Nir Eyal


Nir Eyal is an Israeli-born American author, lecturer and investor known for his bestselling book, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products.

Biography

Nir Eyal was born in Hadera, Israel. In 1983, when he was three, his family immigrated to the United States, and settled in a suburb of Orlando, Florida. He earned a B.A. at Emory University in 2001. He then worked for Boston Consulting Group and a solar panel installation firm, before going to Stanford for his master's degree.

Academic and literary career

After graduating from the Master of Business Administration program at Stanford in 2008, Eyal and fellow students founded a company that placed online ads in Facebook, with Eyal serving as CEO. His work in the company sparked his interest in the psychology of users, and he went on to become a consultant in product design. In 2012, he taught a course in the program on product design at the Stanford University School of Engineering.
Eyal's expertise is in behavioral engineering, which incorporates elements of behavioral science to enable software designers to develop habit-forming products for businesses. He has taught university courses, given speeches and published books about how psychology intersects with technology and business. His writing has appeared in Fast Company, Harvard Business Review, The Atlantic, and other publications.
In 2014, Eyal published his first book, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, which became a Wall Street Journal best seller. In it, Eyal developed the idea of the "hook model", which aims to "build products that create habit-forming behavior in users via a looping cycle that consists of trigger, an action, a variable reward, and continued investment."
His second book, Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life, was published in September 2019.
Eyal has spoken out against proposals to regulate habit-forming technologies, arguing that it is an individual users' responsibility to control their own use of these products.

Published works