Using the Hook Model for user research

The Hook Model was first introduced in the book called “Hooked” by Nir Eyal, an Israeli-born American author, lecturer and investor. It is a thinking model to be used to build Habit-Forming Products. The book covers topics like how habits are formed using the hooked model and few examples of companies who successfully applied it to hook their users.

In this blog post we will talk about — What the Hook model is and how it works, How User Researchers and the entire team can use this Model in their Design Process.

How does the Hook Model Work?

The Hook Model is divided into four phases. They are namely — Trigger, Action, Variable Reward and Investment. These are the phases through which any user must go through in a product or a service to get hooked to the product or you can say keep using the product again and again.

Trigger — This is the first phase of the habit-forming loop where the user first feels that there is a need. A need for the fulfillment of some need or a desire. For example, when we don’t eat for a long time we feel hungry. Here the need is Food and Hunger is the trigger which tells us that we should eat. Similarly, if we are in need of money we get financially stressed and start looking for ways to earn using Google search. Here money is the need and financial stress is the trigger. For each trigger, there is a cause behind it. Let us consider the first example where the trigger is hunger. Let us do a root cause analysis to find out the real cause for the trigger by using the 5Why Analysis Method.

Why are you hungry?

Because I have not eaten anything since yesterday.

Why have you not eaten anything since yesterday?

Because I’m broke right now, no money to buy food.

Why are you broke?

Month end, and I’ve spent all my money somewhere else.

Why didn’t you save some money?

Because I have a very bad habit of spending off my money early. I can’t save money, no matter how much I have I…