Book Sips #1 — Hooked by Nir Eyal & Ryan Hoover
First thing you do in the morning? Checking your smartphone (and you do it more than 150 times a day). Last thing you do at night? Watching a show (not necessarily in TV).
In ‘Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products’ by Nir Eyal (@eyal99) we are taught in…well, creating addicting experiences that users can’t resist and how companies take advantage of it with a myriad of examples. Check out this one: ‘Yin (not her real name) is in her mid-twenties, lives in Palo Alto and attends to Stanford University. She has all the composure and polish you’d expect of a student at a prestigious school, yet she succumbs to a persistent habit throughout her day. She can’t help it; she is compulsively hooked on Instagram.’
‘It’s just fun, I don’t have a problem or anything. I just use it whenever I saw something cool. I feel I need to grab it before it’s gone.’
There’s no need to panic. Be aware and next time you state ‘I don’t have time for this’ remember you can freely choose between a book or a remote control (otherwise, the decision will be taken for you).
Hooked
How to Build Habit-Forming Products
by Nir Eyal & Ryan Hoover
Why read?
Do you wish your users couldn’t live without your product? Through a simple but powerful how-to guide, Nir Eyal shows how to convert users that engage with a product into users who’ll return to it again and again. If you want to get a glimpse into the mind of users you should read this book.
256 pages, Portfolio 2014
About the authors
Nir Eyal
He is the author of Hooked and Indistractable. He has taught at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Design School. He has sold two technology companies since 2003 and now he helps teams design more engaging products.
Ryan Hoover
He is the founder of Product Hunt, created Startup Edition, worked as an EIR at Tradecraft, and was the Director of Product at PlayHaven. Additionally, he has written over 150 essays, many of which are featured in TechCrunch, Forbes, Pando, Fast Company, and The Next Web.
