Book Review: Hooked by Nir Eyal
Really good book for startups and designers of everyday applications and services.
Nir Eyal created model for creating habitual use of your service:
- Trigger (first external, then internal)
- Action (make sure it is easy to do)
- Variable Reward (just like in casino)
- Investment (ask user to make your service better for him)
Model is pretty easy and you can map it to our everyday activities. Email, Facebook, Twitter all of those are using this model. Of course every website has its own value so every one of them manifests those steps differently.
Book is pretty short and to my surprise I really liked two last chapters. One about morality of using such techniques and second one about startups.
One of great quotes from this chapter is Paul Graham:
Instead of asking "what problem should I solve?" ask "what problem do I wish someone else would solve for me?"
Overall: 6/10
This rating for me is a bit lower than what you can see eg. on Amazon (5/5) because of my existing knowledge that in large parts made it boring to the point of skimming to the next new thing :)
Edit February 2019:
I'm hearing about this book more and more. It's worth reading to know what's going on in the platforms that you use in the era of fake news etc.
If you want to read it in Polish: Skuszeni. Jak tworzyć produkty kształtujące nawyki konsumenckie
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