A couple of weeks ago I wrote an article about why I’ve never had a smart watch and there I talked a bit about cell phone addiction, so it occurred to me to write about an interesting book related to the topic that I read a while ago.

The book is called Hooked and its author, Nir Eyal, has studies in behavioral psychology, especially oriented towards technology. Keep this in mind because the apps you use in your day to day, especially social networks, hire these types of professionals to keep you “hooked” to those apps. Maybe it’s obvious, but why do they want to keep us hooked? Well, because the more we look at the screen, the more advertising they show us and the more we buy the things they advertise to us.

The book mentions the 4 steps in which an app keeps us hooked and they are terrifyingly similar to what casinos do.

  1. Trigger It can be external (a notification, an ad) or internal (an emotion like boredom or loneliness). It is what drives the user to use the product. That’s why we often get useless notifications like “So-and-so, who you might know, is on Instagram”, it doesn’t matter if the notification is useful for anything, what matters is giving you a reason to open the app. Here I compare it to the lights and the flashiness of casinos.

  2. Action It is the behavior that the user performs in search of a reward, such as opening an app or scrolling. The action must be as simple as possible. Does it remind you of pulling the lever or pressing the button on casino machines?

  3. Variable Reward The user receives a reward that varies with each use (likes, messages, new content). This generates curiosity and maintains interest. You never know what you are going to see next on your social network, it is a reward that varies, just as you never know if the casino machines are going to give you something or not and what figures they will show you.

  4. Investment The user contributes something (time, data, followers) that increases the personal value of the product and makes it more likely that they will return. If you have already invested time, money or effort into something, it is harder to leave it later.

That’s why it’s so hard to quit, there are hundreds of engineers, psychologists, expert designers doing everything possible for you to follow these 4 steps, believe me, I work in this. There is a very hackneyed but true phrase “If the product is free, you are the product”.