Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products

Hooked has sold over 250,000 copies since being published in 2014, and has elicited a variety of reactions from critics, industry professionals, and social commentators. The book is a guide for industry professionals on how to encourage online users to develop habitual relationships with digital products. While many professionals in the tech industry have appreciated Nir Eyal’s guide to product design and user engagement, social commentators have emphasized the potential for manipulation and exploitation inherent in Eyal’s “Hook Model.”

In a highly competitive industry, tech professionals see the value in Eyal’s method of “hooking” customers and bolstering their user engagement, profits, and standing against the competition. According to the book’s publisher, Penguin Random House, Goodreads readers voted Hooked as “one of the best business books of the year” (“Hooked.” Penguin Random House). Penguin Random House also lists nine reviews for the work, eight of which come from industry experts and businesspeople. These reviews suggest that this book has been a very popular resource for product designers. Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress, writes: “Hooked gives you the blueprint for the next generation of products. Read Hooked or the company that replaces you will.” Industry professionals have praised Eyal’s work for its compelling presentation and effective ideas. Stephen P. Anderson, the author of Seductive Interaction Design (2011), says of Hooked: “You’ll read this. Then you’ll hope your competition isn’t reading this. It’s that good.” The founder of The Next Web, Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, calls Hooked: “The book everyone in Silicon Valley is talking about.” Technology writer Andrew Chen praises Hooked for being “an excellent guide into the mind of the user.” (“Hooked.”)

Most of the criticism of Eyal’s work revolves around the ethics of persuasion. In his book Stolen Focus (2022), Johann Hari argues that Eyal’s position represents the irresponsible and predatory nature of Big Tech, whose products prey on users’ mental health. He writes: “Reading Hooked as an ordinary user of the internet is strange—it’s like the moment in an old Batman movie when the villain is caught and reveals everything he did all along, step by step.” (Hari, Johann. Stolen Focus. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023, 141). Hari argues that Eyal’s methods often result in real mental health consequences for ordinary users whose actions are easily manipulated by tech companies. He explains: “In Hooked [Eyal] talks about using ferociously powerful machinery to get us ‘fiendishly hooked’ and in ‘pain’ until we get our next techno-fix” (Hari 143). Hari questions: “Why should we accept an environment full of programs designed to ‘hook’ us and drive us ‘crazy?’” (Hari 145).

Similarly, James Williams, the author of Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Restriction in the Attention Economy (2018), argues that Eyal’s work is unethical since encouraging habit formation can have serious consequences for users. As a former strategist for Google, Williams is familiar with the world of Big Tech, which he often critiques in his work on persuasive technology and the attention economy as a research associate at Oxford University. Writing for The Guardian, Williams questions the ethics of product designers using psychological insights to increase user engagement. He writes:

We are bombarded at every turn with persuasive design that exploits our psychological weaknesses and often leads us into temptation, habituation and distraction. At the same time, we are expected to take up arms against these distractions, to muster superhuman levels of self-regulation, just to adapt to this all-out war others are waging for our attention (Williams, James. “Indistractable by Nir Eyal review—letting tech off the hook.” The Guardian, 2019).

Williams blames Eyal’s Hooked for encouraging this trend, calling it “the closest thing to a bible for designers who have been enlisted in that war for our attention” (Williams).