How is Hooked Model Applicable to Our Mobile Apps?

The best technologies are the ones that improve the human condition. These are like reading the whole life down to the sign that we’re dealing with, which seems to be so true. Everyone adores technology only to the extent they are usable – help to keep pace with the current times, converting analog to digital, set and track goals. The incredible extent to which the younger generation relies on the most modern gadgets to set personal goals, and stay motivated is increasing proportionally. Your cell-phones have already replaced your camera, your calendar, your alarm clock, it has great power for good but don’t let it replace your family.

Some apps dispose of the users to tracking everything from social media like HabitBull, Time Planner, Coach.me, Strides, Google Goals, Habit Streak, Facebook, Gmail, WhatsApp and many more.

What Triggers the Use of Mobile Apps?

Our day-to-day behaviour (that may be good or bad), habit-forming

So much of what we do with contextual cues in the environment triggering the release of a pre-programmed set of behaviours that happen largely outside our conscious awareness. There are times when we reserve our brainpower for more pressing tasks but still manage to escape and sneak-peak into not-so-important ones like checking posts, tweets, recent photos, updating status on various social media apps.

But effective habit formation has got nothing to do with the goals. The real power still lies in cue-based habits. Relying on cues in the environment – it could be physical, natural, social, technological and likewise.

Here’s the Theory Behind the Discussion

There is this beautiful Hooked-model based on the theory by Nir Eyal.

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(Image Source: Nir Eyal, The Hooked Model)

Developers need to analyze user’s behaviour like search and browse history and then start creating hooks from their experience. Here is how to create a hook-model to user onboarding:

Find Trigger Moments – This might include external triggers and internal triggers.

• External Triggers: These include the push notifications, email reminders that prompt you to take action like “Go check your mail”, “oh there is a message on WhatsApp or Facebook”, triggers from Google weather or Google Maps and likewise.

• Internal Triggers: These can be intuitions, a feeling or an emotion that drives us to take action. Like when I feel lonely, let me check my Facebook or watch Tarot Card Reading on YouTube or open an app to check daily horoscope. It is the point when a user has a mental association with your product and they believe that this is going to reduce their anxiety level.

Such triggers require sufficient motivation and ability to succeed thereby increasing the user’s ability and motivation.

External Triggers That qualify For User Onboarding

Some of the external triggers that developers may use during user on-boarding: empty states, product tours and emails.

• Catch the users by enabling a call to action and potential benefits in the form of periodic highlights on their mobile devices.

• Developers need to delight their customers by giving them their “aha” moment, then redirecting their attention to a key feature to trigger the Hook.

• Virtual Product Tours: Giving virtual product tours to acquaint the user with the app features, various sections. All these tricks draw attention towards a core feature, simultaneously triggering a user to take appropriate action and try it themselves.

• Another method of hooking the users back into your product can be to pull them via emails. Choosing an appropriate repetitive action like typing a search query in Google, Twitter has a limit to writing maximum 280 characters in one tweet, YouTube makes use of triggers to make you simply watch the videos as frequently as possible.

• All this sums up to making use of simple, repeatable actions in your product or application that will provide value to users. Additionally setting goals and keeping users motivated like a celebratory email after successful completion of a quiz or successful subscription, treating them in a magically special way will go a long way and tempt them to make a repeat purchase. Such simple delight features are created to share the excitement and create a habit among users. This eventually lures them to come for more.

• Gamification of certain features also provides opportunities to invest.

Precisely: How Hooked Model is being used in Mobile Apps?

It could be really hard to tear yourself up, more precisely “quarantine” yourself from your mobile phones, even for a few hours. With social media at our fingertips, we’re constantly distracted by the outside world and disrupt our everyday business. Unknowingly, this is a business opportunity for some others who count and track each of our activities. Counterintuitive to this, other businesses do have applications that stop users from such distractions: Offtime, Moment, BreakFree, Flipd, AppDetox, Stay on Task etc.

Trigger, action, reward and investment are the four core principles of the hooked model that drive the habit driven behaviour of any habit-building app (especially, social media). The way these principles are followed define user consistency with the system. To know more about how to make your mobile app a daily habit for your audience, talk to our experts and ensure users get variable rewards which would push them to invest progressively on your app.