Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products Hardcover – November 4, 2014

If you're trying to build the next big app, you need user engagement. This book lays down a model building engagement by having users constantly return to your app. In the beginning this is prompted, but eventually it'll become instinct. This is how viral loops are formed.

It lays out the "Hook Model", a basic framework of the 4 key stages of each loop:

1. Trigger: How does the loop initiate? In the beginning this may be through external triggers (such as an email, notification, icon badge, etc) but through successive loops the user eventually creates internal triggers where a particular thought or emotion will send them back to your product.

2. Action: Once the user is aware they need to use your product (through the trigger), what it the simplest action they can perform to get some kind of reward. For example a Facebook "Like".

3. Variable reward: How are they rewarded for this behavior? This could be social validation (e.g. "my friends approve!"), collection of material resources (e.g. add a photo to a collection) or personal gratification (e.g. inbox zero). The "variable" part is important - rewards should not always be predictable, encouraging users to repeat the cycle.

4. Investment: Finally, the user needs to put something back in to increase the chance of repeating the loop. This could be content (e.g. a book in your Kindle), user entered data (e.g. profile information or linked accounts), reputation (e.g. something to gain a 5 star seller review), or a learned skill (e.g. I'm now really good at this software program). The investment also sets up the trigger to for the next cycle of the loop.

This book is a really easy read. I wanted something that would get to the crux of the problem and set out a practical framework of how to apply it with examples, without being overly verbose on history and research. It delivered.

"Hooked" presents a simple, yet very useful model to channel your thoughts when building a product you want to get in the hands of millions. It's quick to read (only 140 pages), to-the-point and made a world of difference to our concept&design challenges. We used it a lot to model the behavior of our users and figure out specific areas we missed and needed to focus on in order to get engagement.

Another great value of the book is the in-depth analysis of the hooks we are subject to every day (in Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram etc). As you go around the everyday loop you know so well from the user perspective, you see in a structured way the other side of the coin. The side of the people who know how to design behavior patterns and make others tick.

I closed 'Hooked' with a much better understanding of social&scalable products and a lot of interesting ideas for what our team is building. These came from the numerous examples and case studies, as well as the structured questions you can answer at the end of each chapter.

If you'd like to learn about habits and how they are built&changed in general, I'd recommend 'The Power of Habit' book by Charles Duhigg. If you want to understand how habits are formed in the world of technology, startups and software and mobile products, "Hooked" is the book for you. It's built on the same solid research base, yet much closer to practice and much more relevant to today's tech world.

Thank you Nir Eyal for this amazing book!

Love the book.
I will readily admit I borrowed "Hooked" from my library first, lately I delved into a couple of hyped books (for more details please see my other reviews) and now got smarter. I don't buy every book asap. However, after reading halfway through "Hooked" I purchased it because it is fascinating and intelligent on many levels.

Browsing through a couple of negative reviews here I noted that somebody mentioned that this book "Hooked" doesn't provide a perfect blueprint; well, no book ever does. Anybody who believes that is either under the age of 23 or has never tried any business endeavor.

What I like about "Hooked" is that author Nir Eyal presents a multi-faceted picture and thinking. He does not have one scenario but explains how the experiences from many fields lead us to a model how we (most likely) can "hook" customers.

The book is witty and Eyal brings a lot of obvious examples that make the reader think:
"... (p.44) Types of External Triggers: ... Imagine if Facebook or Twitter needed to buy an ad to prompt users to revisit their sites–these companies would soon go broke..."
It's a brilliant example. Most of the people who read this book have a presence on either one or both social media sites, hence we can imagine the situation and we can see why "the advertisement model of yore" is not the answer to today's more complex situation any longer. Opposite to only 25 years ago when running ads on TV or in newspapers was one sure path to success today we have more opportunities hence that old system isn't working any longer.

The book features absolutely fascinating examples.
On p. 32 Eyal lays out that today many investors want to know "Are you building a vitamin or a painkiller?" implying, though a "great vitamin" will have many fans and followers who swear by it there will be others who don't care about living healthy; in contrast, everybody who has pains needs a painkiller whether they like it or not.
Eyal makes the reader go through the exercise of pondering if today's hottest consumer technology companies (FB, Twitter, Instagram etc.) offer vitamins or painkillers. Indeed, though at first it looks as if all of them offer vitamins there are already enough "addicted" people who need "social media site painkillers" to vent, to reaffirm their own worth and so on...

It is this interesting and fascinating thinking which I believe to be valuable to all people regardless of whether they are entrepreneurs who want to sell something, or people who work in a steady employment.

These days we never know how things are going, hence adding this riveting perspective to one's thinking can only be extremely beneficial.

I also appreciated the detailed list of social media sites and apps mentioned throughout the book. I am one of the people Eyal mentions, people who have reservations to join just any site and build cross connections. Still, learning about Codeacademy, Mahalo, Fitocracy, Any.do, Tinder, and what makes visitors come back to them was extremely interesting,.

Recommended with a wholehearted – 5 stars. Now purchased; in fact, I am thinking about getting my two children copies of this book too.

Gisela Hausmann, author and Amazon review expert.