Building Effective Hooks

The diagram above shows the Hook Cycle and the experiences any product should bring its users through. I won’t go into much detail on each phase but by asking yourself the 5 questions below, it should get your brain juice flowing on what you can possibly do.

What do users really want? What pain is your product relieving? (Internal trigger) What brings users to your service? (External trigger) What is the simplest action users take in anticipation of reward, and how can you simplify your product to make this action easier? (Action) Are users fulfilled by the reward yet left wanting more? (Variable reward) What bit of work do users invest in your product? Does it load the next trigger and store value to improve the product with use? (Investment)

To illustrate the Cycle, let me use my favourite app, Carousell!

I find that the main advantages of Carousell are its easy-to-use interface/chat function and its generally friendly community of users. I recently tried Shopee and wasn’t too impressed. It seemed complicated and unwieldy but it could also be that I have grown accustomed to Carousell. Shopee would need to deliver a vastly improved experience to make me switch!

An important thing to note though is the main thread running through the Hook Cycle is you have to know what your users want. And that is where the all-important user research & user insights stage of UX comes in!