Curated Resources for Further Study in Behavior Design, Action Design

“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,

“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

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.

When you’re Behavior Designing a program, make sure you consider (and test) all the available communication channels.

Despite the hype, new years is the worst time of year to be making big behavior changes. Here’s why.

We humans are always trying to fit our experience into some kind of narrative that helps us make sense of things. Unfortunately, reality rarely has a nice, neat narrative. So we end up with gaps between reality, and the stories we tell ourselves about reality. This is a challenge that creates a powerful opportunity.

I recently went through a couple of months with a terrible back problem resulting in physical therapy and a back procedure (out-patient). Of course, I can’t help but look at all my experiences through a behavior design perspective! And, as usual, I heard from my physical therapists that they have a really tough time getting

Ages ago, we raised funding and built the first behavior change, social network. What was once looked at as a strange, new idea, has now become so common I can’t even count the number of behavior change apps available. At the time we still had some people saying, “You’ll never get people on the internet

As GoalTribe, Suruchi and I built the first Facebook fitness behavior change app. It was called “The 30 Day Fitness Challenge” and leveraged game mechanics. We launch this during the last days of GoalTribe, during a challenging time when Facebook admitted to having the worst API stability ever. It was showing great promising, but in