DiscoPosse Review: Designing for Behavior Change by Stephen Wendel

designingforbehaviorchangeEvery once in a while I happen upon a book that is an unstoppable read. This was one of those books. As a behavioral analysis nerd (as in I read stuff like DSM-IV for fun), and a massive fan of diving into psychology to understand how people use systems, this is a one-stop-shop for me.

Stephen Wendel (@sawendel) brings together analytic data with human behavior and shows us how to apply these tools to build effective systems. This isn’t just a proposal of how things may work, but instead shows historical proof of how systems have been built successfully and why.

The proof is in the content because of the real life cases that are highlighted throughout the chapters. Top the examples off with thoroughly backed, research-based behavior analysis and you have one of the most exciting books I’ve seen in quite some time. If I could glue this to The Phoenix Project it would be the perfect pairing!

Move that Cheese!

You’ve probably heard of the classic book “Who Moved My Cheese?” which talks about how to introduce change at work and in life and how we are naturally resistant to change. These are precisely the types of books that help us to better understand ourselves and others. If we want to be able to create a path towards change, we have to understand the factors that prevent that change from being accepted. Designing for Behavior change is the new Who Moved My Cheese in my opinion.

Trust me, buy the book!

If you do any system design, or application design, I can tell you that you would undoubtedly gain from reading Designing for Behavior Change. If you want to introduce any type of new pattern to yourself or others, such as a diet or exercise regimen, a study pattern, or anything at all for that matter really, this book is absolutely appropriate.

Each chapter is nicely laid out with effective examples, footnoted with great references, and also has an “On a Napkin” summary at the end, which is the TL;DR for the overall content of each chapter.

What is even more exciting is that Stephen Wendel encourages continued conversation about the content of the book, and about the subject in general. You can visit his about.me page here: http://about.me/sawendel and make sure to follow Stephen on Twitter (@sawendel) and let him know what you think of the book.

To order the book, you can click the link below and Amazon will do all of the work for you! I hope that you enjoy this book as much as I have 🙂

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