Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products
Nir Eyal · ★★★★★ · 256 pages · 2013
I feel like this book took me into a mind trip in terms of understanding how companies sell us stuff by getting us addicted to certain actions triggers in our hunter gatherer brains. Eyal describes there are 3 kind of validations that we have: to the tribe, to the hunt and to the selves. The first is social validation for example things like "Likes" on Facebook, the second is our want to hunt for bargains (the word hunt literally takes on a new meaning there...) and our want to validate ourselves.
As such Eyal lays out a cycle of why certain things take off but others don't. We want infinite variability as it causes things to stay fresh and want us to come back where as finite variability won't. For example, World of Warcraft is still a thing, FarmVille isn't.
I highly recommend this book not only for product developers but also just people who need to see how products are designed to hit these addictive nerves.