Designing for Behavior Change

Chapter 4. Figuring Out What You Want to Accomplish

If you wanted to develop a new product to help people lose weight, what would you do?

How about something that helps people track how many calories they’re eating, like MyFitnesPal?^[68] Or a diet plan that says what we should eat and what we should avoid, like the Paleo Diet?^[69] How about a diet pill that reduces appetite, like the once highly popular (but unfortunately fatal) fen-phen?^[70] Or, of course, an exercise app, like the many other such apps already out there?

These are all things that jump to mind because they’re familiar, and relate to seemingly obvious actions that people can take to lose weight. Brian Wansink has a different approach. He’s studied how we eat food for decades. He directs Cornell’s Food and Brand Lab and has authored over a hundred academic articles and numerous books about eating.^[71] He’s also really funny (he used to be a stand-up comic).

Wansink has studied what happens when you give people free but really, really stale popcorn before a movie (they eat it anyway), and what happens when you secretly refill people’s soup bowls while they are eating so they can’t reach the bottom (they don’t notice and just keep eating; see Figure 4-1). He’s coined the term “mindless eating” for how our eating behavior is often on autopilot ([ref181]). And Brian has a new weight-loss product for us—it’s called a smaller dinner plate.

Figure 4-1. A cartoon from Brian Wansink, illustrating that the larger the serving container, ...