COMPULSIVE BEHAVIOR SELLS: Nir Eyal is showing software designers how to hook users in four easy steps. Welcome to the new era of habit-forming technology. “Forging new habits has become an obsession among technology companies. In an age when commercial competition is only a click away, the new mandate is to make products and services that generate compulsive behavior: in essence, to get users hooked on a squirt of dopamine to the brain’s reward center to ensure that they’ll come back.”
Back in high school I read Lawrence Sanders’ The Tomorrow File, where they were actually making products worse, but in ways that made them more addictive. And now it’s today.