Hooked: How To Build Habit-Forming Products By Nir Eyal

Description

Hooked: How to Make Products That People Want to Use Again and Again Anyone who makes products, services, or experiences that want to keep users coming back should read Nir Eyal’s book. This book gives a complete foundation for understanding how consumer habits are formed and how to ethically apply these ideas to your own new products, whether you’re a company founder, app developer, UX designer, or marketing.

The Hook Model is a four-step approach that Eyal uses to help people get involved by forming habits. The four steps are Trigger, Action, Variable Reward, and Investment. Eyal goes into great detail on how each step is important for getting people to use a product and making the interaction feel more natural over time.

The Trigger starts the habit loop. It can be anything outside of you, like a notification or email, or something inside of you, such feeling bored or lonely. The Action comes next. This is the behavior that the user does in order to get a reward, like opening an app, scrolling, or clicking. Next is the Variable Reward, which keeps customers coming back because they don’t know what to expect. Finally, in the Investment phase, users invest something into the product (such time, effort, or personal data), which makes it more likely that they will come back.

Hooked is different because it uses real-world case studies. Eyal uses examples from popular sites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and Slack to show how each uses the Hook Model to get people to stick around and become dependent on them. Eyal doesn’t just provide you a plan that works for everyone. At the end of each chapter, he gives readers a set of useful exercises and questions that help them use the model in their own lives.

Hooked goes beyond usefulness and looks at the ethics of behavioral design. Eyal thinks carefully about the difference between manipulation and persuasion. He stresses the need to make “hooks” that help genuine users and make their lives better, instead of taking advantage of their psychological weaknesses. This ethical lens is really important, especially since that attention is a precious and sometimes misused currency.

Hooked gives readers the tools they need to make better goods, not simply ones that make money, but ones that are valuable and have an impact. It pushes product teams to create experiences that are both interesting and useful, which helps people get into the habit of using things that really help them.

Hooked may change the way you think about engagement, user retention, and product development, whether you’re making a fitness app, an online marketplace, or a new feature for a SaaS platform.

About the Author

Nir Eyal is a behavioral design expert, public speaker, and author known for his expertise at the intersection of psychology and technology. A graduate of Stanford University, Eyal has taught courses at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and has been featured in publications such as The Harvard Business Review and The Atlantic.

Product Details

• Title: Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products
• Author: Nir Eyal
• ISBN-13: 9780143128550
• Publisher: Portfolio
• Published: November 4, 2014
• Pages: 256
• Binding: Paperpack