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Recently, I've experienced extraordinary pressure working on our WeChat mini-game project. Despite having developed similar games previously and focusing on lightweight casual formats, I can't shake the feeling that our current game lacks engagement. Multiple rounds of internal testing followed by adjustments have yielded minimal improvements.
Before admitting defeat, I discovered a book titled "Hooked" published in 2013. It's remarkable how its design principles remain brilliant and relevant—I read the 2017 Chinese translation. The book primarily addresses product development rather than specifically targeting game creation. I suspect that expert game developers possess more sophisticated techniques for crafting addictive experiences, placing such strategies beyond the reach of novices like myself.
Hooked: The logic of the four major products that allow users to develop habits
The framework consists of four fundamental elements: trigger, action, reward, and investment. This book serves as a practical guide for product development. By methodically enhancing each step through testing, products can effectively "hook" users, cultivate habitual usage patterns, and transform casual visitors into loyal, long-term customers who provide sustained value.
The Power of Habit: Transforming Your Product from Optional to Essential
Neuroscientists have identified that the basal ganglia region of the human brain manages unconscious behaviors. Our conditioned reflexes are stored here as habits, effectively freeing our conscious mind to focus elsewhere. When the brain establishes these automatic shortcuts and stops actively deliberating next steps, habit formation occurs.
From a business perspective, habit formation represents tremendous value. Users who develop habits around your product become reliable, continuous revenue sources throughout their customer lifecycle. Warren Buffett's insight is particularly relevant here: "A company's strength can be measured by how much pain it causes when raising prices." Habitual users will tolerate price increases because the perceived value outweighs the additional cost. These satisfied users naturally become advocates, driving viral growth through recommendations. Once users develop true product dependency, competitors struggle to present viable alternatives.
This dynamic creates natural monopolies. Disrupting established user habits requires revolutionary innovation, as existing behaviors present the greatest obstacle to adopting new products. When a company successfully embeds its product into users' routines, it achieves near-irreplaceability—creating a form of user dependence that shapes corporate strategy.
Companies aiming to build habit-forming products must prioritize two critical factors. First, frequency—how often the behavior occurs; and second, perceived utility—the clear advantages and benefits users recognize compared to alternatives. Success requires addressing genuine pain points while consistently increasing engagement rates.
Trigger: Prompting User Action
The development of product habits doesn't happen overnight but through consistent, repeated use. This process requires clear behavioral triggers that prompt specific actions. External triggers include paid advertising, PR-generated recommendations, and various marketing activities—categorized as paid triggers and earned triggers—that convert prospects into users. Word-of-mouth between users represents an interpersonal trigger that further expands reach.
The organic trigger—when existing users willingly return to the product repeatedly—is crucial for habit formation.
Internal triggers differ fundamentally from external ones. They emerge when users have integrated the product into their daily lives, allowing emotional states to prompt product usage. This deep connection between user and product requires weeks or months of conditioning before internal triggers reliably prompt action. While external triggers build initial habits, internal triggers cultivate loyal advocates.
Users engage with products that address specific pain points, making deep user insight essential. Understanding users' challenges allows emotional triggers to be embedded in their decision-making process—this is the critical installation trigger. Since users rarely articulate their emotional motivations explicitly, we must study the underlying reasons for their actions: why they use the product, where and when they use it, and which emotions drive engagement. The most effective approach is to adopt the user's perspective, imagining detailed usage scenarios: the context, companions, and emotional states involved. This empathetic understanding reveals users' true emotional needs—what we commonly call scenario marketing.
Action: The Direct Response to Anticipated Rewards
Dr. Fogg's behavior model from Stanford University's Persuasion Technology Research Laboratory elegantly explains why people take specific actions through the formula B=MAT, where B represents behavior, M represents motivation, A represents ability, and T represents trigger. If any component is insufficient, the action will likely not occur.
According to Dr. Fogg, three core motivations drive human action: pursuing pleasure while avoiding pain, seeking hope while avoiding fear, and establishing identity while avoiding rejection. However, motivation alone merely addresses the "itch point" without necessarily triggering product usage—ability is equally crucial.
Dennis Hauptley, author of "The Easy Three-step Method of Innovation," breaks down product innovation into three fundamental steps: understanding why people use a product, mapping the necessary user journey, and then systematically eliminating all non-essential steps until the process is maximally simplified. The principle is clear: simpler products gain wider adoption.
Fogg identifies six elements affecting task difficulty:
- Time: Duration required to complete the activity
- Money: Financial investment needed
- Physical effort: Bodily exertion required
- Mental effort: Cognitive resources consumed
- Social deviance: How others perceive the activity
- Non-routine nature: How much the activity differs from established patterns
When addressing motivation versus ability challenges, prioritize ability. Enhancing user motivation is typically resource-intensive and expensive. Users prefer solutions they can understand instantly and complete with minimal effort—just as clients favor straightforward project deliverables over complex ones.
The author further introduces several behavioral heuristics that companies can leverage to stimulate motivation and enhance product usability. These shortcuts, based on past experiences, include the scarcity effect, environmental effect, anchoring effect, and coupon effect—all unconventional ways to influence user decision-making.
Changeable Rewards: Satisfying User Needs While Stimulating Continued Engagement
Rewards—whether material, virtual, or psychological—are essential to product engagement. You may successfully trigger users to take action, but without meaningful rewards, they will eventually abandon your product. Research shows that it's not the reward itself that drives action, but rather the anticipation and desire for that reward. Humans and animals alike are drawn to novelty and unpredictability. When outcomes become predictable, the brain loses interest. By implementing variable reward mechanisms, products maintain user interest until usage becomes habitual.
Variable rewards fall into three categories: social rewards (satisfaction derived from others' responses), achievement rewards (accomplishment from completing tasks), and self-rewards (intrinsic psychological satisfaction). An important consideration is that variable rewards aren't necessarily monetary. Users often engage with products for intrinsic self-rewards rather than practical benefits. When implementing gamified elements like leaderboards, badges, or point systems, thoroughly understanding user motivations is crucial—sometimes success depends less on cost or feature sophistication and more on aligning the product with users' underlying motivations.
A critical principle is respecting user autonomy. To influence behavior and habit formation, products must remain within the user's control, allowing voluntary rather than forced engagement.
Unpredictability is key to maintaining sustained interest. When users can predict all possible patterns, boredom inevitably follows. Products that fail to provide variable outcomes will eventually lose their audience.
Selecting the appropriate reward mechanism requires deep understanding of why users develop habitual product dependence. This necessitates genuine insight into users' pain points, usage scenarios, and emotional needs—circling back to the trigger installation process. Pain points remain the foundation of everything.
Investment: Fostering Loyalty Through User Commitment
Investment represents the final phase of the addiction model. After users experience the trigger, take action, and receive rewards, encouraging their investment in the product becomes crucial for habit formation.
Developing this commitment begins with attitude transformation. For a behavior to become habitual, it must occur frequently and demonstrate clear utility. On the perception scale, user attitudes gradually shift upward until the new behavior becomes automatic. The more time and effort users invest in a product or service, the more they value it. Since existing habits create barriers, new products must either disrupt old patterns or enter the market through entirely new channels addressing fresh pain points.
Three psychological principles influence this process:
- People consistently overvalue their own efforts and contributions
- People strive for consistency with their past actions and decisions
- People actively avoid cognitive dissonance
These principles shape future behavior—the more we invest in something, the more valuable we perceive it, and the more likely we are to maintain consistency with our past choices. Ultimately, we adjust our preferences to avoid cognitive dissonance. This psychological transformation, known as the "decoration effect," prompts us to proactively modify our attitudes and beliefs. These cognitive shifts lead to behavioral changes that transform our perception of products and services we use.
The investment stage requires users to make small, progressive commitments to the product. These modest investments increase the likelihood of continued usage and complete the addiction cycle. The key is gradual implementation—starting with minimal commitment.
Value storage represents another crucial element. What's being stored includes user-generated content, usage data, social media interactions, attention, reputation, and even specific skills acquired through the platform.
Like all phases of the addiction model, the investment stage demands careful implementation. Product designers must ensure users have sufficient motivation and ability to complete the requested actions. If users fail to engage as intended during this phase, designers may be asking too much too soon. Product design at this stage must align precisely with user motivation and capabilities to avoid counterproductive outcomes.
The most effective approach is decomposing desired user investments into progressively challenging micro-tasks. Begin with simple, accessible actions before gradually increasing complexity through continuous model cycles. This explains why marketing tools like Task Centers typically segment activities into beginner tasks, daily tasks, and promotional tasks—reducing barriers while guiding users through incremental progression.
This completes one addiction cycle, but a single iteration is insufficient. The model requires repeated engagement until habitual usage develops. Each final investment must seamlessly incorporate the trigger for the next cycle. To retain users effectively, habit-forming technology leverages this cyclical process to increase product value with each iteration. Through continuous addiction cycles, the connection between users and products strengthens progressively. Users increasingly rely on the product to solve their problems until new habits and behaviors become firmly established in their daily routines.
Addiction model and Moral Manipulation
This is a paragraph of guidelines about what can be done and what can't be done. There is nothing to share. Don't use human nature to do dark things.
Embracing Testing and Opportunity Identification
The addiction model serves as a valuable diagnostic tool for evaluating product potential. It can filter out concepts with limited habit-forming capacity and identify improvement areas in existing products. This diagnostic approach is particularly valuable when your product attracts significant advertising investment but fails to generate user engagement.
The first critical question in habit testing is identifying your habitual users. Products with higher usage frequency have greater potential for habit formation. Note that we're identifying habitual users, not target demographic groups. Establish clear usage frequency metrics—for example, users who engage 5 times daily or 20 times weekly qualify as habitual users. These benchmarks should be realistic and objectively determined.
How many habitual users constitute a sufficient test sample? The threshold is 5%. If you can't identify this percentage of users meeting your frequency criteria, your product likely requires redesign. For instance, if users typically engage only once every three days, this frequency is insufficient for habit formation. However, if 5% of users meet your established frequency threshold, analyze their origins, the features that attract them, and the problems your product genuinely solves for them.
With these insights, refocus on your product and identify methods to guide new users toward the behavioral paths followed by loyal customers. This might involve updating registration channels, modifying content, removing underperforming features, or enhancing existing capabilities. This testing approach resembles growth hacking—mapping the complete user journey from acquisition to monetization, then optimizing conversion rates at each stage to achieve exponential growth.
Seek new opportunities along three vectors: emerging behaviors, enabling technologies, and interface changes. Innovative products often begin in niche markets but can achieve mainstream adoption if they address universal needs. Infrastructure advancements provide the foundation for significant waves of innovation. As these waves gather momentum, enabling technologies and platforms create opportunities for novel applications, eventually achieving large-scale penetration and customer adoption. In certain domains, new technologies accelerate the addiction model cycles, making them faster, more frequent, and more valuable. Identifying these areas reveals substantial opportunities for developing habit-forming products. As interaction terminals rapidly evolve, novel interfaces create new relationship opportunities with users. Major shifts in human-technology interaction consistently generate valuable opportunities. Interface improvements that substantially reduce effort requirements typically trigger explosive technology adoption.
Summarize and summarize
Because this book is a practical manual, I made a mind map summary.(Chinese Version 🙂)
