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Tell us about your work: what is it about, and how can it be helpful to people and societies?
NE: The premise of my, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, is that the products we find most engaging have a basic design pattern called a hook. Hooks are experiences that connect users’ problems to a company’s product with enough frequency to form a habit. Hooks are in all sorts of products we use with little or no conscious thought. Over time, customers form associations that spark unprompted engagement, in other words, habits. They move from needing external triggers like ads and other calls to action, to self-triggering through associations with internal triggers.
Use of the product is typically associated with an emotional pain point, an existing routine, or situation. For example, what product do people use when they’re feeling lonely and seek connection? Facebook, of course! What do we do when we feel uncertain? We Google! What about when we’re bored? Many people open YouTube, Pinterest, check sports scores, or stock prices—there are lots of products that address the pain of boredom.
In the four-step process I describe in Hooked, I detail how products use hooks to create these powerful associations. Hooks start with a trigger, then an action, then a reward, and finally an investment. Through successive cycles through these hooks, user habits are formed.
Your book presents a simple model about how to increase user engagement with technology. Why do you think it was such a tremendous success?
I think many people today have a sneaking suspicion they are being influenced through their technology, and of course they're right. Many people want to better understand how tech products change our behavior by leveraging some of these techniques I describe in Hooked.
There's also been an explosion of people who want to use these technologies for good. They want to help people live better lives by helping them build healthy habits. It's never been a better time to build habit-forming technologies that can truly improve the lives of more people than right now. The technologies we can use to touch people all over the world are amazing and there's no reason we can't use the same techniques used by the social media and gaming companies to build healthy habits.
What do you think are the biggest opportunities and the biggest threats?
I'm generally very optimistic. It's easy to lose sight of all the amazing ways technology has improved the world. You don't often hear stories on the news about how fewer people are in poverty, fewer are dying from disease, and more people are educated than ever before in human history. Nearly all the credit for the improvement in the standards of living seen around the world is technology-facilitated cost reductions.
Now of course there are downsides to every technological revolution. The agricultural revolution gave us all sorts of troubles as did the industrial revolution so of course there will be threats with the changes we're seeing today. The important thing is to remember that humans are incredibly good at adapting to change. As long as the change doesn't happen too fast, I'm very long on humanities ability to figure out how to deal with the bad aspects of whatever might come at us.
How do you think policy-makers can use your work and insights to improve the design of public policies?
I'm not a policy expert by any means, but I think there are myriad ways governments could improve people's lives by considering the principles of behavioral design I describe. Far too many things we want people to do, and that people want to do for themselves, are much too difficult. Paying your taxes for example, in the U.S. at least, is ridiculously difficult. Why wouldn't the government make paying taxes easier so it can collect more revenue? There are elementary principles we could use that would easily pay for themselves. I get very frustrated with all the missed opportunities I see. Unfortunately, most people in government still use carrots and sticks to try and change behavior but there are much easier and cheaper ways to motivate mutually beneficial behaviors. Simple things like making "calls to action" easily visible and easy to carry out have been shown to be very effective and cost nothing.
What changes would you introduce to Facebook to improve user experience?
As I mentioned in my recent article for The Atlantic and on my blog, I want companies like Facebook to help people they know are addicted. It turns out that's actually a very small percentage of people; I think there's a moral imperative to help people who want to stop using, but can't because they're struggling with addiction.
However, for most people, Facebook is not an addiction. If anything, it's possibly a distraction and in that case, it's our personal responsibility to cut back use if it's not doing us good.
