The more users invest time and effort into a product or service, the more they value it.

The investment phase is the fourth step in the Hooked model. These phase concerns the anticipation of rewards in the future.

Before users create the mental associations that activate their automatic behaviors, they must first invest in the product. For these behaviors to become routines, they must occur with significant frequency and perceived utility.

Understanding human psychology helps designers to build these habit-forming products. There are three tendencies that leads us to a mental process known as rationalization and influence in our future actions: the more effort we put into something, the more likely we are to value it; we are more likely to be consistent with our past behaviors and we change our preferences to avoid cognitive dissonance.

Habit forming technologies leverage the user’s past behavior to initiate an external trigger in the future.

User habits are hard to break and confer powerful competitive advantages to any company fortunate enough to successfully create them.