Instagram users? Oh, okay, terrific. A lot of you. How did Instagram use external triggers? Where did most people find out about Instagram for the first time? Anybody remember? Where'd you first find out about it? On Facebook? On Twitter? Through a friend. Right. People posted their images to these other platforms, and then you had a big call to action a big external trigger that said, hey, check out my photo on Instagram. You click on the external trigger, it told you what to do. Now you have the app on your phone, and now you start getting notifications from your friends. Those are all external triggers telling you what to do next. Now let's talk about the internal trigger. Did you say you use Instagram? Yeah. You do? What's your name? Dipty. Do you remember the last thing you took a picture of with Instagram? If it's suitable for work, yeah. What was the last thing you took a picture of? Your house. Okay, so Dipty takes a picture of her house. Why did you take a picture of your house, by the way? Oh, a beautiful flower outside. Okay, so Dipti takes a picture of this beautiful flower outside her house. I'm guessing that that flower did not say, dipty, take a picture of me with Instagram. Right. It didn't tell you what to do, and yet there was this connection in your mind that when Dipty saw something beautiful that she wanted to capture, that she wanted to hold onto, when there was this instantaneous fe of losing this moment in time, before she was conscious of that need, she already had the app out taking the photo, that fear of losing the moment. Now, when I talk about the moment in the photography space, what other company used to own the moment? Think 20, 30 years ago, what company used to own the moment? Kodak. Does everybody remember the Kodak moment? Remember these commercials that Kodak used to have on tv? These incredibly schmaltzy, sentimental commercials of the puppy dogs running through the grass, the kids who would someday leave the empty nest? My personal favorite was the one they always ran of the grandma blowing out her last birthday Candles. You know what I'm talking. You know that commercial with the grandma? I didn't make that up. You remember this commercial, right? Of grandma? Anyway, why did Kodak spend billions of dollars and almost 100 years teaching people about the Kodak moment? Well, they wanted to create an association in. In the user's mind that when you see a moment like this in your life, capture it with a Kodak camera before it disappears forever. What took Kodak almost 100 years and billions of dollars in advertising, Instagram did with 12 people in 18 months by having US users teach other users what the Instagram moment is all about. But Instagram does much more than the Kodak camera ever could. Because Instagram is also a social network. So the more we use a product like Instagram, the more we pass through Instagram's hook, the more we begin to associate it with other internal triggers when we're feeling bored, seeking connection. Fomo. What's fomo? Fear of missing out. Do you know that's a real word in the dictionary as of two years ago, it's a real word now. Fomo. The fear of missing out feels bad. It's a negative valence state that we might be missing out on something. And the solution to that discomfort is found with this product in our pockets. Instagram wins. So the lesson here is that you've got to be able to identify that internal trigger that occurs frequently enough in the user's life and be the salve, be the solution to that discomfort. Any questions about triggers? Feel free to interrupt. Okay, let's move on. Oh, do you have a question?

Yeah, I was going to say, what about enterprise products?

Yeah, what about enterprise products? How do you find the internal trigger for a enterprise product? So again, has to be something that needs a habit, right? Has to be used frequently. And then we figure out what is the internal trigger. So let's take enterprise products that we all know and love. What about Salesforce? What's the internal trigger for using Salesforce? Let's say you're a salesperson. You're out in the field, you're going to make a sales call. Let's say, what's the internal trigger? Anybody? What's that? To track your leads. But why would you. What's the emotion? What's the fear of not being prepared? Exactly. It's fear. A salesperson is constantly in fear. Anybody here a salesperson? Okay, we can talk about them. Good. Because there's only one they constantly live in fear about. Can I close a sale? Will I meet my quota? What do I say who? What do I do? There's constantly this fear of am I prepared? Salesforce, by opening this product, by opening this enterprise solution satisfies that pain point. What's the another enterprise product, Slack. What's the internal trigger for Slack? Why do people use slack? What's the internal trigger? Somebody said it. What? Right. Fear of missing out. Ok, the water cooler has existed in a corporate space forever and that conversation that occurs over the water cooler has been ported over to this digital interface. But it's still fundamentally the same core human need. Remember, we don't make internal triggers, we satisfy them. We look for the pain in users lives and we scratch that itch. These are age old problems. Fear, loneliness, seeking connection, boredom, fatigue. These are age old problems that our products have the opportunity to satisfy, to cure. So the question for any product that needs to be used out of habit, if that's a requirement for the business model, your challenge is to figure out what's the emotion, what's the pain point, what's the internal trigger that anytime the user feels that pain point, we're the solution. That's when a habit is formed. Make sense? Okay. Yes. Yeah, good trick. So the question here was does the trigger or the internal trigger always have to be negative? Why are you such a bummer, Nir? Such a pessimist. Right? Well it's a bit of semantics. It's a bit of semantics because there's two sides to this emotional coin in a way. Right. But I like to talk about it in the negative because if the user feels good, leave him alone, there's no problem, there's no pain, there's no itch to scratch. So the hallmark of an external trigger, that's annoying, that feels like spam, is one that is not contextually relevant. The key, the secret to sending a great external trigger is to closely couple it with the internal trigger. So the moment I feel boredom, I'm provided with entertainment. The moment I feel fear, I'm provided with a solution to my fear. The moment I feel whatever that negative emotion is, your product is there to cure that problem for me. So that's why I like talking about it in the negative. Because that allows us to find in the user narrative, in the user's day to day life, where does that pain point exist? If there's no pain, there's no problem and there's no opportunity to form this habit. Yeah, right, Right. So the question was, well, Facebook this. Sharing isn't sharing an emotion. What's the flip side of that coin of sharing is It a positive emotion. I would argue it's seeking connection. What's that? To make everybody, to make everybody jealous. I think there is that need. It's two sides of the same coin, right? But I think when we as product managers think about it in the negative, we have an opportunity to scratch that itch, to dig deeper. So there's this great technique called the five whys technique, which many of you are probably familiar with, of course. Well, why does somebody want to share? Right. What's this behavior for? And if we dig deep enough, right. If it's really a problem, we're going to find that internal trigger, that negative emotional state. Okay, yeah, sure. Right. So the question was just so everybody can hear is, you know, there were lots of Instagrams, right? What happened? Why Instagram? There weren't as many Instagrams as you may think. When you start looking at the world through this lens, when you start analyzing companies and their viability through this lens, you start to understand things about who the winners and losers will be before they understand it themselves. And so I would argue there actually weren't that many Instagrams that if you really looked at other folks in the space, right. That you can get a pretty good bird's eye view of what's going to happen by looking through this filter. Now, that being said, engagement is not enough. Everything that I'm going to teach you tonight is just engagement, right? But every business needs three things. Every new product needs three things to survive. They need to be a gem. So when I'm looking at products to invest in, I do some angel investing. When I look at product to invest in or to work with, I look for gems. GEMS stands for growth, engagement and monetization. Each of those three things, GEM growth, engagement, monetization is necessary but not sufficient. Okay, so you can be an amazing growth startup, right? You can have unbelievable user base growth. Kind of like remember Vidi a few years ago? Unbelievable. Vidi went crazy. Pokemon Go. Crazy growth. But if you can't keep those users around, if you can't continue to engage them, if you can't form that customer habit, you become what's called the leaky bucket, right? Lots of users in, lots of users out. And mark my words, this is what's going to happen to Pokemon Go. And you'll see by the end of this model why. But that's the thing that Vidi face as well. Lots of growth, no engagement. So you've got to have growth, engagement, and finally, monetization. Monetization is about market size, is There a big market out there to serve and how do you accrue value? How do you extract some of that value in the customer relationship? So the answer to your question, why do some companies succeed and some companies fail Engagement is only one piece of that puzzle. And I think looking at it through a specific lens helps you understand where some are weak and some are strong. And then finally there's also this growth piece and monetization piece which are outside of scope for today. Today is just about engagement. So I would argue that part of the reason that Facebook beat MySpace was that they figured out viral growth way before about six months before MySpace did, because they figured out the contact list import back when that was a really big deal. So I think they won on growth. Other companies went on engagement and some companies went on monetization. So there's a whole lot of reasons why some companies win, some companies don't. Oh no, that's not true. I don't want to get too off track. Ask people who use Atlassian and Slack. They will tell you there's some big differences specifically with the onboarding process. Think about how difficult it was to get on Slack versus the Atlassian product. Right? Yeah. Does it have to do with for example how Apple was able to come up with iPad with the ipods? Well, after some. Many others have come up with digital players, but they simplified it with core user views. This is a perfect intro. Thank you. You introduced me perfectly to the next phase of the hook. And I think you'll start to see some of these pieces fall into place after we figured out what the user's itch is, the emotional trigger that we're going to attach to. After we figured out what that internal trigger is. Now it's time for the behavior itself. This is where the habit is manifest. The action phase is defined as the simplest behavior done in anticipation of a reward. The simplest behavior done in anticipation of reward. Let me show you a few examples of a few habit forming products. These examples are all from the consumer space, but there's lots in the enterprise space as well. I'm going to show you some habit forming products and I want you to see just how simple the key action is. How simple that habit is. Something as simple as a scroll on Pinterest, just that act of scrolling or a search on Google. Or what could be simpler than just pushing the play button on YouTube. The simplest action to receive a reward. Now it turns out that there is a formula to predict solitary behaviors. Okay. Singular behaviors. This formula comes to us from BJ Fogg those of you who read the book will be familiar with this formula. Fogg tells us that for any behavior B, we need three things. Any human behavior, online, offline, doesn't matter. We need sufficient motivation. The user has to be sufficiently motivated. We need sufficient ability. Ability is the capacity to do the behavior, how easy or difficult something is to do. And finally, the trigger must be present. So for any behavior, online or off, we always need sufficient motivation, ability and a trigger. Let's dive into these. We already talked about triggers, but let's talk about motivation and ability. Motivation, according to this man, Edward Desi, is the energy for action, how much we want to do a particular behavior. Now, motivation is kind of this squishy subject that consumer psychologists have been arguing about for years and years. But Fogg gives us these six basic levers that we can pull on to increase user motivation. Because all of us as human beings, we seek pleasure, we avoid pain, we seek hope, and we avoid fear. We seek social acceptance, and we avoid social rejection. So every bit of marketing copy, every television commercial, every radio ad or billboard, fundamentally uses these six levers of motivation. Now, that's great for people who can spend a lot of money on advertising, but I would argue that the second piece of b mat, the ability piece, is actually more important for our industry. Ability is the capacity to do a particular behavior, how easy or difficult a behavior is to do. And the easier a behavior is to do, of course, the more likely people are to do it. And here again, we have these six factors, these six levers that we can pull on that make a behavior more or less likely to occur based on how much time something takes, how much money something costs, how much physical effort is required to do that behavior, how many brain cycles. Brain cycles has to do with cognitive load, how difficult something is to understand. And in the tech industry, this is huge for us, right? The harder something is to understand, the less likely the user is to do the behavior. Social deviance. Social deviance is when I become more likely to do something because I have seen people like me doing it. And finally, non routine is the fact that I am more likely to do a behavior simply for the fact that I have done it before in the past. Because the more I do a particular behavior, the easier it becomes and the more likely I am to do it in the future. What do I call that? What's that called? It's called practice. Right, practice. The more I do something, the easier it becomes, the more likely I am to do it in the future. Which is why the best Predictor of what you will do tomorrow is what you did yesterday. Behaviors become easier the more we do them. So we can take these three things of motivation, ability, and triggers, and we can actually plot them. And we can ask ourselves in a product development context, you're building a beautiful new app, a great new website, and darn it, people aren't doing the thing you want them to do. The behavior that you have designed is not occurring. So according to Fogg, you can ask yourself, does the user have sufficient motivation? High motivation up here, low motivation down here. Then does the user have sufficient ability? Something is easy to do, it's over here. Something is hard to do, it's over there. And when the user has sufficient motivation, sufficient ability, they cross that red threshold. And if and only if the trigger is present, the behavior will occur every single time online, offline. Your behavior, your kid's behavior, your spouse's behavior, your user or customer's behavior always requires these three basic elements. Motivation, ability, and trigger. Every single action, every single time. So even if you're not building a habit forming product, whenever you're struggling with why isn't the user doing this behavior? It's always one of these three things. And nine times out of ten, it ain't motivation. That might surprise some of you. Many of us think, well, if we just talk at customers, if we just explain to them, if we maybe show them more videos and text about why they should do the behavior we want them to do, they'll do it. And motivation, in my experience, is almost never the problem. Nine times out of ten it's because the user can't find the trigger or the behavior is too hard. Especially when it comes to enterprise products. Right? This is the big problem. Ability. Let's do another quick case study here. Twitter. How many of you are Twitter fans? Twitter avid users. Okay, interesting. Let's take a look at how Twitter has evolved using this concept of motivation, ability and triggers. Take a look at Twitter back in 2009, Twitter 2010, and Twitter today. When it comes to motivation, ability and triggers, what's different? What do you see that's different today versus 2009? From a design perspective, what kind of is obvious here? What's there? A lot less of stuff, right? Look at how much stuff is on this page. Look at all the triggers, right? What was a trigger? That would take you to a different page that would tell you what why was a trigger, how it was a trigger. Watch a video is a trigger. Sign in is a trigger. Click here is a trigger. Click here is a Trigger and get started. Join is a trigger. That is a ton of thinking the user has to do to figure out what is the key behavior. And speaking of, what does Twitter always want people to do on all three examples, this example, 2010 example, and today, what has always been the key behavior? Sign in or sign up. That's always been the key behavior. And what Twitter figured out was by removing the cognitive clutter, by making it easier for the user to figure out what the hell it is you want them to do, they become more likely to do it. So the lesson here isn't, hey, let's build a landing page just like Twitter. That's not the lesson. The lesson is what's in your customer's way? Is it cognitive load? Is it social deviant? Is it non routine? Is it money? Is it time? Is it physical effort? What is in your customer's way for each and every behavior, each click, each action you want them to take? Okay. And of course, figure out radical ways to remove that friction. Yes, please. Oh, this is a good question. Yes. So he's saying, hey, look, Nir, that's not fair. He's crying foul. He says, Look, 2009 people needed to know all this stuff, right? Maybe your product is a new product and we have to tell them about what, what and why, and watch a video and Twitter as a service, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? They need to be educated. We need to boost motivation, right? Wrong. What I learned, interviewing people who actually built this product and watched it evolve over the years at Twitter, what they told me was that they very quickly realized that motivation wasn't the problem. Why? Because nobody came to Twitter by mistake. Nobody typed in twitter.com and said, Oops, what's this? Right? That never happened. Why? Because people came with some kind of existing context, some kind of existing motivation. They heard about it on Oprah. A friend told them about it. They had tons of motivation. All Twitter had to do was get the hell out of their way and let them take the key action, get inside their hook, and start using the product. Okay, it's a great question, but it turns out that most of the time, people don't lack motivation, they lack ability. And it's our job as product designers to to make it as easy as possible to take the singular behavior we want them to take. Make sense. Okay? So we figured out the internal triggers. We prompted them to action with the external triggers. We figured out how to make the action as easy as possible, the habitual action as easy as possible. Now comes the reward. The reward is where the itch is scratched, where the user's pain is alleviated a little bit. When we talk about rewards, we have to talk about the brain. And in particular, an area of the brain called the nucleus accumbens, which was first studied by two Canadian researchers by the name of Olds and Milner. And Olds and Milner discovered that this area of the brain had some really peculiar qualities. When they plugged in electrodes to lab animals, brains connected to the nucleus accumbens, and they allowed these lab animals to press on this little lever to send an electrical shock to this part of the brain. What they discovered was that these lab animals wanted nothing but stimulating their nucleus accumbens. They would forego food and water. They would run across painful, electrified grids just to continue to stimulate this part of the brain. In later experiments done on people, they found similar results. That when people were given a little button to press on, and every time they pushed on this button, they would receive an electrical jolt to this part of the brain. Some people had to have these machines forcibly removed from them to get them to stop activating this part of the brain. But, of course, we don't need electrodes to activate the nucleus accumbens. All sorts of things stimulate this part of your brain every day. Luxury goods, sex, junk food, certain chemicals. And of course, right there in the center, our technology, all of these things activate the nucleus accumbens every single day. Now, Olds and Milner and much of the psychology community for decades believed the purpose of the nucleus accumbens was to stimulate pleasure, right? Why else would lab animals and people incessantly activate the nucleus accumbens if it wasn't because it felt good, right? Well, not exactly. It turns out what we now know is that the nucleus accumbens does not stimulate pleasure per se. Instead, it activates what we call the stress of desire. This wanting, this craving reflex. Because what we now know, due to these FMRI studies that Old and Milner never had, is that the nucleus accumbens becomes most active in. In anticipation of the reward. But when we actually get the thing we want, the thing that's finally going to make us happy and we're going to finally feel good, that's when the nucleus accumbens becomes less active. So the way the brain gets us to act is not necessarily by making us feel good. It's by creating this itch that we seek to scratch. And there is a way to supercharge this reflex, this craving. There's actually a way to manufacture desire. Anybody want to know how? Anybody curious. Of Course, if you read my book, you know what I'm doing there. I just did it to you right now, Right? So if I would, the longer I pause up there, the more uncomfortable you'd get. Why isn't this guy talking? Why did he stop? What's going on?

Why.

Why is he moving all around the room and waving his arms? I'm doing something different to get your attention. And it turns out that that bit of variability, a bit of mystery, a bit of the unknown, causes us to engage, it causes us to focus, and it is highly habit forming. This, of course, comes from the classic work of B.F. skinner. You might remember Skinner from your Psych 101 class back in college, the father of operant conditioning. Skinner took these pigeons, he put them in a box, he gave them a little disk to peck at. And every time they pecked at the disc, they would receive a reward, a little food pellet. So very quickly, Skinner found that he could train these pigeons to peck at the disc whenever they were hungry. Terrific. That's called operant conditioning. But then Skinner did something a little bit different. He introduced a variable reward. So sometimes a pigeon would peck at the disc, nothing would come out, no food pellet. The next time the pigeon would peck at the disc, they would receive a reward. And what Skinner found was that the rate of response, the number of times these pigeons pecked at the disc, increased when the reward was given on a variable schedule of reinforcement. Why does that happen? Because variability spikes activity in the nucleus accumbens, creating this desirous response, creating this wanting reflex. And so, in all sorts of products that we find most engaging online and off, you will find these variable rewards. Rewards of the tribe, rewards of the hunt, and rewards of the self. Let me introduce these to you briefly. Rewards of the tribe are all about these things that feel good, that have this element of mystery and come from other people. So, best example, are looking for empathetic joy, feeling good because someone else feels good. Partnerships, cooperation, competition. All examples of variable rewards of the tribe. Good example is social media. So when you open up a Facebook app and you start scrolling through the feed, you're not quite sure what you're going to find. What videos do people post? What do the comments say? How many likes does something get? All variable rewards of the tribe. Next, rewards of the hunt. Rewards of the hunt are all about the search for food and other material possessions. And in modern society, we buy these things with money. So when many people think of variable rewards, they think about slot machines, right? They think about Las Vegas casinos. Where what makes gambling fun is the fact that there's this variability around what you might win playing these games of chance. But of course, the same exact psychology is at work in our apps. Consider the feed. Have you noticed how over the past few years everything has a feed, especially on mobile, everything seems to have a feed today. Why is that? Well, let's take a look at LinkedIn, recently bought by Microsoft. What was it about LinkedIn? Well, let's see. When I open up LinkedIn, I see the first story is not that interesting. The second story is not that interesting. But maybe the third story is interesting. And what do I have to do to get more of those interesting rewards? What do I have to do? Scroll. So that scrolling. And scrolling uses the exact same psychology as pulling on a slot machine. Both variable rewards of the hunt, and finally, variable rewards of the self. Variable rewards of the self are things that feel good, that have an element of variability, but don't come from other people, and aren't about the material rewards. These are things that feel good on their own. They're intrinsically pleasurable. So the search for mastery, consistency, competency and control. Best example I can think of is gameplay. So when you think about Candy Crush or Pokemon or Angry Birds, any of these games, you're not really winning anything per se, not in terms of material possessions. But there's something fun about getting to the next level, the next accomplishment, the next achievement. I know what some of you are thinking. You're thinking, okay, that's great, but look, I don't use these games. I'm not much of a gamer myself, but I bet you play this game every day, right? Checking those unread messages, finishing the to do's in your to do list, or the thing that always gets me is that one app notification that I have to open to clear it away are all examples of variable rewards of the self. The search for mastery, competency and consistency. One word of warning, variable rewards are not a free pass. I see a lot of people misapplying variable rewards or think when I say variable rewards I mean gamification, and I absolutely do not. I do not mean gamification. Gamification tends to be, nine times out of 10, what we call chocolate covered broccoli, right? Take something delicious, put it on something nobody really wants and we expect them to want. It doesn't work that way. It's still gross. The reason it doesn't work is because we don't properly identify the internal trigger and match it to the variable reward. So if the internal trigger is boredom. Great gamification can entertain, but if the internal trigger is something else, a salesperson who has this fear. Gamification is frickin annoying. Right? So we have to figure out how to match the internal trigger with the variable reward. The variable reward has to scratch the user's itch. It has to give them what they came for and yet have this bit of mystery around what they might find the next time they engage with the product. Okay, one thing I didn't put in the book, that I wish I would have put in the book is that sometimes products don't want to add variability. They want to give the user greater agency and control over something that's already variable. So, for example, Uber would not want to insert a variable reward by saying, hey, guess what? You're going to arrive to your meeting 15 minutes later. Surprise. That's not going to happen. Right? Why? Because that's not in the user's control. If your PC shuts down, if it crashes and you get the blue screen of death, that's variable surprise. But it's not fun because you don't control it. You don't have agency over that situation. So what companies like Uber and Google, do they take an inherently variable situation? The variable reward is already there. They're giving you greater agency and control over something that's already variable. For Uber, it's will I get to where I'm going on time? Remember when a few years ago, when we used to call taxicab dispatchers and you called them and you said, hey, here's my address. How long before you're going to be downstairs? And they'd always give you the same answer. What was the answer? 15 minutes. Always 15 minutes. Maybe it's 20 minutes, maybe it's half an hour. They don't know. They don't care. They had no clue where the cab was. But for you, it was always 15 minutes. So what happens when here comes Uber and manages to tell you exactly how far your Uber cab is that gives you greater agency and control over something that's inherently variable? Many times when I walk out of my. Out of my building, I'll see a taxicab, but I'll already be on Uber, right? Just out of habit, that's I'm instinctively calling an Uber cab. Okay, the last step of the hook, and then we'll take a bunch of questions, is the investment phase. The investment phase is where the user puts something into the product in anticipation of a future reward, a future benefit. Investments are in the hook model for two reasons. These are ways to increase the likelihood of the next pass in two ways. The first way is by loading the next trigger. By loading the next trigger. So, for example, when I send someone a message on WhatsApp, there's no immediate reward. I don't really get anything for that. There's no points, there's no badges, there's no leaderboard. I don't get anything by sending that message. What I'm getting from sending that message by investing in the platform is that I am loading the next trigger because I'm likely to get a reply. And that reply comes coupled with what's that meatball an example of. It's an example of an external trigger that prompts me to go through the hook once again. So loading the next trigger is all about something the user does, not some piece of spam from you, right? Something the user does to bring themselves back. So every time I pin, I like, I comment, I share, all of those things are investments in the platform that bring me back in the future. That's loading the next trigger. The next way that investments increase the likelihood of the next pass is by storing value. Storing value is a really, really big deal. Think about this for a minute. Everything in the physical world, right? Products made out of atoms, like these chairs, my laptop, this jacket, Everything in the physical world made out of atoms depreciates with wear and tear. The more we use it, the less it's worth depreciates. But habit forming technologies should do the opposite. Habit forming technologies should appreciate with use. They should get better the more we use them. And they do this because of this concept of. Of stored value. So for example, the more content I give to my Google Drive, the more valuable it becomes as my one and only cloud storage solution. The more data I give to mint.com or Pinterest, for example, the more I can do with those platforms, the more followers someone has on Twitter, the more valuable the site becomes as a way to reach my audience. So if tomorrow Twitter would say, hey, sorry, you're going to have to start paying for Twitter now, who's more likely to Pay? Someone with 10 followers or 10,000 followers? Of course it's going to be the person with 10,000 followers because they've stored all this value in the product in the form of their follower count. And finally, reputation. Reputation is a form of stored value that users can literally take to the bank. Because on sites like Upwork or ebay or Airbnb, my reputation dictates what I can charge for my goods and services. And how likely am I to leave even if a better product comes along. Kind of hard to do, right? It's a little bit sticky. Now, I'm not going to leave because I have this great reputation on one of these platforms. Which brings me to this cold, hard conclusion, folks. Listen carefully. It is not the best product that wins. There is no rule that I have ever seen written in Silicon Valley that says the best product wins. That ain't true. The truth is, it's not the best product that wins. It's the product that can capture the monopoly of the mind, that captures the market. Because it's through successive cycles, through these hooks that trigger action, reward, investment, that customer preferences are shaped, that our tastes are formed, and that our habits take hold. It's by answering these five fundamental questions of what's your internal trigger? What's the user's itch? What's the external trigger that prompts your user to action? What is the simplest behavior done in anticipation of that reward? How can you make it simpler? Is the reward fulfilling and yet leaves the user wanting more? And then finally, what's the bit of work done to increase the likelihood of the next pass through the hook? This is how we change consumer habits. Now, before I take questions, there's one more thing I'd like to address, and that is the morality of manipulation. I know what that nervous laughter is about. Then many of you, I'm guessing, during my presentation were thinking to yourselves, you know, is this okay? Is this ethical? Is this kosher to do to people, to use their hidden psychology to manipulate their behaviors? And if you had that reaction, I say, bravo. Because let's face it, anytime we are changing people's behavior to meet our ends, that, my friends, is a form of manipulation. So we need to be very careful about how we apply these techniques, because these technologies, these are the things people reach for. I'm sorry, these are the technologies people take to bed every night. It's the first thing they reach for in the morning before they even say hello to their loved ones. And as Ian Bogost warned us, our technologies are quite possibly becoming the cigarettes of this century. So what responsibility do the people in this room have? The engineers, the designers, the entrepreneurs? What responsibility do we have to use these tactics for good? Well, I encourage you to pick one of the world's problems to fix. That is one thing that we have no shortage of. And I believe that we can use these tactics. We can use behavioral design to help people live better lives and to prove that. I put my money where my mouth is. I want to show you one example. This is a company called Seven Cups. Seven Cups was started by a psychotherapist by the name of Glenn Moriarty. Glenn called me up a few years ago. I do these weekly office hours. You can sign up for them too if you'd like. Every week I have one hour where I do four 15 minute increments. Anybody can call me. If you read the book, we can talk about any questions you might have. So a couple years ago, Glenn calls me, finds me on my website and says, hey, I read your book. Here's what I want to do. Here's my problem. I know that there are lots of people who can't get to my practice. I offer these psychotherapy services. People can't get the therapy they need because it's too hard, right? Getting therapy is expensive, it's time consuming, there's social stigma, all kinds of difficulties to getting the therapy people need. So we built this hook. And here's the hook. The internal trigger is when someone's feeling down. A parent of a child with a disability, a soldier with ptsd, there's lots of things they could do to alleviate their psychological pain. This happens to be one of the few things they can do that's healthy for them, that helps them get better. And here's how, when they're feeling down, they pick up the phone. That's the internal trigger, feeling down. The action is to just open the app and for no money, they're connected to this variable reward of another human being on the line, a trained listener who is ready to help. That's variable reward of the tribe. The investment. Here's where it gets really interesting. The investment is every time someone calls in, someone uses this app to connect with somebody, they're offered the opportunity to be trained as a listener themselves. And it turns out those folks who get trained to be listeners themselves get dramatically better. In fact, there was a third party study that just found that people who use this service find it as effective as traditional psychotherapy. This one app conducts 180,000 sessions a week in 130 countries, talking about the amazing potential of using habits for good. So in closing, I hope that you will use these techniques to help people build healthy habits to change the world. Let me just borrow from the words of Gandhi to say that I hope that you build the change that you wish to see in the world. Thank you very much. And with that, I have a quick request. I have this little tradition that after my talks, I like to take a picture of the crowd. So can everyone hold up their phones for me for a second? Can you hold up your phones for my Instagram account? Let me just grab a quick shot of everybody here. Awesome. There's so many of you. I love it. Thank you. Beautiful, beautiful. The second reason I asked you to hold up your phones is that I just increased your ability. I just made it easier now that the phone is in your hand to go to this URL. See, I practice what I preach. Www.oquession2.us Notice it's not.com, it's opinion2us. Hold your phone horizontally, not vertically, but horizontally. You will see a very, very short survey. It's only five questions. I'm constantly tweaking this presentation. Would love to know what you thought of it. It's only five questions. It'll take you 30 seconds. As soon as you click Submit, you will be given a link to my SlideShare page where you can have all the slides you just saw. Now, that SlideShare page has a bunch of presentations on it. Okay? Feel free to look around, share them, whatever you'd like to do with them. The one you're looking for is hooked model. Okay? So when you click that SlideShare page, look for the one that says hooked model. That's the presentation that you just saw. And with that, do you think we can get a few mics? Mic stands up. Okay, I'll use this one. Terrific.

So why don't we. So that we can record the questions. Why don't we have folks who have a question line up over here and we'll set up the mic. So don't be shy. Come on up.

Can you guys hear me? Oh, I should also announce as well, by the way, when we finish the Q and A, I just got these made, these little hooks stickers for people's laptops so that you can remember a trigger action warrant investment. I brought a bunch. If anybody wants one after the Q and A, I've got them up here.

Thanks, Nir. Good stuff. The question earlier was about negative emotions versus the positive. And I think you went through something a little quickly that bears repeating. And that was the whole business of users who are doing okay, leave them alone. And if somebody attempts to come after them, it feels like spam. Can you expand on that a little bit? Yeah. You said that if somebody attempts to put an external trigger out there when they're not feeling a negative emotion, then it starts feeling like spam. Because I agree with that completely. I'd like to hear you say a few more remarks about that.

So the key to turning this on is using this little thing. All right, so the key to great external triggers is closely coupling them to the internal triggers. So understanding that point in the user's life when they feel the pain, when they need a solution for that pain point, is when you want to provide that external trigger. A good example of this, I use an app called Tripit. And Tripit will tell me, you know, the moment somehow they always try. They always can figure out when I'm on my way to the airport, when I'm checking on my flight, when I'm curious, is my flight going to leave on time? And I'm about to use the app somehow that's when I see that notification that says, guess what? Your flight's on time. And here's the gate. Right. That's an example of a beautiful way to couple the internal trigger with the external trigger. The moment in time when the user is most likely to need your solution.

Yes.

I was wondering how you can apply this to forming good habits on your own. Like one easy example is I'm trying to break the habit of eating at midnight. And you could break it down a number of ways. I found that eating gum is bad because it stimulates your hunger more. But then if you persevere too much and then short circuit, sometimes it's even worse than eating a little bit. And I was wondering if there's any objective way to break down like is, you know, is persevering actually, you know, changing your habit.

Yeah. So everything that I told you here is a certain classification of behaviors to change. Thank you for the question. If you graph out, follow me in your head, make a two by two in your head, four boxes on one axis put do and don't. Okay. So on the y axis, put do and don't. Okay. On the x axis, put high willpower and low willpower. And what you will see is that there are four different types of behavior. And what most gurus tend to do is that they say that one technique is good for all four of those behaviors. And I don't agree. Everything here that I taught you today is for low willpower doing behaviors. Facebook is easy to use. Snapchat is easy to use. It's something we do, not something we don't do. So these techniques to forming a habit are unique to that quadrant of behaviors. Doing behaviors that don't require much willpower. Low willpower doing behaviors, adult doing behavior is something completely different. Is something completely different. And so we don't. Because the psychology of how habits work, stopping to do a behavior, we can Use some of the same lessons, but we have to modify things. So, for example, we can use that same hook model to break bad habits by thinking to ourselves, how do we either remove the triggers, make the action more difficult, delay the rewards, or don't invest. So let me give you an example. I struggle with technology habits as much as anybody. My friend Gretchen Rubin once told me that research is me search. And I absolutely agree because I struggle with overusing technology too. And in fact, if you go on my blog and you type in unhooked, I give a 15 minute talk on how to do exactly this, how to stop your bad tech habits. And so let me give you an example of one bad tech habit that I tried to stop. So we're a close crowd, right? I can tell a personal story. Is that all right? Let me tell you a personal story. This is a little bit too personal for comfort, but I'll tell it anyway. My wife and I have been married for almost 15 years. Next month will be 15 years that we've been married. And we were finding, you know, we're not spring chickens anymore. And we were finding that night after night, we were checking our phones and we were on the Internet more than we should be together. Couples should be together. They should talk, they should do other things. And we weren't. So we had a problem because tech was infiltrating this area of our life we didn't like. So I study habits. I wasn't happy with how this particular habit got control of this particular part of our life. And so I looked at the Hooke model and I tried to figure out how I could break this unwanted habit. So here's what I did. I went to the hardware store and I got a $10 outlet timer. This outlet timer plugs into any outlet, and whatever you plug into that outlet timer will turn off at a certain time of night or day. I set it to 10pm Plugged in my Internet router so that every night at 10pm my Internet in my house shuts off. So what does that do? It made the action, the action phase of the hook, that, that mindless Instagramming or Facebooking or whatever that I was doing at 10 o' clock at night. Emailing, typically, it made me stop for a minute and say, oh, the Internet cut off. It broke that mindlessness and made me become mindful of that behavior. Now, of course, if I really wanted to, I could go get my cell phone that has an Internet connection, or I could unplug the Internet timer and put it back in right? The Point is that it just stopped me. I made that behavior just hard enough that it made me stop and think for a second, is this behavior serving me or is it hurting me? So that's one particular technique. Now, there's lots of other techniques that we can do in all four of those different things to stop bad behaviors. It's about breaking hooks. And let me tell you, I'm as much for an advocate about building healthy habits in our lives as I am for removing bad habits. Many of them caused by the same technologies. Right. So I'm very much an advocate for figuring out ways to analyze these. These technologies to make sure they serve us and remove them, Remove these bad habits where they don't serve us.

Hi, Nir. Yeah, so first up, a really good presentation. I've read your book, so it's awesome that I get to stand here and ask you questions. So the point is, like, I'm really interested in whatever you spoke today, and it makes a lot of sense. You know, like, I always feel technology can definitely be used to make people live more, you know, fulfilling life. So the point is, like, I have two kind of two questions on two different fronts. So the first thing is I'm a student and I'll be graduating this December, and I'm consider, like, I'm going back. I was here for my summer intern. I'm going back to school, and I'm considering to take human computer interaction subject. So I guess my first question is, as a student, how can I apply this great concept that you just discussed with us? Like, I know there are a lot of product managers and designers here, and the other question that I had for you is, like, what other kind of. Like what other kind of carrier can someone consider when someone gets super interested in all of the stuff that you just mentioned? So is it just product managers or product designers or what other kind of career can I consider? And as a student, how can I apply all this stuff that you just spoke about?

Well, it's hard for me to give specific advice for your interest, but I will say I think the role of the designer in our community has really changed. It used to be designer, was a graphic designer, and then it became an interaction designer, and then an experienced designer. And now a designer really has to take on this PM role of understanding the business and the voice of the customer. The designer's job has really expanded, and I think it's going to continue to expand so that figuring out behavioral design is going to be part of that career set of that skill set. Because fundamentally, what we're doing is changing human behavior. And when we understand these concepts. The point of this model is that at my last company, we had this constant problem. We were very much bought into Lean Startup. Everybody uses Lean Startup or at least knows about Lean Startup. Well, we bought Lean Startup, Hook, Line and Syncr. We loved it. Right? And I think by and large, it's much, much better than the way we used to build software of waterfalls and never talking to the customer. Lean Startup is way, way better. The problem we always had with Lean Startup was that of the three parts of the Lean Startup model, build, measuring and learning, the building was the hard part. Right? Building is where the blood, sweat and tears all go and money all go. So the problem we always had was, what do we build? Do we build what the hippo says we should build? Does everybody know who the hippo is? The highest paid person's opinion. Do we build what the hippo says we should build? Do we build what the loudest customer says we should build? Do we, God forbid, build what the VC says we should build? Right. Which feature? Why should we build this one versus that one? We would do points. We would do this, but it was all based on guesses. This model is intense. We can't skip Lean Startup methodology. We still have to do build, measure, learn. We're still going to get stuff wrong. The hope is that we can be less than wrong. We can be wrong less often by saying, let's take these features that we could build and ask ourselves, how does this fit into our hook? Does this strengthen the weak parts of our hook or the missing parts of our hook? That's the whole idea behind this concept, is to allow us a way to prioritize which features we build now, which features we build later. And I think that's a critical skill for certainly for PMs and for designers.

Just a follow up question. So this would fall on the user research part of product management, right?

Yeah, yeah. Or product design.

So is this an ongoing thing or is it something you just get figured out before you start whatever your product is?

Yeah. So there's two places that this is, I think, most helpful. The first place is before you've done anything, right? Before you've invested any time and money into design, certainly any time and effort into code. It behooves you to take out a pen and paper and write down what your hook is. Right. That costs nothing, just a little bit of time. And what you will generally find is that one of these four pieces is deficient for your business. So I think you should think about all four of these steps in the hook model before you build anything. If it needs to be habit forming. The other phase that this is useful, and this is where I tend to get most of my consulting calls, is we have to have a habit. Our business model depends on a habit. But people aren't coming back what's going on? Right. How do we fix this product? That is not habit forming. What's going on. And so that's when I. And that's. So that's another tool.