Start at the End: How to Build Products That Create Change

The problem is that with all that knowledge, it is easy to get overconfident and to rush, simply listing the pressures and putting an intervention against each of them. Down that path lies madness. It is entirely possible for a single pressure to give rise to many interventions and equally possible for one intervention to satisfy many pressures.

Advertising accounts for more than 1 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product: $220 billion of spend to compensate for a process that doesn’t consider behavior change its central aim.

good science, is based on the assumption that your interventions won’t work. That last sentence is the one that most often makes people want to fire me (my charming disposition aside). It is a very, very hard thing to be about a month into a project and have your CBO say that they’ve selected several pilots that they expect to fail. But that cultur

you could change the behavior of college students who smoked by putting a sticker on their lighter reminding them that “Smoking Kills”—just like MacDonald’s AIDS stamp.3 Students were asked to use the lighter when they wanted to smoke, but some of them had an additional task of counting backward by tens.

↑ ↓ Mind-bending, I know. But remember the goal of this book: I want you to actually create behavior change, every single day. And sometimes simple frameworks are the best way to get that done. These arrows represent the balance of competing pressures that create our behavior: promoting pressures—the up arrow—make a behavior more likely and inhibit

behavior change itself will be inherently imperfect. You can lose the battle—a person, a specific moment, a single unit of behavior—and still win the war. This is true because populations are, in the aggregate, largely predictable. Even if any given person might not do what we expect all the time, the overall behavior of large numbers of people acr

You will also likely have to remind the group that the goal is not practicality. We’re living in a counterfactual world and nothing should be taken as unachievable at this point; we’ll have plenty of time to be choosy during intervention selection, and we can always scale back a strong intervention to fit resource constraints. There may also be a t

meet up creation flow that read “I pledge to create real, face-to-face community.” Andres was skeptical. Sure, it might keep out the spammers, but the golden rule of designing sign-up flows is that you don’t add anything unnecessary, because every additional step introduces greater inhibiting pressure and thus lowers the behavior that is registrati

Again, the trick to getting good at pressure mapping is learning to let go of your natural assumptions, to see the irrational and the counterrational as opportunities.