Summary of Hooked

Finally, the user must invest in the product. Be it time, work, money, or even the act of inviting friends to join and use the product as well, the user’s sweat equity will add tremendously to his or her loyalty to the product in the

savvy designers will know that if the benefit received by a user is unchanging, it will lose its attractiveness and become boring and predictable. A variable reward is thus key to hooking users and keeping them coming back to the product, even without notifications or explicit calls to action.

habit is an action that is performed with little thought or conscious compulsion.

First, developers need to do their homework: Who are the target users? How often should they use the product? What motivates them to use the product? It’s not enough to merely wish to create the next blockbuster app or product for everyone. The developer needs to have a specific audience in mind.

The third type of developer, the entertainer, builds a product just for fun. It’s not intended to improve the users’ life but rather to simply be fun

Peddlers build a product with the intention of helping others but would not use the product personally. As a result, they may struggle with basing the product in real-world needs and find that users fail to get hooked.

The first type of creator is the facilitator: someone who builds a product that he or she would use personally. This product aims to make the user’s life better.

All developers must question whether or not it’s right to hook a user on their product.

People tend to place value on things that they create themselves or invest their time in. For example, the photo-sharing website Flickr offers users just over a terabyte of storage space free of charge, an amount that many other sites would never be willing to offer for free.

Another type of investment comes from learning a challenging piece of technology. To return to the example of Final Cut Pro, a professional video editor may have spent months mastering the program in order to do the best job possible.