Habit-friendly design for lasting engagement

Out of all the apps on your smartphone, how many do you use every day? How many have you continued to use after the first week? Out of all the products and services we use, the ones that stick are the ones we’ve built habits around using.

Many ideas fail to take the psychology of human habits into account.

Luckily, Nir Eyal’s HOOK model shows us how they work, so we can design things that people can easily build habits around.

Worksheet

Here’s a worksheet I developed as a simple cheat sheet for designing with the HOOK model, whether on a macro (architecture) level, or micro (interaction) level.

Workshop

I give a workshop on this where we look at the HOOK habit model, break out into teams, and go step by step to design for a sustainable habit. It’s meant for UX designers, entrepreneurs, developers, and anyone who wants to build engaging relationships with people.

Reference

• Hooked – Nir Eyal
• Hooked Workbook – Nir Eyal
• Americans’ circle of confidantes has shrunk to two people – Cornell Chronicle
• Understanding individual human mobility patterns – Nature
• ComScore US Mobile App Report – ComScore
• Photo: Webdagene 2014. Nir Eyal. – Eirik Helland Urke
• BJ Fogg’s Website
• BJ Fogg’s Behavior Model

Further Reading

• Ethical Design Manifesto – Ind.ie
• Seductive Interaction Design: Creating Playful, Fun, and Effective User Experiences – Stephen P. Anderson
• Emotional Design: Why we love (or hate) everyday things – Don Norman
• Webs of Influence: The Secret Strategies That Make Us Click – Nathalie Nahaï
• Thinking, Fast and Slow – Daniel Kahneman
• Switch – Chip and Dan Heath