Skip to Main Content
Designing for Behavior Change, 2nd Edition
book

Designing for Behavior Change, 2nd Edition

by Stephen Wendel
June 2020
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
382 pages
11h 26m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Audiobook available
Content preview from Designing for Behavior Change, 2nd Edition

Chapter 8. Understanding Our Efforts: A Brief Story About a Fish

DECIDE

Imagine that you’re walking along a beach. You see a fish stranded in the sand, flopping around a few feet away from the water. Let’s further imagine that you’re feeling more helpful than hungry. What do you do?

Do you walk up to the fish and yell, “What’s wrong with you? Don’t know how important it is to be in the water? If you just understood the value of water like I do, you’d get into the water!”

Or do you calmly and thoughtfully try to teach the fish, “Let me explain to you how your gills work. Your gills extract dissolved oxygen in the water and put it in your bloodstream, where the rest of your body can use it. If you aren’t in the water, you can’t get dissolved oxygen, and you’ll soon die.”

No. That’s obviously foolish. The fish isn’t lying in the sand because it lacks motivation, nor because it lacks understanding. Maybe it doesn’t know the details, but it “knows” the most important part: it needs to get back into the water.

Instead, there are really four things you can do in that moment.

First, you could pick up the fish, hold it in your hands, and walk it over to the water where you drop it in. All the fish needs to do is stay put and not flop around too much in your hands—it’s not trivial, but it’s a whole lot easier for the fish than to get back into the water on its own.

Second, there might even be ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

Articulating Design Decisions, 2nd Edition

Articulating Design Decisions, 2nd Edition

Tom Greever
Storytelling with You

Storytelling with You

Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781492056027Errata PageSupplemental Content