Here are my slides from the talk that I gave at WordCamp Portland about Lean Product Development using Nir Eyal’s Hooked model to validate your WordPress product ideas will have customers before you invest too much time in coding something. The Hooked model will be familiar to everyone who watched this years State of the Word, because Matt introduced it as a great model for WordPress development and how to evaluate WordPress user behavior.
In the presetation, I used the Hooked Model as a way of understanding why some software products become habit-forming and bring users back time and again. Not all products achieve this level of virality, but the ones that do, follow the Hooked Models’ 4-step “loops” over and over again. The goal of the presentation is to break down why this happens so that anyone can apply the model to a product that they want to build.
The 4 Steps to the Hook are:
- The Trigger – What triggers users to take an action with the product
- The Action – The ability vs. motivation users have to use the product
- Variable Rewards – How the user experience rewards users dynamically every time they log in
- Commitment / Investment – Increasing user commitment and engagement over time
In the presentation, I cover how to evaluate your product’s ability to become a habitual part of your user’s lives. We go through specific steps that you can follow to evaluate a WordPress product idea by seeking out a list of potential customers, asking them a series of questions that relate to the 4 Steps to the Hook, and then collecting and analyzing their answers to use as feedback that will help you build a product that your customers will love.
And if you want a longer version of the process, there’s a version of the talk that I wrote for Smashing Magazine earlier this year called, “Building Something Your Users Actually Want to Buy.“
Leave a Reply