Part Two: The product · Everyday use
Streaks, badges and guilt reliably bring people back. They do it without making anyone's life better, and people come to resent the product for it.
People form honest habits with products all the time. They open the calendar each morning because the day is in it. The habit follows the usefulness.
A hook runs the other way. It builds the return first and leaves the usefulness for later. Snapchat's streak is the plain example: a count of the days in a row that two friends have sent each other something, which resets to nothing if either misses a day. The reason to open the app becomes the count. Daily rewards, badges and warnings about what you will lose all work the same way.
They work, on the dashboard. Returns go up. Two things go wrong behind the numbers. People begin to feel managed, and that feeling does not wear off. And the company can no longer tell from its own figures whether anyone finds the product useful, because the return has stopped meaning that.
Software sold to companies has its own version. An account manager's report shows how many staff logged in each day, so the product nags people to log in. A tool that is properly used twice a month gets treated as failing. The answer is a report in the work's own unit and rhythm: rotas published this month, not logins per day.
A simple test separates the two kinds of habit. If the streak were removed, would people still come back? And if you explained to a customer exactly how it works and why it is there, would they feel respected or played?
What replaces a hook is a reason of the person's own. Something of theirs is waiting, or the work comes round again, or they can see they are getting better at it. A reminder the person set for themselves is a tool. One the product set for them is a hook.
Therefore:
Let people return because the product is useful at a rhythm their life or work already has. Remove anything whose purpose is to make leaving feel like a loss.
In practice. List everything in the product that prompts a return. For each, write the explanation you would give a customer who asked how it works. Remove the ones you would not want to explain.
Goes with. The honest reason to return starts with THE SECOND VISIT (39) and grows through PROGRESS THEY CAN SEE (43). Hooks survive wherever a company ignores MEASURE PROGRESS, NOT ATTENTION (29).