“Our actions have been engineered.”
Think about your daily life. On a regular day – just pick one habit, anything simple – like involuntarily reaching for your phone and checking Instagram. Analyse that habit and keep asking ‘why’ till you understand the exact thing that leads you to perform that action. If you can find the ‘trigger’, then perhaps you may be able to manage it.
If you can’t find it, read this book. It will tell you what is really happening inside your head – which emotion has been triggered and how, to lead you to take that action. All successful products are designed to ‘exploit’ (for lack of a better word) this ‘ somewhat automatic workflow’. Good to understand it whether you are consuming products or designing them.
———————————————
Hooked – How to Build Habit-Forming Products
– Nir Eyal
———————————————
A bit about the author, because I think it always helps to understand who is writing and why. Nir Eyal is a behavioural designer – he taught at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and has worked at the intersection of psychology, technology and business for years. He wrote this book as a framework for product designers and founders actually. But honestly – it’s a great consumer awareness study. And because we are all consumers, we should educate ourselves.
THE HOOK MODEL
The entire book is built around what Eyal calls the Hook Model — a four-step cycle that the most habit-forming products in the world run on.
“Trigger -> Action -> Variable Reward -> Investment.”
> Trigger – Some emotion already exists inside you. An irritant is added to activate that.
> Action – A behavior you will engage in, in anticipation of a reward that this irritant promises
> Variable Reward – The irritant does not make clear what the reward is, it keeps moving and the variety keeps you guessing, so you keep coming back
> Investment – eventually, you decide to invest something. This whole cycle is so frictionless that you keep coming back.
That’s it. That is the loop. Seemingly simple, yet billions of people are caught in it every single day without fully realising it.
Let’s get into every step under the excellent guidance of Eyal!
TRIGGER
There are two kinds – external and internal. External triggers are the notifications, the red badges on your apps, the “someone liked your photo” ping. Those are easy to spot. The internal triggers are far more interesting and, frankly, far more powerful. These are emotions. Boredom. Loneliness. Uncertainty. Fear of missing out. The moment you feel one of those things – and you reach for your phone – that feeling has become a trigger. The product has successfully attached itself to an emotion you might experience regularly. Think about that for a moment.
ACTION
For a behaviour to happen, it has to be easy. Eyal references BJ Fogg’s work here — motivation alone is not enough. If something requires too much effort, people won’t do it, no matter how much they want to. This is why great product designers obsess over reducing friction. Every extra tap, every extra second of loading time, every moment of confusion — is an opportunity for the user to drop off. The product has to feel effortless. Almost automatic.
VARIABLE REWARD
This is the genius step in the chain.
Eyal explains the concept of variable rewards — borrowed directly from B.F. Skinner’s research with pigeons (yes, pigeons!). What they found was that animals – and humans – are far more compelled by unpredictable rewards than by predictable ones. If you know exactly what you will get every time, the excitement fades. But if the reward is variable? You keep going back. Just in case.
“Introducing variability does create a focused state, which supresses the areas of the brain associated with judgement and reason while activating the parts associated with wanting and desire.”
Sound familiar? The scroll. The refresh. The swipe. Why do you keep doing that? Because you don’t know what comes next – and that is the variable reward built in the system. It is not an accident, it is architecture.
There are three types of variable rewards Eyal identifies — rewards of the tribe (social validation, connection), rewards of the hunt (information, resources), and rewards of the self (mastery, completion). The best products tap into all three.
INVESTMENT
The last phase is particularly clever. After the user has received their reward, the product asks them to put something back in. A comment. A follow. Personalization settings. Data. The more you invest in a product, the more it improves for you — and the harder it becomes to leave. This is not just about switching costs. It is about identity. This product knows me now. This product is mine.
And the cycle begins again. Trigger. Action. Variable Reward. Investment.
WHAT I TOOK AWAY
I have been in and around business long enough to know that the most successful products are not always the most technically brilliant. They are the ones people cannot put down. And this book makes it very clear why that is.
I also think this is an important read for parents. We talk a lot about screen time and setting limits – and yes, all of that matters. But understanding why these products are so hard to resist gives you so much more to work with. You can have a real conversation with your children about what is happening in their brain, not just issue rules from above. I’m certainly trying that approach at home (it’s not working, but still).
There is also an interesting ethical dimension to this book that Eyal does not shy away from. He calls on product builders to think carefully about whether they are creating something that genuinely improves people’s lives or simply exploits vulnerabilities in human psychology. He uses the term “facilitator” versus “manipulator” and also “the morality of manipulation” and I found that very interesting. It puts the responsibility squarely where it belongs but is also food for thought as a consumer.
Eyal quotes one of his blog reader who says in an email to him –“If it cant be used for evil, its not a superpower”.
What a powerful observation.
IN CLOSING
Hooked is not a long book. It is well-organized, well-researched, and surprisingly readable for something that is partly a business framework. It proves beyond doubt that habits are not created, they are built upon. (read the oyster analogy on pg. 40, its extraordinary)
If you build products or lead teams that build products – read it. If you are a human being who uses a smartphone – definitely read it.
And the next time your hand reaches for your phone the moment you feel even a flicker of boredom — you will know exactly what is happening. Whether you put the phone back down is, of course, entirely up to you.
Best,
Ruta