Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products
£11.40£12.30 (-7%)
‘A must-read for everyone who cares about driving customer engagement’ Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup
‘The most high bandwidth, high octane, and valuable presentation I have ever seen on this subject’ Rory Sutherland, vice chairman, Ogilvy & Mather
Nir Eyal reveals how successful companies create products people can’t put down – and how you can too
Why do some products capture our attention while others flop? What makes us engage with certain things out of sheer habit? Is there an underlying pattern to how technologies hook us?
Nir Eyal answers these questions (and many more) with the Hook Model – a four-step process that, when embedded into products, subtly encourages customer behaviour. Through consecutive “hook cycles,” these products bring people back again and again without depending on costly advertising or aggressive messaging.
Hooked is based on Eyal’s years of research, consulting, and practical experience. He wrote the book he wished had been available to him as a start-up founder – not abstract theory, but a how-to guide for building better products. Hooked is written for product managers, designers, marketers, start-up founders, and anyone who seeks to understand how products influence our behaviour.
Eyal provides readers with practical insights to create user habits that stick; actionable steps for building products people love; and riveting examples from the iPhone to Twitter, Pinterest and the Bible App.
Read more
Additional information
| Publisher | Portfolio Penguin (6 Nov. 2014) |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Hardcover | 256 pages |
| ISBN-10 | 0241184835 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-0241184837 |
| Dimensions | 20.4 x 13.8 x 1.7 cm |
by Gavin Deadman
In this book Nir Eyal provides a simple yet powerful model to help your customers form habits that connect their problems with your solutions.
The Hooked model focuses on:
An initial ‘trigger’
Which drives an ‘action’
Where you get a ‘variable reward’
Which causes an ‘investment’ due to reciprocation
Nir provides some fascinating insights into how companies have successfully adopted this model eg. Facebook, Twitter, Spotify, Tinder and case studies from The Bible App and Fitbod, where Nir tells his story of the personal benefits he got from Fitbod.
Social media companies and video game makers know these tactics already, but Nir wrote this book so everyone can build products that help people do what they really want, but for the lack of good product design, don’t.
A must-read for everyone who cares about driving customer engagement.
by StandiMC
Hooked is based around the four step process that causes products, apps to become habit forming. The battle most tech companies now face is the battle for consumer’s attention. The vast majority of the population now carry round with them a device that triggers their attention, businesses and services can get them thinking or acting in desired ways around the clock.
Billion pound valuations have been drummed up for companies such as Whatsapp, Snapchat and Instagram without taking a penny, because these apps were to become so heavily engrained into peoples lives. Attention comes first, monetisation second. These wild valuations come from the ability these apps have to make consumers use them everyday, all the time, with minimal conscious prompting. The book helps to establish the process apps go through to get to this habit forming status, following a ‘trigger’, ‘action’, ‘reward’, ‘investment’. It takes all four to create a habit forming product and have a longevity to success.
The book describes the reward elements that drive our actions. The needs of the self, the tribe, and the hunt. It puts many everyday things into perspective and gave me a greater understanding us to why we act as we do. I found this aspect particularly eye opening.
Overall I found this book extremely useful, and look forward to referencing it in the future. Highly recommend.
by Jonathan Slobom
You have to read lots of books to find the occasional gem. Hooked by Nir Eyal is one of the few great business books. It answers the fundamental and intriguing question:
Why don’t you ever see advertising from Facebook, Google, Linked In, Twitter or Instagram?
In its simplest form the answer is easy – they have a habit forming service that solves the users pain better than the alternatives.
Change creates opportunity
•You can no longer place lots of display advertising to occupy a space in peoples minds. Media is very fragmented so there is a lot of waste and it can be very expensive.
•People are giving brands less and less attention:
•There’s more choice than ever before
•There’s more marketing messages than ever before
•Peoples lives are busier than ever before
•Devices to access the internet are getting smaller and smaller
PC- laptop- tablet- smartphone-wearable
So what do these habit forming brands do?
Habit forming brands have worked out how to make consumers form new habits.
•They connect the users problem with their solution frequently (many times a week) to create habit forming products.
•They know, just like the old fashioned advertisers that money follows engagement because engagement keeps you top of mind.
•They also consistently think of the users pain, if there isn’t pain, there isn’t a problem and there isn’t a need for the solution.
Nir reminds us that the goal of a product or service is to satisfy a need and that marketing tactics should convert internal triggers in the customers mind into external triggers that they can take action on. They then get a reward for their action which triggers them to come back multiple times and often increase their investment of money and time. They also invest their personalise reputation by telling others. In other words, word of mouth which is the most powerful marketing tool available.
This is a must read book for all entrepreneurs.
by Matt Rutherford
This is an excellent primer on the ‘value unit’, the individual nugget that fuels the network effect, and helps explain what makes some products world-beating.
Eyal explains how products are addictive, with a simple four-step model:
– Trigger -What internal trigger is the product addressing or what external trigger gets the user to the product?
– Action – What is the simplest behaviour in anticipation of reward?
– Reward – Is the reward fulfilling, yet leaves the user wanting more?
– Investment – What ‘bit of work’ is done to increase the likelihood of returning?
For each stage of the model, there is an explanation of the science behind with some real-world examples of how these are implemented in products we all know.
The great news is that the science is simply explained, and not too academic – and at the end of the chapters there is a list of key takeaways coupled with some practical actions you can take to help the design of your product.
Later in the book, there is a chapter that deals with the ethical concerns of building an addictive product and an excellent case study of how to apply the theory in a real-world situation.
Hooked is concise enough that it can be read in a couple of days, but comprehensive enough that you can walk away with a clear understanding of how products become addictive, and how you can design products that people cannot put down.
I’d highly recommend Hooked to anyone that is looking to increase customer engagement with their product.