ARE WE HOOKED?

Today we will be trying to understand how habit formation products control our minds with the help of a book written by Nir Eyal, Hooked.
The success of any product lies in its retention rate. The more people who buy your product a second time, the more it will penetrate the market.This retaining power is called the hook by the author. The hook consists of four parts.A trigger is something that causes you to do something.The negative emotions of boredom, uncertainty, and anxiety are the internal triggers for using these apps. Whenever you feel bored while working, within a few seconds of this thought, you might be ending up on Facebook, Instagram, etc. The trigger is the itch that you feel and now want to scratch. The scratching of this itch is the next part of the hook, the action, which is the simplest behaviour you promote when you scratch the itch. In the case of boredom, you opened the social media app.What should be the frequency of this itch? The study shows that for habit formation, the behaviour should occur more frequently, and it must be less than once a week. Habits are formed through the constant doing of things so regularly that you won’t even think of the activity before performing it.The third part is the reward, which is the change in your emotions that you derive after you act the way the company wants. The social media app threw up interesting reels,  shorts, text, photos, and what not. But this reward is always variable; you do not exactly know what you are going to see by opening, say, Facebook. The most important part to understand is that they give you a reward but leave you with more cravings for the same thing, so that you will come back again and again.The last part is the investment: the user invests his resources in order to gain something in the future. This means that the activity you engage in will keep you interested until the next time you visit.When you text someone on WhatsApp, you are not getting any rewards immediately, but in the future, when the person replies, it will keep you hooked.
Have you read this book? Did you understand how you ended up scrolling for hours and hours? Comment below.