Book Review — Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products.
Mission # 2 for AssemblyF Product Fellowship
The landscape of UX design has changed dramatically in the last decade. In the early days, most organizations treated UX professionals as another type of graphic designer, but, in today’s organizations, UX design is a strategic capability that drives innovation and enhances competitiveness.
Likewise, the role of UX designers has also shifted beyond creating functional user experiences by applying usability, information architecture, and design principles. Now, UX professionals also apply psychology and human behavior to desivse design principles in their designs.
Nir Eyal’s book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products provides an overview of a model for producing habit-forming products. The book also discusses the products that have a proidounf impact on our lives. How do companies like Snapchat, Facebook and Slack bring people back — time and time again.
“Once a technology has created an association in users’ minds that the product is the solution of choice, they return on their own, no longer needing prompts from external triggers.”
Eyal’s Hooked model consists of four parts: Trigger, Action, Variable Reward, and Investment.
- Trigger: Activating user behavior
- Action: Satisfying the user need
- Reward: Feeding the beast
- Investment: Skin in the game
This book ultimately motivates the product leaders to create products that users can’t live without. It involves equal part user empathy and equal part user psychology. In the end, it’s the products that keep us coming back for the right reasons that, habit or not, earn our enduring love and loyalty.
