“the behavior you are seeing is the behavior you designed for.”

The design process can be arduous for long stretches with no easy answers in sight.

The feedback cycle between designer and user is the beating heart of the user-friendly world.

Ritual-based, habit-forming design is a frontier for our work at Dalberg and a long-term goal for many designers tackling broad social issues.

These neglected spaces—before, between, or after direct product touch-points—are often the best design opportunities, as they can be strengthened with feedback to better connect the dots across the entire journey in unexpected and often delightful ways.

uncompleted tasks are easier to remember than successful ones, a discovery known as the Zeigarnik effect.

most designers have an intuitive appreciation of the principle behind this law, and they “chunk” related options together to reduce cognitive load and reinforce a more coherent mental model.

the designer should not assume that there is a correct mental model for a product or service. People usually blame themselves for not understanding something. It is the designer’s job to take the user’s side and blame any flaws on the product—or the product designer—whenever possible. This can be tricky, particularly when you are the one who

“Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.”