# Hooked UX

> Habit-forming product design — an AI agent skill based on *Hooked* by Nir Eyal.

Published 2026-02-19 · Updated 2026-08-17 · Product & Innovation · Free and MIT-licensed
Canonical: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/hooked-ux/
Source: https://github.com/wondelai/skills/tree/main/hooked-ux

**Install:** `npx skills add wondelai/skills/hooked-ux --global`

## What is the Hooked UX skill?

Nir Eyal’s Hooked explains how products become habits, and Hooked UX is the free AI agent skill that puts the model to work. Your agent maps your product onto the four-step cycle — trigger, action, variable reward, investment — names the step your loop is missing, and designs the fix without reaching for another notification.

## Key concepts from Hooked your agent applies

- **The Hook Model** — Four steps that create habits: Trigger → Action → Variable Reward → Investment.
- **External & Internal Triggers** — Start with external triggers (notifications, emails) and transition to internal triggers (emotions, routines).
- **Reducing Friction** — Make the desired action as easy as possible — fewer steps, less thinking, lower effort.
- **Variable Rewards** — Unpredictable rewards (social validation, content discovery, personal achievement) drive repeated engagement.
- **Investment Phase** — Get users to invest time, data, or effort that makes the product more valuable with each use.

## When to use Hooked UX — and when not to

Reach for it when:

- Users finish onboarding, get the value once, and never return unless an email from you drags them back.
- Engagement rests entirely on push notifications, and each campaign buys visibly less than the one before it.
- People enjoy the product but nothing they leave behind makes their fifth session better than their first.
- You have a daily-use ambition and a monthly-use reality, with no emotion or routine that reliably points at your product.

Reach for something else when:

- The behavior genuinely repeats once a year — a tax filing, a house move — so optimize the single conversion with CRO Methodology.
- Users want to come back and cannot get through the flow; the missing ingredient is ability, not reward — use Improve Retention.
- Nobody returns because the product does not yet solve a real problem — Jobs to Be Done is the honest place to restart.
- You are polishing the feedback and animation of one small interaction rather than a return cycle — that is Microinteractions.

## About Nir Eyal

Stanford lecturer, behavioral design expert. Nir Eyal has taught at Stanford's Graduate School of Business and Hasso Plattner Institute of Design. He spent years in the video gaming and advertising industries, studying how technology shapes behavior.

More: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nir_Eyal · https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q7039822
The book: https://openlibrary.org/books/OL27172184M/Hooked

## Example prompts

- Map the Hook cycle for my social media app using hooked-ux skill _(Product design)_
- Design variable rewards for my learning platform using hooked-ux skill _(Engagement)_
- Identify internal triggers we should associate with our product using hooked-ux skill _(Behavioral design)_
- Create investment mechanisms that increase switching costs using hooked-ux skill _(Retention)_

## Frequently asked questions

### How do I install the Hooked UX skill?

Run `npx skills add wondelai/skills/hooked-ux --global`. It takes about 30 seconds and needs no account. The Hooked UX skill then works in Claude, Claude Code, Claude Cowork, Codex, Cursor, OpenClaw and Hermes Agent — anything that reads the open agentskills.io format — and your agent loads it on its own when a task calls for it. It is free and MIT-licensed, and the source is at https://github.com/wondelai/skills.

### Which book is the Hooked UX skill based on?

It packages *Hooked* by Nir Eyal — stanford lecturer, behavioral design expert. The skill distils the book's method into instructions your agent follows while it works, covering the hook model, external & internal triggers and reducing friction. It sits in the Product & Innovation part of the library.

### How is this different from the Improve Retention skill?

Hooked is an architecture; Improve Retention (Tiny Habits) is a diagnosis. Eyal assumes the behavior can happen and asks how to make it recur on its own — external trigger giving way to internal trigger, reward made variable, investment loaded so the next session is better. Fogg asks why a single instance of the behavior failed and answers with motivation, ability or prompt. Reach for Fogg when users try and fail; reach for Hooked when they succeed once and never come back.

### What are the four steps of the Hook, exactly?

Trigger — external at first (a notification, a link from a friend), eventually internal, where an emotion or routine fires without you. Action — the simplest behavior someone will do in anticipation of reward. Variable Reward — an unpredictable payoff: social validation, the hunt for something good, a sense of completion. Investment — time, data or effort the user puts in, which both loads the next trigger and makes the product better next time. Investment is the step teams skip, and the one that makes a loop compound rather than decay.

### Do I need the book to use this?

No — but Hooked is unusually practical to read alongside it, because much of the book is worked examples of ordinary products (Pinterest, Instagram, the Bible app) taken apart step by step. The skill carries the model and applies it to yours. What the book gives you is a trained eye: after it, you catch other people’s hooks in the wild, which is the fastest way to get better at designing your own.

### Isn’t habit design just manipulation?

It can be, and the skill cannot referee that for you. Eyal’s own test is the Manipulation Matrix: would you use the thing yourself, and does it materially improve the user’s life? Point this skill at a product with thin value and it will still design a working loop — you will simply have made churn slower and resentment louder. Decide whether the habit deserves to exist before you ask an agent to engineer it.

## Related

- All Product & Innovation skills: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/product/
- Jobs to Be Done: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/jobs-to-be-done/
- Improve Retention: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/improve-retention/
- Lean Startup: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/lean-startup/
- Design Sprint: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/design-sprint/
- Continuous Discovery: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/continuous-discovery/
- Inspired: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/inspired-product/
- The Mom Test: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/mom-test/
- The 37signals Way: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/37signals-way/
- Lean Analytics: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/lean-analytics/