Hook Model Presentation Today

I am giving a presentation today about the Hook Model. With Nir's permission, I will be showing a large subset of these slides.



For sure, I am going to show the slide with his great book called Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products.

 If you like, you can ask me how it went at our Facebook Hook Model community or go to nirandfar.com and click on "Join The Discussion" in the upper right of the screen. See you there!

Update: I had a great interactive audience! It made all the difference.

The Mentor Program Viewed Through Octalysis

As it exists today, I am the founder and Product Owner of our company's Mentor Program. The mission of the Mentor Program is to empower people to share knowledge essential to the company such as technology knowledge.

The program has an internal web app which displays the names of people who have participated by either sharing or receiving knowledge. Without getting into the details about how to earn levels, those who have participated heavily receive a digital and an in-real-life badge reflecting how they participated and when.

A Sample of the Dashboard Screen

A player can see the web app either through a browser or in the software developer lab on a large monitor screen in the corner.

Meaning, Accomplishment and Loss

On the monitor, we showed the same thing that the browser version showed for about two weeks. It couldn't show everything which was a problem. So, we had two key changes made to the monitor version of the web app:

1. Sort names by most recent activity 
2. Show only those who have contributed to the current quarter, our Current Mentor Heroes

Sorting the names by the most recent activity, is a newsfeed inspired approach. It helps deal with the issue of having too many names to show on the monitor. It also highlights the accomplishment and meaningful contribution just made by the players for their recent participation.

Showing only active participants as Current Mentor Heroes got interesting results. Doing this introduces into the program a feeling of loss. Can you imagine what happened when the new fiscal quarter came in March and everyone saw a blank page that said nothing more than "Current Mentor Heroes"?

One of the key developers in the program asked me if I wanted to revert it back to showing the normal dashboard. I responded with a "nope" and a smile. Sure, it bothered me to see nothing up there. It bothered everyone and that's the point! We were all used to seeing those colorful accomplishments and names. We were now feeling loss which was instilling a sense of urgency to get something up there.

In less than a week, I had a helpful person email me saying they wanted to help us out. They let me know about some recordable participation. That person understood the program vision and wanted to contribute to our cause in a meaningful way. Other people followed up in that same week and we had over 13 hours worth of knowledge sharing!

Similar to Octalysis Core Drives

The decisions recently made are similar to pieces of the Octalysis Gamification framework. The framework is centered on Human-Focused Design and created by Yu-kai Chou. Having watched all the Octalysis videos available, I see Octalysis Core Drive #8, Loss & Avoidance which instills some urgency. Urgency does overcome a problem we've had in the past. These changes also highlight what could be called Core Drive #2, Development & Accomplishment. FYI, the Octalysis community discusses these drives at https://www.facebook.com/groups/octalysis If you like, you may join our friendly Facebook group.

What's Next?

Although I have ideas, what is next will come out of a discussion with my Mentor Program team. They are wonderfully insightful people with a variety of skills. Undoubtedly, one of two things will be worked on. We may focus on a progress bar approach or reduce the friction of getting knowledge seekers hooked up with knowledge givers. These ideas came from members of the team who are passionate about empowering others with sharing and receiving knowledge. If you're not surrounded by awesome people and ideas such as I am then I highly recommend you seek some now!

Stormy Habit Weather

In the USA this winter, Mother Nature has thrown snow into many peoples’ lives. Schedules and internalized daily habits were disrupted through imposed external forces. New opportunities and habits took shape. Some people embraced the moment as a time to create a snow shark.

Glancing at Amazon, I see others read and commented on the Hooked book written by Nir Eyal with contributions from Ryan Hoover.

The recent snow event got me thinking about habits extinguishing and habit competition. Do more people habitually check the weather now? What are they not doing anymore? If a mobile app provided the weather as a side feature during a snow storm, would people use it more? 

The Argus iPhone app has the weather as a daily integrated feature of its personal dashboard of your life. So, I wake up and look at the temperature high/low for the day on Argus while seeing other things like how much sleep I got.



Although it seems much of the focus is currently on building products that form long term habits, I think exploring how to keep people using their products even through stormy habit-disruption times will serve well too.

I invite us all to discuss this in the Facebook Hook Model community.

Why Create A Hook Model Community?

You may ask, why create a facebook community around the Hook Model? Simply put, the Hook Model works well. Really well! You can create products and services that people habitually use. It's the combination of psychology, business and technology. So, it's fun and profitable!

How did I discover the Hook Model? I saw a GSummit 2013 presentation by Nir Eyal, read some of his posts, and finally read twice the book Hooked: A Guide to Building Habit-Forming Products.

Want a taste via video? If you would like, just slide the YouTube video slider below and pick anything to watch for 1 to 2 minutes.

This video above and slides are available on Nir Eyal's blog post "New Video - Hooked the Psychology of How Products Engage Us"

Coming up and co-chaired by Nir Eyal, the Habit Summit is on March 25, 2014. It's where experts "share their hard-won insights on how to build habits (user and personal habits)."

So books, videos and conferences. What was missing? Well, a place where like-minded people could focus as a group on the Hook Model framework, a Hook Model community.

I asked Nir in the Gamification Revolution spreecast The Ethics and Tenants of Habit-Forming Design with Nir Eyal for a community. He suggested I create one. So with his feedback, I created the Hook Model Community

We have discussed Nostalgia, the HabitZone, ATARI acronym, the virtual reality Oculus Rift, and more.

You are invited to come join our Hook Model Community at https://www.facebook.com/groups/hookmodel Although it's free, it's habit forming. ;) Of course, the choice is yours. Hope to see you there!

I Got The "Hooked" Book For Free

I am a fan of Nir Eyal's work around habits and how to apply them in business. Below are slides giving you a taste of some of his work.

Hooked Model from Nir Eyal

Today, I got a great book of his called Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. I discovered it from his blog post titled: “HOOKED” BOOK IS AVAILABLE FOR DOWNLOAD (AND $0 FOR THE NEXT 5 DAYS).

It's a collection of his past work and more. I highly recommend this book for anyone wanting to learn more about habits, human behavior and applying it to products or services.

Last Quarter Beat Previous Year And It Was Only Two Months Long!

The Mentor Program is going strong! Essential technological knowledge and more is getting shared much more than before I applied Gamification to the program. To dive deeper into the Mentor Program, check out Gamification Meets Technology Mentor Program.

I am the Product Owner / Manager of the program. Due to our company getting bought, our calendar changed. Last quarter consisted of only two months, October and November. Yet, those two months yielded a score of 1010 points which is over twice what it was the year before at 440 in the year of 2012. The year before that it was 600 in that same quarter, October, November and December of 2011.

So, a two month quarter beat previous 3 month quarters!

Income Inequality Learned While Studying Marketing

While studying Product Owner / Gamification related things such as Marketing via Coursera, I ran across income inequality. Wow.

"economic inequality" biggest issue? http://t.co/nckIeMGCd9 - See video http://t.co/XnW4s14358 - "wealth #inequality meme" going viral?

— Michael Finney (@finneycanhelp) December 8, 2013

Wow. Watch the video, really.