Introduction
There’s a certain yellow book you’ll find on the shelves of most major
tech companies. I’ve seen it at Facebook, Google, PayPal, and Slack. It’s
given out at tech conferences and company training events. A friend
working at Microsoft told me the CEO, Satya Nadella, held up a copy and
recommended it to all the company’s employees.
The book, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, was a Wall
Street Journal best seller and, at the time of this writing, still ranks as the
number one book in the “Products” category on Amazon. It’s a cookbook,
of sorts. The book contains a recipe for human behavior—your behavior.
These tech companies know that in order to make money, they need to keep
us coming back—their business models depend on it.
I know this because I’ve spent the past decade researching the hidden
psychology that some of the most successful companies in the world use to
make their products so captivating. For years, I taught future executives at
both the Stanford Graduate School of Business and at the Hasso Plattner
Institute of Design.
In writing Hooked, my hope was that start-ups and socially concerned
companies would use this knowledge to design new ways of helping people
build better habits. Why should the tech giants keep these secrets to
themselves? Shouldn’t we use the same psychology that makes video games
and social media so engaging to design products to help people live better
lives?
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.