Comments about oreilly Designing for Behavior Change:

Clear, comprehensive with practical examples, high usability

Comments about oreilly Designing for Behavior Change:

The best book of its kind, written by someone tackling these challenges in the real world. In particular, he nails it with advice for how to break out of the mold of simply translating your application into a lack luster "to do list" user interface. Wendel is to behavior-based UX what Julia Child was for French cooking. He makes it practical, accessible and dare I say fun.

Comments about oreilly Designing for Behavior Change:

I found this book insightful, and in places even inspirational. If you come from a User Experience background, this book will help you add a few tools to your toolbelt, and will help you build a business case for why behahioral change and how psychology is important to usage and design. There are lots of useful examples that tie the book back to real world applications.

If you are not coming from a User Experience background, you may find this book hard to follow in places, because it is probably a shift in focus from the way you approach consumer and industrial design, but you will still find this book useful if you are excited by the process of taking conceptual design and making it a reality.

Comments about oreilly Designing for Behavior Change:

I found the exploration of behavior models very enlightening for me. As a developer of healthcare software, eliciting behavior change is what it's all about.

Comments about oreilly Designing for Behavior Change:

This gave me more insight into how the whole product cycle works from start to finish in designing for behavior change.

The book feels like it's 100 pages too long.

Some of the tangents are too abstract.

Comments about oreilly Designing for Behavior Change:

Designing for Behavior Change is all about analysing requirements, designing, testing so as to build effective user interfaces. Steve Wendel shows us behavior analysis techniques and design strategies to create win-win interfaces for both business and client/ customers. The quality of information in this book is really very good.

This is a book I feel is useful for two types of readers. The first is an UX/ UI app designer, they have a budget and they do user testing. For many a UX/ UI web designer there is little user testing. We have to use wisdom and experience to reach good design decisions. This book will help you make even better decisions.

Using an iterative approach to "understand, discover, design, refine". This book will help you understand. You should already be a designer if you are reading this. Discovery and refinement are already part of our creative process. The book starts out with a section about behavioural psychology. The second section of the book is about discovery. The first chapter of this section "Figuring Out What You Want to Accomplish" points the way forward. Start with a vision, what result do you think you need? Make priorities as to how to accomplish this. Move on and work out who your target users are and create personas. Once you understand what needs to happen and what type of user you are dealing with you can start the conceptual design phase. Each phase is explained clearly, what you need to know, what you need to do. Next up, the interface design, testing... then refinement. All sections are dotted with tales of woe, things to avoid and pointers to where the insights may happen.

No dark arts but honest win-win goals are championed. Steve Wendel has been with Hello Wallet for many years in various roles and in now chief scientist. Happy Wallet won a webby award last year (2013). In this book Steve Wendel shares where they got it wrong and where they got it right. Hello Wallet is a webapp positioned for employers as a workplace financial wellness benefit to employees. Hello Wallet is also available for individuals and helps tame out of control finances.

You can see that there are research budgets. For UX/ UI app designers that is a (non) luxury that UX/ UI web designers have to do without many a time. If you are a web UX/ UI designer this book will help you build your knowledge base. I really feel the insights and tone of this book will help nearly every reader professionally. There are not very many books on these subjects, but this is a very good book and I highly recommend it.

Comments about oreilly Designing for Behavior Change:

The book is aimed at app developers who want to make a product that will be used regularly and will cause people to change their daily habits and routines.

It's full of ideas, examples, studies, and information to help you plan, design, test, and deploy an app that will help people make a change. The change might be to exercise more often, save money, or something else. Many examples in the book are from HelloWallet, where author Stephen Wendel works, but there are plenty of examples from other places as well.

The book takes you through the complete process of figuring out the goal for your app, clearly stating the behavior you want to achieve, and the process of creating, designing and testing to make sure you accomplish the goal. There is science to back up the author's suggestions. There are examples to help you understand what kind of behavior change you can expect people to make using an app, and how to get them to use it long enough to make the desired changes by keeping the interface simple. It talks about designing, coding, about measuring impact, and about refining a product as you go along.

Footnotes and appendices are many if you want to get into the various studies and examples cited in the book, but there's plenty of information here to get you going with just this source.

Each chapter is almost a text in itself, because the author repeats many of the core princples of what you need to keep in mind in every chapter. It's repetitious, but it also reinforces the key points at every step along the way.

Summary: An excellent guide to designing apps to create behavior changes.

Comments about oreilly Designing for Behavior Change:

A strong theoretic book that explores the conscious and sub-conscious minds of behaviour, in order to set the mindset for designing for human behaviour. A pillar of UX development, Stephen Wendel presents the psychology of why people do things in a certain way, and strategies for encouraging behavioural change, re-forming habits and so forth.

Comments about oreilly Designing for Behavior Change:

First and foremost - as this is an early release there were numerous formatting issues and some spelling mistakes but this was to be expected, "Early Release - Raw and Unedited" emblazoned on the front of the book does somewhat suggest potential issues. As such, I'll stick solely to the content.

Stephen Wendel guides us adeptly through the inner workings of our lazy minds and shows us how to maximise our chances of effective designs for behaviour change by paving the way to good design with excellent theory, references and his own experiences to draw upon.

In the preface, the author clearly defines the scope of this book and, most importantly, the audience for whom the book has been written and the types of changes that the book can help you to achieve in your designs. If you're planning world domination by brainwashing people through your apps then this book is not for you (indeed bad news for you in general as the author reveals that it is in fact quite difficult to coerce people to do something that they don't want to). If, however, you genuinely want to help people to develop better habits then read on.

In order to effect change, the person looking to design for change needs to understand how the mind makes decisions and why it makes the decisions that it does make and not others. Once this has been discussed (with some fascinating data / anecdotes from studies), the author then introduces strategies for actually changing behaviour.

Armed with this knowledge, you are then taught how to take the theory already learned and apply to the people that you want to reach, in a logical progression that begins with figuring out what exactly you want to do, how to do it and then continues on to how to actually implement it, solicit feedback and continually refine your product.

Even if you never hope to develop a product for behaviour change, this book is a fascinating read that illustrates how we as a species tend to think and how people try to use that information (for both good and bad) to influence our decisions. If you are hoping to develop a product for behaviour change then get this book without delay.

I'm quite delighted, apart from the sterling content of the book, at the use of humour too. Little things like the summary of each chapter being referred to as "On a Napkin" make it all a more pleasant read. I was also delighted to see references to Brian Wansink, another excellent author on behaviour (and a funny guy too)

If you're looking to help people with behaviour (not addictions) or are just interested in the topic then get this book, you won't regret it.

Comments about oreilly Designing for Behavior Change:

I heard Steve talk at an O'Reilly webinar and got so much out of it. I bought the book and was not disappointed. He has so much great material and lays it out so well. Everything is backed up with resources and references. I especially like his summaries at the end of each chapter "On a Napkin" and his callouts "Lessons for Designers" where really well placed.