Nir And Far: Business, Behaviour and the Brain

Right now, someone is tinkering with a billion dollar secret — they just don’t know it yet. “What people aren’t telling you,” Peter Thiel taught his class  at Stanford, “can very often give you great insight as to where you should be directing your attention.”Secrets people can’t or don’t want to divulge are a common thread behind Thiel’s most lucrative investments such as Facebook and Linked...

When my family immigrated to the United States in 1981, my father weighed 185 pounds. He came chasing the American dream but got more than he expected. Along with a new, more prosperous life for his family, he also acquired some bad habits. For one, he took up smoking because, as he sheepishly admits, “that’s what business people here did back then.” And to ward off the boredom of long car rides b...

Nir’s Note: In this guest post Ryan Hoover takes a look at how interface changes drive innovation. Ryan blogs at ryanhoover.me and you can follow him on Twitter at rrhoover What do motorized vehicles, broadband internet, and smartphones have in common? These technologies all introduced new forms of user interface, transforming its user’s daily lives and behaviors. I’ve been studying Nir Eyal’s wor...

Note: I’m proud to have co-authored this post with  Jason Hreha , the founder of Dopamine , a user-experience and behavior design firm. He blogs at persuasive.ly Yin asked not to be identified by her real name. A young addict in her mid-twenties, she lives in Palo Alto and, despite her addiction, attends Stanford University. She has all the composure and polish you’d expect of a student...

Diets don’t work. Studies show that temporary fixes to old habits actually make people gain weight. Essentially, the dieter’s brain is trained to gorge when off the diet and inevitably the weight returns. In my previous essay , I shared the story of my father’s struggle with bad eating habits. He had put on weight over the last few decades and despite several attempts, he had trouble taking it off...

How do products tempt us? What makes them so alluring? It is easy to assume we crave delicious food or impulsively check email because we find pleasure in the activity. But pleasure is just half the story. Temptation is more than just the promise of reward. Recent advances in neuroscience allow us to peer into the brain, providing a greater understanding of what makes us want. You can read the Nir...

My wife put our daughter to bed, brushed her teeth, and freshened up before bed. Slipping under the covers, we exchanged glances and knew it was time to do what comes naturally for a couple on a warm night in Silicon Valley. We began to lovingly caress–but not each other, of course. She began to fondle her cell phone, while I tenderly stroked the screen of my iPad. Ooh, it felt so good. If our nig...

Do you get the feeling apps are getting dumber? They are, and that’s a good thing. Behind the surprising simplicity of some of today’s top apps, smart developers are realizing that they’re able to get users to do more by doing less. A new crop of companies is setting its sights on changing user behaviors; the small behaviors in your life, hoping to reap big rewards. They’re using the best practice...

Until recently, when I needed a break I’d grab my phone. Whether I was bored, mentally fatigued, or just wanting a pick-me-up, I felt relief checking the news, Facebook, or Instagram. However, new research suggests there are good ways and not-so-good ways to spend our break time. While some breaks can leave us refreshed and reenergized, others tend to leave us depleted and drained. You can read th...

Note: I co-authored this post with  Andrew Martin  and  David Ngo . It originally appeared in TechCrunch . This week, fans packed stadiums in London wearing their nation’s colors like rebels ready for battle in Mel Gibson’s army. They screamed with excitement and anguished in defeat. Many paid thousands of dollars to travel around the globe to be there. You can read the Nir and...

NOTE: This post originally appeared in Techcrunch .  Reading Leena Rao’s recent article on Techcrunch about the personalization revolution, you get the sense that the tech world is waiting for a bus that isn’t coming. Rao quotes well-known industry experts and luminaries describing what needs to happen for e-commerce to finally realize the promise of personalized shopping, a future where onli...

Nir’s Note: In this guest post, Ryan Hoover, contributing writer of my book Hooked , describes how nostalgia is used to drive attention and build an engaging product. Follow @rrhoover or visit his blog to read more about startups and product design. Remember pogs? Remember Tubthumping? Remember Nickelodeon GUTS? Now pause… How do you feel right now? Did reading those words stimulate any emotional...

Nir’s Note: This guest post is an excerpt from my friend Ryan Holiday’s new book,  Ego Is the Enemy . Ryan is the author of three other books  and his monthly reading recommendations, which go out to 50,000+ subscribers, can be found here .   John DeLorean ran his car company into the ground with a mix of outsized ambition, negligence, narcissism, greed, and mismanage...

Everyone suddenly seems interested in messing with your head.  Gamification ,  Quantified Self ,  Persuasive Technology ,  Neuromarketing  and a host of other techniques offer ways to influence behavior. At the heart of these techniques is a desire to change peoples’ habits so that behavior change becomes permanent. Here’s the problem: Until now, the explosion of methods f...

Nir’s Note:  In this last in a series of guest posts on the topic of technology habits, Jason Shah shares practical tips he used to regain control over his devices and break bad habits . Jason is a Product Manager at Yammer and blogs about user experience and technology at  blog.jasonshah.org . You can follow him on Twitter  @jasonyogeshshah . “Not long ago, in a drug...

Interested in boosting customer desire? A classic study that demonstrates the psychology of scarcity reveals an interesting quirk of human behavior that may hold a clue. In 1975, researchers  Worchel, Lee, and Adewole  wanted to know how people would value cookies in two identical glass jars. One jar held ten cookies while the other contained just two stragglers. Which cookies would peop...

This week, thousands of people swarmed the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Looking from above, the scene resembled an insect infestation of scampering masses in a hive of the latest must-haves. When considering our complex relationship with technology, perhaps it is useful to reflect upon the plight of one particular bug, the male julodimorpha beetle, who like us at times, can’t get...

Nir’s Note:  This guest post comes from  Marc Abraham , a London-based product manager at  Beamly . In this article, Marc reviews the recently published book “ Designing Multi-Device Experiences ” by Michal Levin. Follow Marc on Twitter  or check out his blog . We live in a world where the number of connected devices is growing on a daily basis at an immense rate, with people c...

Type the name of almost any successful consumer web company into your search bar and add the word “addict” after it. Go ahead, I’ll wait. Try “Facebook addict” or “Twitter addict” or even “Pinterest addict” and you’ll soon get a slew of results from hooked users and observers deriding the narcotic-like properties of these web sites.  We’re on the precipice of a  new era  of the web....

Nir’s Note: My friend Jake Knapp just published a fantastic book titled,  Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days . The book details a process he and his colleagues at Google Ventures use to quickly go from idea, to prototype, to live test. Jake put together an exclusive excerpt from the book for NirAndFar.com readers. Here it is: Monday of t...

Nir’s Note: This post is co-authored with  Stuart Luman , a science, technology, and business writer who has worked at Wired Magazine, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and IBM. “I wish that I could be like the cool kids,” goes the catchy hook for the hit song by Echosmith. The official video has been viewed over 15 million times on YouTube, perhaps tapping into something deeper than mer...

Note: I’m proud to have co-authored this post with my good friend Charles Wang .  Charles is a co-founder of LUMOback , a former classmate, and an accomplished psychiatrist.  He brings a great perspective to the art of Behavior Engineering. Today’s top selling books are about how to acquire world-class skill. Daniel Coyle’s, The Talent Code looks at how deliberate practice is required to...

We are caught in an endless cycle of messaging hell and the pattern is always the same. First, a new communication system is born — take email or Facebook, for example. Ease-of-use helps the product gain wide adoption and reach a critical mass of users. And then things turn ugly. Some crafty entrepreneur figures out how to exploit the system and starts building a business around it. He reaches mil...

“Hi Nir,” the email began. “I have been reading your work and find it incredibly interesting.” Naturally, this is the kind of message a blogger loves to receive. However, this email was special for another reason. It was from a prominent New York publishing agent who represents several authors I read and admire. “I don’t know if you’ve already started down this road or whether writing a book inter...

Nir’s Note: This guest post is by Erik Johnson . Erik applies behavioral design principles on The Behavioral Insights Team at Morningstar. Six years ago, I was in a position that many people early in their careers find themselves in: I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. My first job out of college took good care of me and was interesting enough, but I knew it wasn’t the career...