I haven’t found any compelling bots for today’s #botoftheweek.

But I want to share with you a trick we use to improve our bots onboarding & engagement 5x. It works 🙂

It’s based on a habit creation model called HOOK, described by Nir Eyal in his book “Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products” (highly recommend to read).

Let’s say we are building a community manager bot, which helps to engage community members in Slack.

To implement the HOOK model, we need to activate a habit-forming process, which consists of 4 steps:

1. Trigger

The trigger is an activator of a behavior.

It could be either internal or external, and usually, in bots, internal triggers (such as boredom or curiosity) are activated by external triggers (such as a direct message from the bot).

The goal of the trigger is to drive the user to take action using the product.

In our case, the trigger is hidden in an onboarding message:

“Greetings, @flreln! Welcome to BotCube, the top Slack community for bot designers.”

”My name is Botty, and I’m a bot, designed to help show you around and get the most out of your membership.”

”Say “help” to get started or “tip” to get today’s tip about bots.”

The last message here is an example of a good trigger because it has 2 key things:
- Shows that the reward is variable (“today’s tip”);
- Is actionable and provides the user with a choice.

2. Action

The action is a simple thing user needs to do to get a reward. Like hitting “Show me” button or opening a notification.

Once the user has done the intended action (in this case, typing the “tip”), he’s dazzled by what he sees next.

3. Variable reward

The reward is the realization of the value from the action.

Feedback loops are all around us, but predictable ones don’t create desire and don’t surge the level of dopamine in the brain.

In our case, the reward is a random useful tip about bots that user gets after he typed “tip” message to the bot.

Variability and reduced accessibility here multiplies the effect, creating a frenzied hunting state, activating the parts associated with wanting and desire.

4. Investment

The last phase of the HOOK is where the user is asked to do a bit of work.

Here we can benefit from the reward we just gave him and ask him to take action that makes the service better with use and generates future triggering opportunities.

In our community bot example, we can promote a survey or explain any other feature we want the user to proceed to.

These investments can be leveraged to make the trigger more engaging, the action easier, and the reward more exciting with every pass through the HOOK loop.

That’s it.

I highly recommend you to implement this approach in your bots and just see what happens next.

You will be surprised :)