Nir Eyal

As infinite distractions compete for our attention, companies are learning to master novel tactics to stay relevant in users’ minds.

I looked for insights from academia, drawing upon consumer psychology, human-computer interaction, and behavioral economics research.

building habit-forming products is indeed a superpower. If used irresponsibly, bad habits can quickly degenerate into mindless, zombielike addictions.

Habits are one of the ways the brain learns complex behaviors.

Habit-forming products change user behavior and create unprompted user engagement. The aim is to influence customers to use your product on their own, again and again, without relying on overt calls to action such as ads or promotions. Once a habit is formed, the user is automatically triggered to use the product during routine events such as wanting to kill time while waiting in line.

Once the compulsion to play is in place and the desire to progress in the game increases, converting users into paying customers is much easier.

many innovations fail because consumers irrationally overvalue the old while companies irrationally overvalue the new.

Because old habits die hard and new products or services need to offer dramatic improvements to shake users out of old routines

A company can begin to determine its product’s habit-forming potential by plotting two factors: frequency (how often the behavior occurs) and perceived utility (how useful and rewarding the behavior is in the user’s mind over alternative solutions).

No matter how much utility is involved, infrequent behaviors remain conscious actions and never create the automatic response that is characteristic of habits.