Designing for Behavior Change, 2nd Edition

Chapter 18. Conclusion

Throughout this book, we’ve looked at how to deliberately, and ethically, develop products that help your users change their behavior, from exercising more to drinking less.

To do so, we’ve tried to develop three major conceptual tools:

• An understanding of how people make decisions and act in their daily lives

• A model of what’s required for someone to take action relating to your product in a given moment

• A process for applying that knowledge to the practical details of product development

Let’s briefly review the big ideas that support each tool.

How We Make Decisions and Act

In Chapter 1, we summarized the breadth of behavioral research with five core lessons:

• We’re limited beings: we have limited attention, time, willpower, etc. For example, there is a nearly an infinite number of things that your users could be paying attention to at any moment. They could be paying attention to the person who is trying to speak to them, the interesting conversation someone else is having near them, the report on their desktop that’s overdue, or the notification on your app. Unfortunately, researchers have shown again and again that people’s conscious minds can really only pay proper attention to one thing at a time.

• Our minds use shortcuts to economize and make quick decisions because of our limitations. Your users have a myriad of shortcuts (aka heuristics) that help them sort through the range of options they face on a day-to-day basis and make rapid, ...