The Science Behind How Companies Get You Hooked On Their Products
In 2008 Nir Eyal was part of a team of Stanford MBAs starting a company backed by "some of the brightest investors in Silicon Valley."
They wanted to build a platform to place ads into online social games. Eyal wondered how mind manipulation worked - how do products change our actions, and create compulsions.
How do you engineer user behaviour? Are there moral implications? Could these forces be used for good (nudging).
So he looked around for a guide. He couldn't find anything that satisfied him so he documented his experiences, reading, and observations of hundreds of companies "to uncover patterns in user experience designs and functionality." He wanted to know what was common between the "winners" and determine what was missing from the "losers."
The result of this effort is his book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products and the creation of the Hook Model: a four-phase process that companies use to form habits.
That sounds like a growth hacker's dream.
Let's take a look.