This is a guest post by Suvam Prasad (https://www.linkedin.com/in/suvamprasad/). I am very glad to have his post.

This book is very special to me because it helped me to discover new perspectives of web designing mythology. The book is written by Steve Krug(a famous user experience professional). The book contained hardly 216 pages that give you enough knowledge and idea to understand web design usability, user accessibility, and how to be a great user experience designer. Most of the concepts mentioned are very beginner centric. The book revolves around web usability with actionable guidelines, conduct usability testing, understanding user interface design, which should be UCD(User-Centered Design). The book starts with the user interface myths. Whenever the user visits any site, they try to search the specific keyword or word; they are looking for their needs. The users are not going to read the long passage or articles on the site. It is unnecessary to include long paragraphs on the website if it is an e-commerce website or a selling-product-based website. The user always in a hurry to satisfy their itch, and the product should act as a painkiller.

TLDR; A short book on Product Development and especially explains how B2C (especially social media) companies make their users hooked on their products. Though Product owners, designers, and founders can use this book in improving their products, every user can read this to understand why some of the popular apps do things (like infinite scroll, weekly digest emails, notifications) which we use day-to-day. Hooked also overlaps with Nir Eyal’s other book Undistractable

Disclaimer: This book was published in 1989. So, we have to time travel to understand a few things, but overall the concepts are still relevant. Also, read this during COVID-19 (middle of a global pandemic).

This review is a little different than other books. Going to share most of the notes as points.

Peter Lynch is America’s money manager. He was Vice-Chairman of the Fidelity Management & Research Company. He was the portfolio manager of Fidelity Magellan Fund, which was the best performing fund in the world from May 1977 to May 1990.

Part 1 is about Master Internal Triggers which talks about that distractions are mainly caused by discomfort. Most people don’t want to acknolwedge the uncomfortable truth that distraction is always an unhealthy escape from reality. Being indistractable means striving to do what you say you will do.

We are compelled to reach for things we supposedly need but really don’t. (eg. checking emails)

We tend to blame things like television, junk food, social media etc - but these are all promiate causes of our distraction, but not the root cause.

Here is a list of books which I really enjoyed reading. They are mostly around the topics such as Self Development, Management, Finance, Technology.

• Give and Take by Adam Grant
• Atomic Habits by James Clear
• A random walkdown wall street
• Designing Data Intensive Application
• surely you’re joking mr. feynman
• How To Win Friends and Influence People
• Lean Startup
• The Go programming languate
• Make your bed
• Hard thing about hard things
• One Up On Wall Street
• Learn to Earn
• Indistractable
• Thinking fast and slow (I couldn’t complete this book. Its too much content)
• Hooked

Chapter 1 is Good Returns which explains the Dangers and Rewards of Giving more than you get with multiple examples. One of the things which striked me

You can’t just ignore someone because you don’t think they’re important enough.

I can’t agree more on that. I have seen first class that founders making this mistake. Its so easy to just ignore, but think about the long term or big picture. First chapter, goes over some of the examples of givers approaches. Especially David Hornik some of his quotes and thoughts are note worthy