Top 40 Quotes & Sayings by Nir Eyal

I wanted to create a toolkit which I would have wanted as an entrepreneur to use these principles of psychology in product design. Some startups totally forget the trigger. In some, the action is too complicated. Others don't have a variable reward, which maintains mystery.

Google is one of these products that I think is incredibly habit-forming, and it's the kind of product that shows this characteristic of something that we use with little or no conscious thought.

The most habit-forming products are intra-day behaviors. We take out Snapchat or Instagram or Pinterest multiple times a day.

AdNectar specializes in deploying branded virtual items across top social networking properties and applications. Virtual items are images sent to communicate a message between users of social media.

Habits can be good or bad, whereas addictions are always bad.

One of the common myths is that when you have kids you can't really have adult relationships, that kids come first. We don't think so. We actually think that we have to take care of ourselves individually. If we can take care of ourselves, then we can become better partners for our spouse.

What Facebook wants to create an association with is every time you're bored, every time you have a few minutes. We know that, psychologically speaking, boredom is painful. Whenever you're feeling bored, whenever you have a few extra minutes, this is a salve for that itch.

It is reasonable to think that the more readers put into the Bible app in the form of small investments, the more it becomes a repository of their history of worship. Like a worn dog-eared book, full of scribbled insights and wisdom, the app becomes a treasured asset not easily discarded.

Don Draper-style advertising is really only available to the biggest brands out there. It's only commodity goods that use those kind of messages because they have to differentiate goods that are really hard to differentiate between - Shell gasoline versus Exxon, Coke versus Pepsi, Sprint versus T-Mobile, it's all the same thing!

If the food of friendship is time together, how do we make the time to ensure we're all fed? My friends and I have recently come across a way to keep each other close. It fits into our lifestyles despite busy schedules and a surfeit of children. We call it the 'kibbutz.'

The more professional opportunities came my way, the more time I spent away from my friends - the people I truly cared about. Maintaining friendships with people to talk to, depend on and enjoy takes time.

The market for religious apps is fiercely competitive; searching for 'bible' in the Apple App Store returns 5,185 results. But among all the choices, YouVersion's Bible, funded by LifeChurch.tv of Edmond, Oklahoma, seems to be the chosen one, ranking at the top of the list and boasting more than 641,000 reviews.

We originally started AdNectar to serve brand advertisers, but we've now found that our publishers are greatly benefiting from integrating our system. In addition to a new revenue source and the data our API provides, it turns out users actually prefer branded over generic virtual items.

The cold truth is that the best products don't always win. Many times it's - the products that have the ability to keep users coming back and using them without conscious thought and using them out of habit are the ones that keep us coming back.

Everything I write is meant to share what I'm struggling with. I hope that it helps other people. I benefit from that a great deal because I always hear new ideas from my readers. It's a very symbiotic relationship.

I think my worst habit is struggling with technology, even though I know how this stuff works, I need to bring conscious thought into how I use.

AdNectar was born out of a class project at the Stanford Graduate School of Business in January of 2008. The founders are all avid social network users and we wanted to see if we could discover the optimal way for advertisers to reach consumers in a way that felt authentic and organic, and yet was scalable to a mass audience.

The more readers use the Bible app, the more valuable it becomes to them. Switching to a different digital Bible - God forbid - becomes less likely with each new revelation a user types into the app, further securing YouVersion's dominion.

The Bible app is designed to make absorbing the Word as frictionless as possible. For example, to make the Bible app habit easier to adopt, a user who prefers to not read at all can simply tap a small icon, which plays a professionally produced audio track, read with all the dramatic bravado of Charlton Heston himself.

Instead of relying on expensive marketing, habit-forming companies link their services to the users' daily routines and emotions.

Brainstorm new interfaces that could introduce opportunities or threats to your business.

As fleeting commitments, diets often fail. Thinking of dietary choices as part of who you are...can give them real staying power

The ultimate goal of a habit-forming product is to solve the user's pain by creating an association so that the user identifies the company's product or service as the source of relief.

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

User habits are a competitive advantage. Products that change customer routines are less susceptible to attacks from other companies.

Products with higher user engagement have the potential to grow faster than their rivals.

Users who continually find value in a product are more likely to tell their friends about it.

Habit-forming products often start as nice-to-haves, but once the habit is formed, they become must-haves.

Companies leverage two basic pulleys of human behavior to increase the likelihood of an action occuring: the ease of performing an action and the psychological motivation to do it.

Fogg states that all humans are motivated to seek pleasure and avoid pain; to seek hope and avoid fear; and finally, to seek social acceptance and avoid rejection

For an infrequent action to become a habit, the user must perceive a high degree of utility, either from gaining pleasure or avoiding pain.

You'll often find that people's declared preferences - what they say they want - are far different from their revealed preferences - what they actually do.

Like flossing, frequent engagement with a product, especially over a short period of time, increases the likelihood of forming new routines.

Reducing the thinking required to take the next action increases the likelihood of the desired behavior occurring unconsciously.

When designers intentionally trick users into inviting friends or blasting a message to their social networks, they may see some initial growth, but it comes at the expense of users' goodwill and trust. When people discover they've been duped, they vent their frustration and stop using the product.

Why not live now instead of someday?

To initiate (user) action, doing must be easier than thinking.

Habit-forming products alleviate users' pain by relieving a pronounced itch.

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.

If users are not doing what the designer intended (when users are investing time, effort, etc in your product), the designer may be asking them to do too much.