Your simulator needs a tune-up

We all have a simulator that we use every day to predict how others will react to us — our brain. This simulator works amazingly well. It lets us construct a joke that other people will laugh at, paint a picture that others will marvel at, and write a sales pitch to get people to

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Let Me Tell You a Story: It Might Just Save Your Life

It’s not a stretch to take our most primal information technology, the story, and use it to help people. A story is powerful, whether around a campfire, in a viral video, or snuggled up next to someone you love. It’s a way to share knowledge, understand problems, process information, and even encourage healthy behavior change.

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Metaphor Made Me Do It

You probably already know that persuading someone has little to do with what you say and much to do with how you say it. But persuasive communication is more than thoughtful word choice and emotional storytelling. One of your most persuasive tools isn’t thoughtful at all. Enjoy the rest of the article in its entirety on

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Emotional ROI: An Easy, Powerful Model for Improving Behavior

Your team has painstakingly developed something that will help a lot of people. You’ve researched, designed, tested, and produced it. Then you launch. And…crickets. People aren’t trying it. And if they do, they aren’t sticking with it. Your heart sinks. The team is frustrated. The CEO is mad. Why!!!??? Why aren’t people doing something that

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If at First You Don’t Succeed… Iterate Like Crazy

“Humility and design go hand-in-hand; it’s just in the nature of design.” – Austin Knight, Google Designer 1 You probably think you can beat a kindergartener at just about anything. Half-court basketball? No doubt. Historical trivia? Sure thing. Barbecue cook-off? Fuhgeddaboudit. How about building the highest spaghetti tower that can hold up a marshmallow? Well,

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Bias Blindness Obliterates Projects by the Millions

“It is the peculiar quality of a fool to perceive the faults of others and to forget his own. You can’t clear your own fields while you’re counting the rocks on your neighbor’s farm.” – Cicero When we lose a hand at poker, it’s bad luck, but when we finally win the pot with a

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Our Irrational Brains Are Killing Us

“Nothing is perfect. Life is messy. Relationships are complex. Outcomes are uncertain. People are irrational.” – Hugh Mackay Our brains evolved over millions of years and made us the best hunter-gatherers the world had ever seen. We survived. We thrived. We spread across the globe and built great civilizations.    Unfortunately, the same evolution that

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Emotional Design

Emotional Design is about designing products, services, and experiences to achieve specific emotional outcomes, usually positive. Emotions drive most human action, so it’s critical to design with emotions in mind.

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Setback Recovery: Where Did All Your Participants Go?

If there is one truth about behavior change – it’s that you’re going to screw up. You’re supposed to screw up. That’s how you gain experience and figure out what works.

However very few behavior change products design for ‘failure’. And when they do, they don’t do a very good job at it.

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