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

get specific about where your population does and doesn’t want to spend their resources, consider both their cognitive habits and the cognitive environments of your interventions, and spend that brainpower wisely.

if your outcome behavior is not the result of any of the motivations of the population, it is unethical.

They can be affirmative

To be effective and efficient, identity needs to be situated within all of our interventions,

Since we’re picking on tech companies, let’s go with another fan favorite: Facebook. In June 2014 they, along with some Cornell researchers, published a paper10 that revealed a massive intervention in which the company manipulated the contents of users’ newsfeeds to contain either more positive or more negative content, which then caused users to p

Designing for behavior change is about creating the conditions that allow us to act on our original motivations.

Specificity around the exact things people do and don’t want to spend cognitive resources on is part of avoiding the Blue Apron problem.

Good behavioral scientists are T-shaped: they have one area of deep expertise (the legs of the T) and broad interests across other disciplines (the arms of the T). So on Fridays we have an hour when someone teaches a method from their legs to the rest of us for whom that isn’t our core discipline, broadening our arms. And then we spend another hour

Try to think of identity as hierarchy. At the top are the roles, which don’t mean anything in and of themselves but are simply shorthand for a set of values that live underneath. These values are then associated with actual behaviors, because identity is really a sentence we tell ourselves and others: “I’m the kind of person who [value/behavior].”