📖 Review: Hooked by Nir Eyal
Table of Contents
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Overall Opinion
I really enjoyed this book! The writing style, structure & clarity of the narrative made learning the principles behind habit-forming products easy and understandable. Nir does an excellent job at grounding his ideas in real products and experiences, adding a tangible way to understand them.
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Summary
The book breaks up the product design journey into 4 steps, focused on the development of habit-formation. Each step is well considered and underpinned by real-world examples & psychology:
- Trigger
- Action
- Variable Reward
- Investment
Nir argues that these four steps are “fundamental” for building effective hooks. Essentially this procedure aims to foster “unprompted engagement”, where users don’t need to be reminded to engage - they just do it.
| Stage | Explanation |
|---|---|
| Trigger | These are internal & external factors that tell the user what to do next |
| Action | This can best be explained by asking ‘why?’ It is the motivations that inspire a user to take action (Note: Motivating people is more expensive than reducing the risk or effort needed to engage with your product) |
| Variable Reward | Users are rewarded for using the product, falling under three reward types: The Tribe (social acceptance), The Self (to gain a sense of competency) & The Hunt (the need to acquire phyical objects) |
| Investment | Labor leads to love - the more time invested, the greater the percieved value |
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Morality
While creating an app or product that users just can’t put down is great for business, Nir does argue again and again that the steps in his book must be carefully considered with plenty of introspection.
I also appreciated that Nir is well aware that his book is essentially a handbook for manipulating people into liking your thing & includes a section addressing this. The section discusses the morality of manipulation, with a manipulation matrix to guide explanation:
Summary from left to right:
A person who believes that the product materially improves the users life but does not use the product is called a Peddler.
A person who believes that the product materialy improves the users life and uses it is called a Facilitator - this is what we as designers should strive to be.
A person who believes that their product doesn’t improve a user’s life and doesn’t use the product themsleves is known as a Dealer.
Lastly, a person who believes their product doesn’t improve the user’s life but does use it is called an Entertainer.
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My Favourite Passages & Examples
“Many innovations fail because consumers irrationally overvalue the old, while companies irrationally overvalue the new” - Gourville
“We irrationally value our efforts” - on the IKEA effect
“Experiences with finite variability became less engaging because they eventually become predictable” - on variable rewards
A good example of investment in practice is LinkedIn, where users who invest their data become more committed to the platform
“Habit-forming products are the cigarettes of this century” - Ian Bogost on the dangers of creating potentially addictive & destructive products