Resources to Learn More - Designing for Behavior Change: Applying Psychology and Behavioral Economics (2013)

Designing for Behavior Change: Applying Psychology and Behavioral Economics (2013)

Appendix B. Resources to Learn More

Resources on Behavior and Decision Making

This book provides an overview of the literature on behavior change and decision making. But it isn’t comprehensive: the literature is simply too vast, and most of it doesn’t apply when designing products for behavior change. If you’d like to learn more, though, here are some great resources to inspire your work and spur new ideas.

Resources on Applying the Mind’s Shortcuts to Design

BJ Fogg’s Persuasive Technology and Behavior Model

BJ is the father of contemporary product-mediated behavior change. He founded the field of persuasive technology—the use of computers to persuade—in the 1990s ([ref66]). More recently, he’s developed a model of what’s required for intentional behavior to occur (the Fogg Behavior Model) and a method for building habits (Tiny Habits). There’s a lot more out there, but his work is a good place to start thinking about these issues.

Here is a list of his writings and websites:

§ Fogg Behavior Model (http://behaviormodel.org/): motivation, ability, and a trigger are needed for intentional behaviors.

§ Behavior Grid (http://behaviorgrid.org/): a typology of 15 types of behaviors, with guides on how they can be changed, based on the frequency of the behavior, and whether it is to be started, stopped, increased, or decreased.

§ Fogg’s Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford (http://captology.stanford.edu/), where Fogg is a half-time professor. The site has links to numerous videos and articles.

§ Fogg’s book, Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do (Morgan Kaufmann, 2002).

Stephen Anderson’s Seductive Interaction Design

Stephen’s book, Seductive Interaction Design (New Riders, 2011), provides thoughtful, powerful examples of how psychology can be used to affect behavior via product design. He groups these applications into a set of themes, which provides a useful structure to the otherwise overwhelming research literature.

He also has a set of cards for designers summarizing the key topics, called “Mental Notes” (http://getmentalnotes.com/).

Dan Lockton’s Design with Intent

Dan has developed a toolkit for “Designing with Intent,” described in his PhD thesis.

§ The toolkit (http://www.danlockton.com/dwi/Main_Page) is a set of 101 cards showing “patterns” for influencing behavior through design. They are organized under a set of eight “lenses” for thinking about, and designing for, intentional behavior change.

§ The thesis (http://architectures.danlockton.co.uk/phd/) describes how the toolkit was developed, how it was tested in the field, and what other researchers are doing in the space

§ His background research for the thesis spawned a number of working papers (http://architectures.danlockton.co.uk/dan-lockton/#workingpapers), which are the most detailed review of the field that I’ve seen.

Susan Weinschenk’s Neuro-Web Design and 100 Things

Susan has two interesting books in this space, one on web design specifically, and one on the cognitive mechanisms and ways in which the mind works that affect web behavior. The latter book provides a valuable list of mechanisms but doesn’t help to structure that list or give a method to select and target behavioral goals.

The web design book is called Neuro-Web Design (New Riders, 2009), and the book on mechanisms is called 100 Things Designers Need to Know About People (New Riders, 2011). Her professional website, http://www.theteamw.com/, has more information about her work.

Jeff Johnson’s Designing with the Mind in Mind

Jeff’s book, Designing with the Mind in Mind (Morgan Kaufmann, 2010), applies research on visual perception and psychology to user interface design, in particular. He covers issues such as gestalt psychology and visual ambiguity, our visual system’s ability to detect differences in color, how pattern recognition is built up, and how we scan web pages.

Blogs

There are a handful of blogs on how psychology can be used in product design to help change behavior (send me an email if you know of any others):

§ Anders Toxboe’s Persuasive Pattern Library (http://persuasive-patterns.com/)

§ David Royer’s blog (http://www.davidroyer.com/)

§ Kristian Tørning’s Persuasive Design Blog (http://www.persuasive.eu/)

§ Nir Eyal’s blog (http://www.nirandfar.com) also covers product design and behavior change.

§ Sebastian Deterding’s Coding Conduct Blog (http://codingconduct.cc/) covers persuasive design, serious games, and gamification.

Design Trickery

There’s only one site I know of that identifies the nasty tricks not-so-ethical designers sometimes use (and shames them for it): Dark Patterns. You can also see Jesse Snyder’s write-up on Dark Patterns and a TechCrunch post specifically about Facebook.[161]

Chris Nodder’s new book Evil by Design (Wiley, 2013) also covers “evil” design patterns and how they work.

Books on Decision Making

In recent years, there has been a rapid growth of research in behavioral economics and a rediscovery of solid work in the psychology of judgment and decision making. Much of it can be applied to product design and development, after some translation and experimentation. The following links are for books and sites intended for a general audience, not the academic journal articles.

Explicit Behavior Change Approaches in Behavioral Economics

Most of the behavioral economics research is on how the mind works (and makes financial decisions, in particular), but here are a few works that explicitly look at behavior change:

§ Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein’s Nudge (Penguin Books, 2009). This is one of the best general-audience books on behavioral economics out there. It introduces the concept of “Choice Architecture,” or how our decision-making environment affects our choices. Check it out.

§ Benartzi’s Save More Tomorrow (Portfolio Hardcover, 2012). This describes one of the most effective financial interventions out there—having people commit to use their future income increases for savings.

§ Karlan et al.’s paper “Getting to the Top of Mind,” on the incredible power of simply reminding people to do what they said they want to do (this is an academic article).

§ Kim Ly et al.’s Practitioners Guide to Nudging is a new ebook on how to use behavioral economics for behavior change.

General Behavioral Economics/Judgment and Decision-Making Books

§ Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013). I love this book. I don’t love very many books, I must admit. I purchased a copy for everyone on my team. This is a wonderfully detailed and thoughtful analysis of how the mind works, from dual process theory to how various cognitive mechanisms and heuristics affect behavior. It’s a long one, though.

§ Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational (Harper Perennial, 2010). A fun and well-told read that makes the underlying psychological and behavioral economics principles understandable and memorable. A good introduction for general audience.

§ Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink (Back Bay Books, 2007). An easy read, which is less thoroughly grounded in the research than other books, but still a useful summary of dual process theory and mental heuristics.

Also, a good list of resources on behavioral economics can be found on the Corporation For Enterprise Development website, http://cfed.org/knowledge_center/research/behavioral_economics/.

Research On Habit Formation

Habit formation has many names and was studied in much of the old behaviorist literature on conditioning. Most of the modern work I’ve seen is explicitly on addiction. But three works are bringing the study of habits into broader areas of application, including how to help people change their (nonaddictive) habits:

§ Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit (Random House, 2012). An overview of how reward-based habits form and how they can be changed. He also presents a metaphor about how habits function within organizations and companies. The anecdotes reach a bit too far, but he cites much of the research that’s out there and provides excellent examples.

§ Jeremy Dean’s Making Habits, Breaking Habits (Da Capo Lifelong Books, 2013). He reviews the research on habit formation and change, and stays closer to the research than Duhigg’s work. A solid, informative book. Also check out his very popular blog on psychology:http://www.spring.org.uk/.

§ Neale Martin’s Habit: The 95% of Behavior Marketers Ignore (FT Press, 2008), provides a cogent, detailed summary of the academic literature, and then applies that knowledge to the field of marketing.

§ Nir Eyal’s Hooked (forthcoming). Nir is currently working on this book, which will hopefully be out soon! Hooked focuses on habits and “the desire engine” as a core driver of behavior change, and on building a business model that uses it responsibly.

For the underlying research, see Neale Martin’s great resource list on habits: http://www.sublimebehavior.com/knowledge/habit-research/.

How to Apply Behavior Change Concepts to One’s Own Life

In Switch (Crown Business, 2010), Chip and Dan Heath apply the psychology literature, especially dual process theory, to changing one’s own behavior. It uses the metaphor of the rider (our conscious rational mind) and the elephant (our intuitive reactive mind) throughout, to explain what we need to do in our daily lives to align the rider and elephant and “switch” our behavior. Check it out.

Blogs

Here are some blogs on behavioral social science, often with humorous applications in people’s daily lives:

§ Dan Ariely’s blog (http://danariely.com/)

§ Linked to the book Nudge by Thaler and Sunstein, The Nudge Blog (http://nudges.org/); it isn’t active as of this writing, however.

§ Jeremy Dean’s PsyBlog (http://www.spring.org.uk)

Behavior Change Approaches from Marketing and Sales

Sales and marketing aren’t my main interests, but they are fields we can certainly learn from, and apply to other domains.

§ Robert B. Cialdini’s classic Influence: Science and Practice (Pearson, 2008) details ways to influence people, especially for sales purposes. Despite his showmanship, Cialdini did some solid and important research on persuasion, and his book is justifiably a classic for its clear and practical presentation.

§ Noah Goldstein, a protégé of Cialdini, and Steve Martin published Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive (Free Press, 2009), which includes a longer list of influence tactics. The core concepts are similar, but you may find this presentation more accessible for your work.

§ The Marketing Sciences Institute’s Consumer Insights covers 42 tricks that marketers use to influence buying decisions.

These two books don’t give “how-to” instructions like the previous ones do, but they are useful summaries of the research used in sales and marketing:

§ Martin Lindstrom’s Buyology (Crown Business, 2010)

§ Paco Underhill’s Why We Buy (Simon & Schuster, 2008)

Where to Get the Latest List of Resources

An online and periodically updated version of this annotated list can be found at http://actiondesign.hellowallet.com/about-the-research/.

I also maintain a larger list of relevant books in the field on Shelfari at http://www.shelfari.com/sawendel/shelf.

Please feel free to shoot me an email (http://about.me/sawendel) or reach out to me via Twitter (@sawendel) with suggestions or corrections to this list.


[161] http://webdesign.tutsplus.com/articles/user-experience-articles/dark-patterns-in-ui-and-website-design/; http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/25/5-design-tricks-facebook-uses-to-affect-your-privacy-decisions/