Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products

by Nir Eyal

Adobe Photoshop is the most widely used professional graphics editing program in the world. The software provides hundreds of advanced features for creating and manipulating images. Learning the program is difficult at first, but as users become more familiar with the product—often investing hours watching tutorials and reading how-to guides—their expertise and efficiency using the product improves. They also achieve a sense of mastery (rewards of the self, as discussed in chapter 4). Unfortunately for the design professional, most of this acquired knowledge by users does not translate to competing applications. Once users have invested the effort to acquire a skill, they are less likely to switch to a competing product.