How many of you open Instagram as the first App in the morning and also as the last used app before sleep? I think most of you! (even I do the same). So the question is, how did Instagram manage to build this habit for us?
In his book Hooked, Nir Eyal describes a model using which we can build habit-forming products. Let’s see how Instagram utilises the Hooked model to keep us hooked on it.
Trigger
How can we spark a user’s interaction with our product? We can use:
- Internal Triggers: Generated within users themselves. Instagram’s users have an inherent desire for social validation and to stay connected to friends. This creates a sense of FOMO, driving the user to open Instagram frequently.
- External Triggers: Coming from an outside source to the user. Instagram sends a push notification when a connection posts after a long time. This nudges the users to open the app to check the content. Moreover, push notifications of messages and likes on the posts build a greater desire to open the app.
Action
Once the user has opened the product, we should nudge the users to take simple actions on the product. Instagram makes this super simple for the users by providing easily scrollable feeds with the content being powered as per the user’s affinity. Gestures like double tapping to like a post and animations of expanding the comment box while viewing a post make the user perform an action easily.
Variable Reward
Once a user has performed an action, providing feedback is important to keep the user engaged and make them come to the product again. For instance, after the user has created a post, they would seek social validation in the form of likes and comments from the connections.
Investment
As users will be performing actions and get variable rewards, they would spend more time on the app. This would result in investments, maybe in the form of data, thus making it difficult for the users to switch to the competitors. The social network and user profile built by the users are the investments which would keep the users hooked to Instagram for a long period of time.
Book a slot for interactions
https://topmate.io/jayant_jain7/
Tags:
Strategy