Hooked Model

Before we start — Who should care and what should you use Hooked Model for

Hooked Model is designed to answer the question of how users become sticky users of an app/product. In other words, Hooked Model can be used to improve your product-market-fit, drive better organic user acquisitions, engagements, and retention rates. It is a structured way of thinking for product people to build better products.

Area that Hooked Model can’t explain — suggested supplement to Hooked Model

Hooked Model helps you build better products, but it does not guide you through different stages of a product’s life cycle. Area that an early stage product should focus, despite building a better product, is different from a mature product.

Therefore, I find Andrew Chen’s The Cold Start Problem a good supplementary book to The Hooked Model. Combining the structures from these 2 books helped me come up with a very good thinking structure on products. Check it out!

1. Trigger

2. Action

Triggers are designed to initiate actions by users. But having successfully designed triggers does not lead to 100% actions, and Fogg Behavior Model states that product designers should keep 3 elements in mind.

B = MAT (A given behavior will occur when motivation, ability, and trigger are present at the same time)

Motivation

Motivation defines the level of desire to take that action. And there are 3 kinds of motivations that all humans share.

• Seek pleasure and avoid pain

examples: video games, TikTok

• Seek hope and avoid fear

examples: Career consulting/college application consulting

• Seek social acceptance and avoid rejection

examples: social media

Ability

After understanding the reason people use your product, your product team should be trying to make the product easier to use. Investments on improving users’ ability have the highest return for all products. Here are what products should also optimize on to improve users ability to use the product.

• Time

How long does it take for a user to complete an action? Checking e-mail instead of physical mailbox lowers time required. Chinese products are big fans of showing a 3–5 sec advertisement when a user first opens the app. They are trading off users’ ability to use the product for monetization. When you open 1 point 3 acre(一亩三分地), the app gives you a 3–5 sec intro to the app. It’s not even an advertisement. It is not a smart choice as the app trades off users’ ability to use the app for nothing.

• Money

How much money does it cost a user to use your product? Minimizing fiscal cost can drive actions, that’s why business model of successful social apps never relies on app purchases. That’s also why I think the monthly fee model adopted by Datacamp is superior to that of Coursera. Had Coursera adopted the monthly fee model, it could drive better engagement results.

• Physical effort (amount of labor involved)

Twitter’s 140-character message limitation increased mass users’ ability to create and share, because although mass users have limited ability at creating traditional blog, all of them share the motivation of self-expression and seeking social acceptance.

Another great example is most modern products have removed the “next page” button, because such buttons raise users’ physical effort while using products.

• Brain cycles (mental effort and focus required to take an action)

TikTok is a zero-brain-cycle product — all you need to do is swipe down and like videos. This massively improves users’ ability to use TikTok, as they don’t need to browse and choose which video to watch because TikTok does the job for you. In the past YouTube incorporated recommendation algorithms to lower brain cycles, but as a user you still need to pick from the recommended ones. TikTok took a step further to remove the final step and it’s a proven success.

Social deviance (how accepted the behavior is by others)

Xiaohongshu first originated as a platform for users to share expensive stuff they purchased. It turned out to be a fantastic pivot, as motivations exist, but it’s not a well accepted behavior on platforms like WeChat Moments.

Xiaohongshu recently also incorporates features such as “hide my posts from potential acquaintances”, “hide my posts from nearby users”. These features clearly serves the purpose of minimizing social deviance to improve the ability of users posting on it.

Another great example is Facebook Dating’s “don’t match me to friends” algorithm.

Heuristics

Product designers can utilize many of the hundreds of heuristics to increase the likelihood of their desired action. Examples are scarcity effect, endowed progress effect.

3. Variable Reward

Rewards, especially variable rewards, are essentially a product’s core value propositions. Users are triggered, motivated, and performed actions on your product, and in return, products offer variable rewards that satisfy them, encouraging them to repeat the loop again.

Rewards of the Tribe

It directly matches the motivation to seek social acceptance. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and several other apps collectively provide people with powerful social rewards on a variable schedule. Not every post gets you 100 likes — some are lower, and some might go up to 2k likes — that very fact let users keep coming back and wanting more.