In this video we're going to talk about user habits. This is a really important concept for thinking about innovative new solutions that change the way users actually do things. Which is most meaningful products, to some degree. In the old scale friendly way of doing things, we had features. And these features delivered certain benefits to our customer. And we assumed that we had this kind of perfectly rational, perfectly informed customer that if we were saving them $5.37 on every grocery purchase, well, of course they would go do that. In the innovation friendly world, we more so kind of go where the customer is. And the reality is we do not have perfectly informed, perfectly rational customers. A lot of what we do has an emotional basis, and it has to do with habits and circumstances. And we discover that stuff like a designer and we test it like a scientist. That's some of the methods you've been learning here. And if you are familiar with the resurgence, I guess you would say of behavioral economics, where we look at not just the simple economics, microeconomics, but we pair that with neuroscience and psychology, this take on how users behave, it kind of parallels that. And a very good tool for doing this that's extremely practical is Nir Eyal's Hook Framework. Any product manager can take this and sketch out a set of user habits in around 20 minutes. It has these four phases, four steps. The Trigger, something that makes us want to do something, take action. And what we're looking for is this reward, which may be variable and that's more stimulating. And then over the course of using this product over and over again, we invest ourselves in it. So let's step through these four steps. The trigger could be internal or external. An internal trigger is something that I internally have, a sort of remembrance or a desire. And an external trigger is something that comes to me externally and reminds me to do something, take an action. With Facebook, an internal trigger would be our protagonist here feels bored and alone so they go and horse around on Facebook to gratify themselves. And the external version of that would be that they get an email or a notice of some sort that says, your friends have posted a bunch of stuff, go look at it. Or people have been liking your photo, go see how many people and who. These are examples of triggers. Take a minute and think about for your product that you're working on right now, what is the trigger? What causes somebody to initiate their use of it? Let's look at Enable Quiz, what might be some triggers for Enable Quiz? Well, when it comes to the task of let's say, Helen's already set up a quiz. And she now is using it as she brings in a series of candidates to screen for an open position they have. Well, an internal trigger would be Helen thinks, I got a couple candidates coming in this afternoon. Let me make sure I have the quizzes ready. And she can also load for herself an external trigger in the meeting reminder that comes up from her Google Calendar or whatever. She could set a note for herself, hey, don't forget to set up the quizzes. That would be an example of an external trigger that Helen creates for herself. Triggers lead to some kind of action. With Facebook, all we do is scroll and we get to see stuff. And when we put a photo on Facebook, we'd mostly take a photo with our camera, and we post it to Facebook. One interesting thing here is what happened to this activity, this action of posting photos when mobile phones with cameras became prevalent? Well, it lowered a lot, right? Because before the threshold of action was really high. You had to take photos with a digital camera, get it over to your computer, hook it up, drag the photos out, post them to Facebook. Massively more work than just snapping a photo and loading it on Facebook natively with your phone. And that is really your job as a product manager. Is to think about for every major habit that you're creating on the part of the customer how do you continually lower that barrier of action and make it easy, less laborious, for the customer? For the example, we just looked at with Enable Quiz where Helen's prepping this quiz, what is the action that she takes? Well, she's gotta make sure she's logged into Enable Quiz. She has to have the right quiz up. And then she has to have some kind of linkage of what candidate she's administering what quiz to. And she probably wants to prep that in advance. Something that the product manager for Enable Quiz might want to consider as they assess their priorities is if this action is important and kind of a pain for her, could they load the candidate names from someplace else? Like Helen's calendar or some external system that they have? And is that a worthwhile investment in the product to lower that barrier of action? All right, we've looked at the first half of this Hook Framework. We've introduced it, great way to think about your product. In the next video, we're going to look at the second half of the Hook Framework.
