Sample Chapter: Duly Noted

This is a sample chapter from Jorge Arango’s book Duly Noted: Extend Your Mind Through Connected Notes. 2024, Rosenfeld Media.

Chapter 1

Notes Are for Thinking

When I was a boy, the beginning of school was one of my favorite times of the year. One day always stood out: when my mom took me to buy stationery. I loved getting new pens, pencils, and notebooks. A fresh notebook held the promise of clarity, order, and better grades. I mostly used Mead Trapper Keepers, a popular brand of loose-leaf binders. They represent how I managed notes as a kid: I’d write down what I heard during class and stash pages in that subject’s section, in chronological order. While studying, I’d revisit those notes. Occasionally, I’d discard old ones to make room.

By the end of the school year, I had a binder full of transcripts. They’d served their purpose, so I could toss them. Next year would bring new teachers, new classes, and new notebooks. I seldom revisited old notes. This basic approach was the start of my note-taking life. I’ve since learned that notes can be more than a means for capture and recall: they’re also a medium for thinking.

What Are Notes For?

My Mac’s dictionary defines a note as “a brief record of facts, topics, or thoughts, written down as an aid to memory.” But as with other common words, “note” has more than one meaning. We also speak of some financial instruments as notes. And, of course, notes are also the stuff of musical melodies. But in this book, we mean the first usage: brief written records that aid our minds.

Not everything you write down is a note. For one thing, as the definition says, notes tend to be short. Think sticky notes, not essays. Intent also matters: you make notes primarily to aid your thinking. Sometimes you write notes for others, but most often you do so for yourself. Some notes you “dash off,” while others you ponder. Most aren’t meant for publication; I’ve made many notes while writing this book, but writing the book’s text is different from note-taking. All notes augment your mind in different ways.

Remembering

Remembering might be the most common reason to take notes: you hear or see something you want to recall later. This is why, when you call a company’s help desk, the agent suggests you have a pen and paper at hand. It’s good advice: such calls yield case numbers, dates, and other details that you’ll forget quickly if you don’t write them down.

Transcribing

A common reason for taking notes is to recall what you heard during a lecture or video. For example, when attending a presentation, you may type into your laptop or scribble in your notebook. Doing so has a dual benefit: it helps you pay attention and produces a text that reminds you of what the speaker said.

Recording

Some professions, such as research scientists and medical doctors, benefit from keeping records of their work. This is a kind of remembering, but a bit more formal. It’s worth examining separately since such notes also provide legally admissible evidence when outcomes are contested. People in professions that require it take great care with their notes.

Learning

Sometimes you write things down not because you’re trying to remember a particular detail but because you’re trying to learn about a subject. Learning entails more than just remembering facts. For one thing, you must connect ideas at different levels of abstraction. For another, learning often happens in sessions spread over several days, weeks, or months, as in a class. Much of the note-taking discussed in this book focuses on learning.

Researching

When researching a subject, you want to recall the salient facts. And if you’re interviewing someone, you want to keep track of the most important things they said. In either case, you’re ultimately looking to synthesize what you learn so you can make better decisions. Notes aid the process.

Generating

Sometimes you take notes not to remember or learn something, but to generate new ideas. This is one of the most exciting uses of notes: your notebook becomes a collaborator in the thinking process. Putting thoughts down on paper (or on the screen) gives you fodder for reflection, leading to other ideas that you also capture.

You’ve experienced this when brainstorming using sticky notes on a whiteboard. Seeing notes on the board suggests other ideas. You move them around to form clusters, suggesting further ideas. A virtuous process follows.

Planning

Many people live by their agendas and bullet journals. When you have many things to do or track—as is often the case when managing long and complex projects—it helps to write things down. Sitting down with a calendar and a sheet of paper will help you plan more effectively than if you had to keep everything in your head.

Imagine you’re going on a trip, so you make a checklist of items to pack. Seeing items on the list will remind you of things you may have missed at first. You may also consider the priority of items on the list. (For example, your passport should probably be first.) Visualizing items and the relationships between them helps you prepare for the trip.

Communicating

Although you take most notes for your own sake, you also leave some for others. For example, I sometimes find food containers in our refrigerator with a sticky note that says, “Papa, don’t eat!” My kids know that, without this note, their snack might soon be gone. This fits the definition of “brief record,” even if it’s not meant for “recall.” These notes turn your surroundings into shared cognitive environments.

Fidgeting

While writing this book, I asked people on Twitter why they take notes. Bastiaan van Rooden memorably replied, “To slow down the monkey in my head.” I can relate: many people pay better attention when their hands are busy. In this case, the primary benefit of scribbling things down is keeping your attention focused; the marks on paper are a nice secondary benefit.

Note-Taking Media

Not only are there many reasons for taking notes, but there are also just as many different ways to do so. You can doodle with a pencil in a notebook, write with a marker on a sticky note, type into an app on your phone, draw with chalk on a sidewalk, or tie a string around your finger. In a pinch, you may even write on your skin.

While walking around Tahoe City, CA, my daughter saw a store she wanted to return to. Lacking paper, she wrote down its name on her hand.

Which is to say, you can make notes from whatever is handy—what matters is catching and preserving fleeting thoughts and observations. That said, it helps to be intentional: different note-taking media are suited for different needs.

Pen and Paper

There are good reasons why paper-based notes remain popular. With a bit of care, paper lasts a long time. Paper requires no batteries, and you don’t need a special app or device to read your notes; the paper itself is the medium. Paper is also portable and fast.

But paper also has its downsides. Copying paper-based notes requires specialized equipment (e.g., a photocopier) and lots of time. While notebooks are portable, large paper-based repositories (e.g., collections of notebooks) aren’t. You can’t search paper or link notes easily to each other. And with bound notebooks, you can only view notes in the order they were written. (Unless they’re indexed, which also takes time.)

Here is part of my collection of paper notebooks, spanning two decades. The only way I can find stuff in most of these books is if I know the date when I wrote the note.

Index Cards

Index cards are a convenient way around the constraints of notebooks. Since cards aren’t bound together, you can easily re-sort them. They’re ideally sized for note-taking: smaller than regular sheets of paper, but large enough to capture a single idea in some detail. And because they use thick stock, they stand up to manipulation.

You can use boxes to keep cards organized. When archived carefully, index cards provide one of the advantages of digital notes: random access. That is, you can jump directly to the note you need without having to flip through the rest. They don’t need to be stored in the order they were written; you can archive them alphabetically or in any other organizational scheme.

Because of this flexibility, index cards are a popular thinking medium for researchers and authors who keep and refer to lots of notes. Ryan Holiday, author of several popular books, says that his index card–based note-taking system:

has totally transformed my process and drastically increased my creative output. It’s responsible for helping me publish three books in three years (along with other books I’ve had the privilege of contributing to), write countless articles published in newspapers and websites, send out my reading recommendations every month, and make all sorts of other work and personal successes possible.

Holiday’s system consists of individual index cards with a single thought or quotation on each one. He writes a category label in the top-right corner of each card and stores these cards in one big box. But when working on a specific project, such as a book, he uses a smaller dedicated box for the project. Holiday learned this approach from his mentor, the author Robert Greene. Other authors, such as Vladimir Nabokov, also used index cards to organize their work.

Marginalia

Underlining key sentences and writing ideas on book pages is a common way of taking notes while reading. The obvious advantage is that note-taking happens in context: you capture ideas near (or on) the texts that sparked them, so they’re easier to understand later. But this is also their main downside: since they don’t stand on their own, these notes are harder to reorganize or relate to other notes.

E-books have an edge here. Digital marginalia can be more easily referenced, searched, backed up, and synced. But some people like to mark up physical books with a pen or highlighter. Many of the ideas in Holiday’s index cards come from his reading: he annotates books and articles as he reads them, marking passages that stand out and writing thoughts in the margins as he goes along.

Sticky Notes

Personally, I don’t like writing in books—but I still want the advantages of taking notes in context. Sticky notes provide a way around this dilemma: I read with a pad of small stickies and a pencil. Whenever I find an idea or passage that resonates, I write a few words on a sticky note and paste it on the book’s margins, so it protrudes from the page. In this way, it doubles as a bookmark.

Of course, sticky notes are helpful for more than annotating books. They’re also a mainstay of workshops, design studios, and other situations that require groups of people to think together. Using sticky notes, it’s easy to turn walls, whiteboards, windows, tabletops, and other ordinary surfaces into temporary placeholders for ideas. (More on this in Chapter 10, where we’ll discuss collaborative note-taking.)

Sticky notes’ main advantage is that they can be attached and reattached nearly anywhere on a smooth surface. Because of this, they’re ideal for exploring relationships between ideas. You can paste notes in any sequence and reorganize them later. That said, larger sticky notes aren’t suitable for storing ideas long-term; it’s impractical to keep walls and whiteboards covered in notes. (Of course, this doesn’t apply to the small sticky notes used to annotate books.)

Photographs

One way to get around sticky notes’ ephemeral nature is to take pictures of the wall or board before taking down the stickies. While photos aren’t strictly about making marks, they can be an effective way of capturing ideas and observations. For example, whenever I park in a large, unfamiliar parking lot, I take a photograph of a nearby landmark so that I can find my car later.

I took this photograph in the parking lot of Disney’s Animal Kingdom theme park. Note I didn’t bother with proper framing; I didn’t expect to use this photograph for anything other than finding where I’d parked.

People used cameras as note-taking devices well before personal computers arrived on the scene. Around the mid-Twentieth Century, film-based cameras got small, fast, convenient, and inexpensive enough to serve effectively in this role. In a presentation to shareholders, Polaroid founder Edwin Land described the original (1944) concept for instant photography as

a kind of photography that would become part of the human being, an adjunct to your memory; something that was always with you, so that when you looked at something, you could, in effect, press a button and have a record of it in its accuracy, its intricacy, its beauty—have that forever.

The main advantage of photographing things you want to remember is convenience. You likely have a phone with an excellent camera in your pocket; no note-taking method is faster than taking it out, pointing it at something, and shooting. The obvious downside is that you’re limited to capturing what you see in the world—great for remembering where you parked, but less so for recalling abstract ideas.

Audio and Video

One way to remember what you were thinking is to record yourself saying it. Recording equipment used to be fiddly, bulky, and expensive, but smartphones have made recording ubiquitous. Software can transcribe your recordings so you can read and search for what you said.

Recordings are most effective at capturing what somebody says with high fidelity. While you may lose some thoughts when handwriting or typing notes, a recording will capture everything verbatim. This is also its downside: recordings don’t benefit from the real-time synthesis you do when using a slower medium. Still, some people love to record themselves “speaking their minds.”

Digital Notes

Most of the note-taking means we’ve highlighted so far existed in some form before computers. But now, we’ll focus specifically on digital note-taking. Almost five billion people have a smartphone, and many also use laptop or desktop computers. Most of these devices include note-taking apps, and people use them to write down all sorts of things, ranging from shopping lists to book notes.

Many digital note-taking applications mimic the abilities and superficial characteristics of analog (i.e., “real-world”) note-taking media. For example, Macs include an application called Stickies that lets you place sticky notes on your computer desktop. Well, not really: Stickies places a series of pixels that look like sticky notes on another series of pixels that function like a “desktop.”

WORKING NOTE: Install Obsidian

In the late 2010s and early 2020s, new digital note-taking tools appeared that brought to market capabilities previously available only via specialized software and often in research contexts. Several are worth exploring and investing in. But to make the ideas in this book more tangible, we’ll focus on one such tool: Obsidian.

Obsidian is a commercial software application created by a small team. As of this writing, it’s free for personal use and available on all major desktop and mobile computing platforms. It embodies key principles we’ll explore in this book, so it’s a great tool for learning. That said, you could use other tools to implement these practices. We’ll just focus on Obsidian for illustration.

(If you’re already using Obsidian or a comparable note-taking app, feel free to skip the rest of this section.)

To start, download and install Obsidian on your computer or mobile device. If the former, you can install it by visiting https://obsidian.md and following the instructions. If the latter, you can search for Obsidian in your device’s app store and install it from there.

Obsidian’s first screen gives you several options. If you’re using the software for the first time, you can either select Quick Start or Create a new vault. (The other options are mostly for use by existing Obsidian users.)

When you first launch Obsidian, you’ll have the choice to create a new vault. In Obsidian, a vault is where you store notes. You can create and manage as many vaults as you want. For example, I currently manage two vaults: one where I manage projects and another that serves as my primary long-term knowledge repository. To use Obsidian, you must create at least one vault.

Under the hood, a vault is simply a folder on your computer containing plain text files. So, if you decide to move on, you can still access your data in a universally compatible format. Go ahead and create your first vault and look around Obsidian’s user interface. In the next chapter, you’ll create your first note. But for now, just become familiar with the software.

After you create your first vault, Obsidian will open without any note selected. This is understandable since you haven’t created anything yet.

Obsidian’s user interface has a panel on the left that lists your available notes and a panel on the right that shows the currently open note(s). The parenthetical plural is because Obsidian lets you open several notes simultaneously, which you can view either in tabs or side-by-side.

Think of a typical war movie scene: a ragtag platoon planning an attack. The soldiers huddle close to the ground and, absent paper and pens, draw (literal) lines in the sand and move rocks and twigs to represent targets and units. The commander might say something like, “Hutch, you and Charlie stand here and give cover while Mack and I rush the compound.” One soldier might ask a question, and another will contribute an idea—all facilitated by a few rocks and dirt.

The improvised map gets the platoon “on the same page,” so to speak. By representing the battlefield as tangible things they can manipulate, they can better think through and communicate their plans, spotting obstacles and opportunities they might miss if they were trying to imagine the situation in their heads. You may have had similar experiences when working with colleagues around a whiteboard.

Once you understand that you think with things, you can explore ways to augment your thinking. The battlefield map and the whiteboard are examples of augmentations that are useful when collaborating with others. Notes are a similar augmentation. As with the whiteboard, you can use them to think collaboratively, but they’re also very useful when thinking by yourself.

In Genius, his biography of Richard Feynman, James Gleick writes about the role of notes in the physicist’s work. Starting from an early age, Feynman worked out problems in his notebooks. Later in life, in an interview with MIT historian Charles Weiner, he explained the role of his notes. Gleick writes,

He began dating his scientific notes as he worked, something he had never done before. Weiner once remarked casually that his new parton notes represented “a record of the day-to-day work,” and Feynman reacted sharply. “I actually did the work on the paper,” he said. “Well,” Weiner said, “the work was done in your head, but the record of it is still here.” “No, it’s not a record, not really. It’s working. You have to work on paper, and this is the paper. Okay?”

To emphasize the point, notes aren’t merely a way to record your thinking; they’re part of where thinking happens. They are the means through which you understand and make sense of things. When making notes, you’re thinking on the page and beyond, experimenting with temporary models that describe how a part of the world might work. It’s a creative, generative act of discovery and clarification.

NOTABLE NOTE-TAKER: Gretchen Anderson

Gretchen Anderson is a product consultant, coach, and author based in the San Francisco Bay Area. While working on her book Mastering Collaboration, Gretchen built an outline using her computer. She used this outline to think through the high-level ideas in the book. However, the outline became constraining as she got into the details. “I started to lose track of it,” she explained. So, she switched to using physical sticky notes:

I was doing this at home, where I don’t have a whiteboard…But I do have lots of windows, so at one point, I busted out the sticky notes and had the medium-sized ones and one color for chapters and smaller different colored ones for main points and the stories that would buttress them so that I could create that kind of map that I could see all at one time. Interestingly, that happened late in the process, maybe three-quarters of the way through. You know, I was kicking myself like, “Gretchen, you know that you could have done this earlier!”…I probably couldn’t have done it any other way. I started out with an outline, I changed that outline to be something that was looser so that I could fit everything I was learning into it, and then I needed to kind of remix it again to make it something that people could follow and not just have it be a laundry list of stuff I learned.

By commandeering her walls and windows, Gretchen literally expanded her thinking surface. Moving from an outline to a two-dimensional map of ideas allowed her to see everything at once and “remix” it into a sequence that her readers could follow. Note that she used sticky notes of different colors and sizes, which allowed her to distinguish different structural elements at a glance.

Outlines are great for exploring hierarchical relationships, but not as effective when you want to visualize lots of stuff at the same time. Switching how you’re taking down ideas is a common way to get unstuck in complex creative projects. Different media have different capabilities and constraints: it’s important to be aware that you might have to switch at some point depending on what you’re doing.

Endnotes

As you see, there are many ways of taking notes and many reasons for doing so. But ultimately, you do it to extend your cognitive abilities. Thinking clearly is fundamental to everything you do, so mastering notes will help you in many aspects of your life.

As I mentioned in the introduction, this book focuses on digital note-taking. We’ll look beyond comfortable metaphors to new means of exploring ideas that are only feasible with computers. You’re not building a better Trapper Keeper, but something entirely different and more exciting. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Before you start building your note-taking system, you need to cover a few fundamentals.

back to Duly Noted

Frequently Asked Questions

These common questions and their short answers are taken from Jake Burghardt’s book Stop Wasting Research: Maximize the Product Impact of Your Organization’s Customer Insights (2025). You can find longer answers to each in your copy of the book, either printed or digital version.

1. Should all organizations care about research waste?
   Almost every tech organization has some kind of customer research that they could revitalize. Even at early-stage startups, founding teams may hire full-time researchers to investigate markets, customer experiences, analytics, and more. Beyond specialists with a “research” job title, other roles will conduct different forms of customer-centered investigation. All of these branches of inquiry can generate customer insights. Many of those insights are unused and forgotten, even while they could be having more lasting effects on your organization. Over time, the accumulation of this forgotten research can be turned into a valuable internal asset for ongoing product planning. See Chapter 1, “What Is Research Waste.”
2. Will this book cover how to conduct new research?
   No. This book is about increasing the impact of any type of customer research (described in Chapter 2, “Understand Your Research Waste”) rather than how to conduct any one kind of research. There are already other in-depth books that explain specific research methods (including several titles from Rosenfeld Media).
3. Doesn’t increasing research maturity solve this problem?
   No, I’ve yet to see the nirvana of a fully mature, consistently “user-driven” product company. It’s true that an organization that’s considered lower research maturity—with a limited track record of using customer insights from research—is more likely to waste its known learning. However, some organizations rated high in research maturity are also routinely wasting critical research. Beyond typical maturity scales, there are missing practices and operations that are needed to drive research-based product planning. This book works to fill those practical gaps.
4. Is this book about research repository tools?
   Yes—and a lot more. Research repositories are central enablers for the action ideas throughout this book, but there are also many concepts and approaches you could apply before formalizing how your organization’s research gets stored. Chapter 5, “Launch Knowledge-Consolidating Tools,” covers requirements for two types of repositories: “report libraries” and “insight summary hubs.” Chapters 6-12 cover a range of ideas that apply these repositories to intervene in your organization’s ways of working. It’s worth noting that this book will not tell you which tool or repository vendor to use. The marketplace of applications is changing too fast for that, and exploring options is a great way for you to build organizational momentum toward reducing research waste.
5. What research metadata do you recommend?
   Metadata is data that describes and amends other data. When talking about research systems—such as research repositories—metadata is often one of the first things that people ask about. Research metadata is a varied topic that can be reductively lumped into a single discussion. Different types of metadata can enable different outcomes. These types are expensive to define, apply, and maintain over time. You’ll need to consider pros and cons carefully before committing to any tag set, hierarchy, or other defined structure. This book outlines possibilities for the following metadata types:
   –Descriptive: Characterizes the source of any research asset (see Chapter 4, “Step Up from Research Silos”).
   –Insight types: Defines insights by their functional role and hierarchical relationships (described in Chapter 5).
   –Primary findability: Enables locating research by important categories for reducing research waste (see Chapter 6, “Organize Now for Later Use”).
   –Prioritization: Defines which insights matter most from different perspectives (described in Chapter 7, “Clarify What Matters Most”).
   –Citations and progress: Connects research to product planning actions, status, and impacts (see Chapter 11, “Link Research Rationale to Plans”).
6. You’re talking about “waste”—is this a book about “Lean” methods?
   No. This book’s ideas are not tied to Toyota’s Lean Manufacturing or related software methodologies (which can be useful for many quality improvement and optimization challenges).
7. How does this fit with ResearchOps, ProductOps, and DesignOps?
   Several operational disciplines have claimed an interest in managing research knowledge. No one discipline owns this territory across the tech industry. That’s just fine. Improving how varied customer research gets applied in product development and delivery has to be a team effort. Any initiative to reduce waste will need to span your organization’s silos—but it also will need to “live” somewhere in your org chart (described in Chapter 3 “Start a Movement to Reduce Research Waste”). If your organization already has some operational roles in place, then they may rise to become “owners” of waste reduction. At the very least, they can become key contributors.
   For more on operational topics not covered in this book, see the Rosenfeld Media titles: Research That Scales: The Research Operations Handbook by Kate Towsey and The Design Conductors: Your Essential Guide to Design Operations by Rachel Posman and John Calhoun. See also Product Operations: How Successful Companies Build Better Products at Scale by Melissa Perri and Denise Tilles.
8. Do I need to use all of this book to reduce research waste?
   Not at all. No one is going to apply all the action ideas in this book. The first three chapters provide background for any effort to increase research-informed planning. Beyond those introductory chapters, you can choose only those ideas that make sense for your current resources and organizational context. Reducing research waste is a marathon, not a single sprint. There will always be more work to do, and any progress you make can catalyze future improvements.

Membership Home

Frequently Asked Questions

These common questions about online learning and design and their short answers are taken from Dan Mall’s book Design That Scales: Creating a Sustainable Design System Practice. You can find longer answers to each in your copy of the book, either printed or digital version.

1. What is a design system?
   A design system can be many things: a visual language, a library of code snippets, a collection of artboards in a design tool, a way of doing design, and much more. In this book, I talk primarily about design systems as an organizational practice. Chapter 2, “Design System Fundamentals,” explores each of these kinds of design systems in more detail.
2. Why are design systems important?
   About five billion people use the internet each day, and the average person spends over six hours online daily. Designing websites, apps, and digital content at scale is imperative for keeping up with the ever-increasing demand for information and services online. Understanding design systems and how to work with them is already a job prerequisite for digital designers, engineers, and product folks at many organizations, and that trend continues to increase.
3. Aren’t design systems just for designers?
   Absolutely not! Design systems are exciting because they are one of the few tools that equally serve the proverbial three-legged stool of design, engineering, and product. Chapter 7, “Roles and Responsi- bilities,” describes all the roles and responsibilities that can exist on a design system team.
4. Will this book teach me how to make a design system?
   Yes and no. If you’re looking for detailed how-to for setting up UI kits in design tools like Figma or prop settings in languages like React or Angular, there are many online articles and courses that do a better job of that. I chose not to cover those kinds of topics in this book because that’s not usually where most design systems fail. Most design systems fail because they aren’t integrated early enough into the grain of how an organization operates, so this book focuses mostly on how to do just that.
5. I’ve made design systems before in just a few days. Does this topic really warrant a whole book?
   It’s true that a skilled practitioner can create design system artifacts like Figma UI kits and code libraries very quickly. However, a design system practice takes time to establish. It’s not that the tasks take long; it’s that design systems practices are exercises in cultural change, and change takes time to permeate through an organization in a way that sticks. Chapter 6, “Governance and Contribution,” explains the who, what, where, when, and why design systems take time—time that’s well spent.
6. Will this book recommend tools that make design system work easier?
   It’s an exciting time in design system tooling because new applications, plug-ins, and software are coming out every day! While there are a handful of tools mentioned throughout the book, the tools are too new and change too often for me to call out any as having stood the test of time.

back to Design That Scales

Frequently Asked Questions

These common questions about card sorting and their short answers are taken from Donna Spencer’s book Card Sorting: Designing Usable Categories. You can find longer answers to each in your copy of the book, either printed or digital version.

1. I wrote our content on cards/sticky notes and our team shuffled it around to create the IA. That’s a card sort, isn’t it?
   Not really. That’s just shuffling content ideas around the table (which is still useful, just not really a card sort). I think the essential element to something being a card sort is that it involves real users of your information.
   See Chapter 1 for more information on what a card sort involves. 
2. I need to test that my draft information architecture is okay. Should I do a closed card sort?
   A closed card sort is where you ask people to slot content into a set of categories that you give them. It is useful to learn about where they think content goes, but a closed card sort will not tell you whether they will be able to find it. If you need to make sure that people can find information in your IA, you should give them a set of tasks and ask where they would look.
   See page 149 for more information on how to test your information architecture 
3. My website is really big. How do I get the card sort to cover it all?
   This can be really tricky because you can’t just give people an enormous pile of cards. You can sort with topics instead of detailed content, focus on just part of the site at a time, or run a series of sorts to get good coverage.
   More tips for large sites are on page 70.
4. How many people should I involve so the answer is statistically significant?
   Statistical significance is really not important–you want insights and ideas rather than the one true answer. You should involve enough people so that you see enough similarities and differences to help with your design project.
   More tips on selecting people are in Chapter 6.
5. Should I let people put cards in more than one place?
   Participants often ask if they can put cards in more than one place, especially when there is not one clear home for a card. I always allow them to do so. It gives me useful information about content that may cross categories.
   See page 99 for more questions participants ask.
6. What do I do with all this data?
   Ah, that is the big question. Spend some time just looking for patterns and “interesting” things in the data. Then dig a bit deeper and look at similarities and differences. You may not get one perfect answer, but you’ll always learn interesting things for your project.
   Read about analysis in Chapters 9 and 10.
7. I don’t remember my university statistics. How do I analyze all this?
   If you don’t know how to do statistics, that’s okay. Don’t try! There are ways to analyze data without statistics–exploring it, looking for patterns, identifying similarities and differences. And you’ll learn more than if you plugged it into a statistics tool and got an answer. But make sure you don’t collect more information than you need, or this will be impossible to do.
   See Chapters 9 and 10 for information on how to analyze with and without statistics.

back to Card Sorting

Frequently Asked Questions

These common questions about mobile design and their short answers are taken from Rachel Hinman’s book The Mobile Frontier. You can find longer answers to each in your copy of the book, either printed or digital version.

1. Why is mobile UX such a hot topic right now?
   For what felt like the longest time, mobile UX was considered a small and obscure design space that most designers felt obliged to learn more about but loathed participating in because of all the inherent design constraints. The release of the first iPhone in 2007 changed all that. The iPhone demonstrated to the mobile industry and the world what was possible when innovative mobile technology was paired with a stellar user experience. The iPhone was more than an innovative product; it was the first mobile device that got people—regular, everyday people (not just the geeks)—excited about using a mobile phone. Now, as increasingly more people are experiencing what it’s like to access and interact with information from nearly anywhere, through devices that are beautifully designed, mobile is no longer a niche topic. There’s never been a better time to design mobile experiences.
   See Chapter 1 for more.
2. What makes mobile user experience and design different?
   Practitioners of mobile UX design often cite context as the biggest difference between designing for mobile experiences and other design spaces.Developing an understanding and empathy for the depth, breadth, and design implications of the mobile context is quite possibly the most essential skill necessary in creating great mobile experiences. If you’re a practicing designer, chances are that context is your design blindside. Most designers have been steeped in a tradition of creating experiences with few context considerations, although they may not realize it. Books, Web sites, software programs, and even menus for interactive televisions share an implicit and often overlooked commonality: use occurs in relatively static and predictable environments. In contrast, most mobile experiences are situated in highly dynamic and unpredictable environments.
   See Chapter 3 for more information on designing for the mobile context.
3. What modifications to my existing design processes do I need to make to create good mobile experiences?
   Mobile UX professionals use many of the same tools and processes as other UX professionals. Designers new to mobile UX must learn to calibrate their design decision-making skills to a new medium—and prototyping is essential in developing those decision-making skills. Although prototyping is considered a luxury for many PC-based experiences, it is an absolutely essential part of creating compelling tablet and mobile experiences. The reason is simple. Chances are, if you are new to mobile, your design experience and instincts aren’t very well tuned to mobile. Unlike the PC, the mobile design space is relatively new, and design patterns have yet to be formally codified. In lieu of experience and heuristics, the best way to develop these skills is to practice turning the brilliant ideas in your head into tangible experiences you and other people can engage with. Prototyping can become your saving grace in this regard.
   See Chapter 6 for tons of info on prototyping methods.
4. How do I design for touchscreen experiences?
   One of the issues that makes designing for touchscreen experiences challenging for designers is that most of us have been steeped in a tradition of creating experiences using GUI (graphical user interface) principles. With the widespread uptake of mobile phones and tablets outfitted with touchscreens, we’re currently in the midst of a UI paradigm shift. Designers and UX professionals must now learn to create experiences that leverage NUI (natural user interface) principles. This includes learning the key differences between GUI and NUI, as well as understanding how to optimize experiences for touch.
   Chapter 2 will help you understand what makes NUI interesting and different, and Chapter 8 will give you valuable info on how to optimize screen-based experiences for touch UIs.
5. Should I design a native mobile app, a mobile Web app, or a mobile Web site?
   Many experts in the mobile industry have deeply held philosophical viewpoints on this question and have been willing to fight verbal cage fights with those whose opinions differ. The short answer is: “It depends.” Chapter 4 covers some of the pros and cons of each approach. A word of caution: While this is an important implementation question to answer, it’s not necessarily the first question you should be asking at the beginning of a mobile user experience project. Ultimately, your goal should be to create a great user experience. Technology and implementation choices can help guide your design and decision-making process–but they should not dictate it.
   More on identifying mobile needs in Chapter 3.
6. What does the future hold? What’s next for mobile user experience?
   In the near future, many designers and UX professionals will focus on pioneering the parts of the mobile frontier that have already been discovered. And that is a good place to be. But there’s a vast space just beyond what’s been discovered that some brave souls have already begun to explore. There are three mobile trends I’ve been tracking that I believe will have a profound impact on the future. These themes will not only redefine mobility, but they’ll also irrevocably alter the relationship we have with computing. They are: the shifting boundary between computers and the human body, the shifting boundary between computers and the environment, and mobile experiences for emerging markets.
   These topics will all be covered in Chapter 9.

back to The Mobile Frontier

Sample Chapter: Conversations with Things

This is a sample chapter from Diana Deibel & Rebecca Evanhoe’s book Conversations with Things. 2021, Rosenfeld Media.

Chapter 1: Why Conversation Design?

Rebecca: Hey, folks. Does anyone out there know how to make voice experiences more accessible?
Diana: Yes, I heard a great talk about that a month ago. This is something I’m trying to learn more about, too. I’d be happy to share my notes—want me to send them to you?
Rebecca: I’d love to see your notes! Thanks for being so helpful.

This conversation, held over a community Slack channel in 2018, is the origin of our friendship and this book. At the time, we were both about six years into careers in the tech industry. We finally felt like we knew what we were doing—enough to start noticing where the technology was short-changing people, and enough to start getting opinionated about the conversational interfaces we worked on.

Terms Defined: Conversational Interfaces

When you talk to technology and it answers back—whether it’s speaking or typing—that’s a conversational interface. A voice assistant like Siri? Conversational interface. A fridge that says you’re low on milk when you ask? That’s one, too. An interactive virtual reality game where you can talk with characters to advance the game? Yep. It’s a broad term that encompasses nonhuman things that do their best to listen, speak, and chat similarly to the way humans do.

Since we met, conversational technology has only gotten even more ubiquitous: chatbots waving hi from the corners of websites and apps, smart speakers hanging out on countertops, people walking around talking to their watches and glasses. But we still see that the industry’s approach tends to be technology-centered, rather than human-centered strange, considering conversational interfaces are supposed to be modeled after human communication. To us, this disconnect is a huge reason why these technologies aren’t living up to the hype. But we remain fascinated with this work, and optimistic about its potential. Because you’ve picked up this book, it seems like you’re interested in conversational interfaces, too. Keep reading, and you’ll learn everything you need to get started, including how to be a critical, ethical, inclusive thinker.

Let’s begin with a look at what makes conversational interfaces unusual—remarkable, even. First of all, conversational interfaces include lots of kinds of technology; there’s a ton of variety. (Figure 1.1 gives a snapshot of devices that fall under this umbrella.)

Figure 1.1
Pick a conversation partner.

Conversational interactions are different from, say, typing a question into Google; a search engine uses words, too, but it’s not a conversational exchange. Here are some hallmarks of true conversational interfaces:

• Language (words) is the primary input and output.
• The nature of the interaction is a back-and-forth conversation.
• The person’s input is similar to how they’d say it to another person.
• The system’s output is meant to mimic natural language—to answer on human terms.

Conversational interfaces are powerful because people are language super-users. People learn language intuitively and use it all day, every day, in both speaking and reading. That’s why these interfaces can be so effective: when people experience their technology talking to them, they click right into this easy mode. It’s a deeply innate way to navigate interactions.

Coming to Terms

Conversation design is interdisciplinary, so its practitioners use a lot of jargon coming from different ‘elds—and this jargon isn’t standardized. We’re word nerds, so for this book, we scrutinized what terms people used and where those terms came from. This book uses the term conversational interface broadly, to refer to talking technology, including both spoken and typed interactions. For aural interactions, we use these terms:

• Voice user interface, or VUI (pronounced voo-ey, rhymes with chewy): A general category of interactions that use out loud speech as an input or output.
• Voice assistants: A VUI system that’s meant to help you with daily life at home, work, in the car, or everywhere. (These are your Alexas, your Siris, or Googles.)
• Interactive voice response, or IVR: Older, computer-automated phone systems where users listen to pre-recorded or synthetic voices, and respond by pressing numbers or saying simple voice commands.
• Text to speech (TTS): Technology that takes text (letters, words, numbers, sentences) and a synthetic voice speaks the text aloud.

For text-based interactions (which necessarily involve a screen), we use these terms:

• Chatbot: An interactive system where the conversation is typed (instead of spoken). Some chatbots use clickable buttons, too.
• Multimodal: Systems that use more than one sensory input or output. (For example, a combination of voice and visuals.)

They have other key uses, too:

• Convenient multitasking: Walking through your front door with two bags of groceries, you say “Alexa, I’m home,” and voilà, your lights turn on and your playlist starts. In the kitchen, hands covered in cookie dough, you can holler “Hey Google, set a timer for twelve minutes.” You’re driving, and you say “Hey Siri, text Chloé that I’m ‘ve minutes late” without taking your eyes off the road or your hands off the wheel.
• Information “spearfishing”: Navigating apps and websites can involve searching, scanning, clicking, and scrolling. A well-designed bot can cut through the muck and deliver concise bits of information: “What’s my credit card balance?” “When was Bea Arthur born?” When a user nabs the info they want in one quick jab, it’s more frictionless than any web search.
• Hands-free public spaces: When the 2020 pandemic started, people’s aversion to touching an ATM or vending machine sky-rocketed. Voice interactions can create a less germy future where people can speak with interfaces, rather than tapping sticky screens or pushing grubby crosswalk buttons.
• Judgment-free help: Research shows that in some situations, people feel more comfortable spilling the beans when they know they’re talking to a “fake” person—a virtual therapist, for example. Shame can be a powerful silencer. During conversations where people often feel judged, with topics on drug use or talking about debt, a neutral speaking partner can ease the stress.
• Accessibility: For people in the Deaf community, or hard-of- hearing folks, a chatbot can be a much smoother way to get customer support, for example. And using voice makes so many things easier—order take-out, call friends, check the news—for people who are blind, sight-impaired, or have limited mobility for any reason.
• Infinite patience: Voice assistants don’t mind being woken up at 3 a.m. Chatbots don’t mind if you wait twenty minutes before responding to them. You can ask a bot the same question over and over—it won’t mind.

Conversational interfaces can accomplish things that screens alone can’t. When they’re designed well, they tap into human instincts and emotions, and they feel personal and familiar like no other form of technology. And building a conversational product is a hard, interdisciplinary puzzle—who wouldn’t want to solve a puzzle like that?

Coming to Terms

Speaking of bots in general, that little syllable has been used since the 1960s to denote “a type of robot or automated device,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, thank you very much. We use the shorthand “bot,” or even “thing,” to refer to conversational interfaces or devices.

What about this sloppy meatball: artificial intelligence? We blame the media, corporate talking heads, and the public imagination for this one devolving into near meaninglessness. We’ll take a stab at a definition that works for this book:

• Artificial intelligence: Algorithmic systems that try to “think,” speak, or behave like people can.

Sometimes this book uses conversational AIs to refer to more advanced systems that get closer to mimicking human intelligence.

Finally, the most important word we need to address: user.

If you’re in design, you’re probably acclimated to an odd convention: refer to the people who are interacting with the technology—the app, the website, the printer, the smart fridge—as users. It’s right there in the name: it’s the U in UX. There’s been well-founded pushback on the term in recent years. Criticism coming from grassroots UXers, as well as tech bigheads like Jack Dorsey, calls it out as dehumanizing, creating abstraction instead of highlighting the humanity in people the ‘eld is trying to center.

These are valid criticisms. This book employs user because in certain places, the term people felt too general, and we wanted to specifically connote someone using the technology being discussed. When the industry clicks on a better term, we’ll be all in.

Conversation Designers to the Rescue

Conversation design falls under the umbrella of user experience (UX) design, so it’s both human-centered and data-driven—just with a tight focus on talking. Conversation designers are the practitioners of this craft, and they aim to help people and bots have good conversations, starting with what people need and how they use language to express those needs. They think in terms of scripts and flows and user journeys. (Figure 1.2 shows a literal sketch of a conversation design brainstorm. Beware!)

In simple terms, conversation designers usually do these things:

• Research to understand how people talk and what their needs are.
• Design personalities for bots.
• Write responses that the bot will say.
• Study different ways that users ask for things or express the same idea.
• Craft diagrams, charts, or sketches of how conversations flow.
• Create prototypes to test how people react to different personalities, voices, and scenarios.
• Advocate for accessibility and inclusive design.
• Collaborate with the people around them.

Figure 1.2
A page from a conversation designer’s notebook.

Conversation design has interdisciplinary roots. Its techniques stem from research on how people ingest, comprehend, and produce language—which means conversation designers often come from diverse backgrounds like linguistics, sociology, psychology, neurology, and more. (And yes, it can take inspiration from the arts, like screenwriting, acting, poetry, and improvisation.)

If you’re trying to find a conversation designer for your team, or wondering how you fit into the conversation design landscape, know that people with a wide and diverse set of backgrounds have this job. Greg Bennett, linguist and conversation designer, says that including these diverse perspectives are a strength, especially for language-driven products, “Because your lens on the world is going to be slightly different than mine, and your lens on how to use language will be slightly different, which reveals something that I can’t see. That’s the best part about it.”

No matter where conversation designers come from, it’s a crucial role, because conversational interfaces are a strange, ever-surprising form of technology. To get them right requires expertise, and without it, a lot of voice and chat interactions end up pretty unhelpful and frustrating. See Figure 1.3 for a sampling of tweets explaining what can happen when conversation design is left out.

Figure 1.3
When Rebecca tweeted “What can go wrong when voice or chat projects don’t have a dedicated conversation designer?” these three folks nailed it: Brooke Hawkins, conversation designer; Lauren Golembiewski, CEO and co-founder of Voxable; and Roger Kibbe, voice and conversational AI technologist.

Conversation design isn’t easy. First, its users are still learning to trust conversational tech. They worry that voice assistants are “always listening.” They’ve been burned before by an obtuse chatbot. They’re traumatized from years of bad computerized phone systems. So designers face an uphill battle trying to build user trust.

Combine that with the fact that people really, really notice when bots can’t hold up their end of the conversation. Most people are such natural language machines that any anomalies are obvious and jarring: that’s why a crappy, stilted conversation feels so wrong. Everyone is a harsh critic, with the highest of expectations for the interface.

Content Warning

Throughout this book, you’ll encounter an unfortunate truth: Because these technologies imitate people (and are created by people), they can be biased and harmful just as people can.

A common theme in technological bias is racism. Ruha Benjamin, author of Race After Technology, sums up this potential for any technology: “So can robots—and by extension, other technologies—be racist? Of course they can. Robots, designed in a world drenched in racism, will find it nearly impossible to stay dry.”¹

Conversational AIs have a complicated relationship with femininity, too. They are often criticized for “sexist overtones, demising of women in traditional feminized roles, and inability to assertively rebuke sexual advances,” as authors Yolande Strengers and Jenny Kennedy wrote in their book The Smart Wife.² This book gives several examples of where racial and gender bias rear their heads.

But these aren’t the only forms of oppression a bot can put out there: they are just the ones with the most research thus far. Conversation designers need to understand intersectionality: “the complex, cumulative way in which the effects of multiple forms of discrimination (such as racism, sexism, and classism) combine, overlap, or intersect especially in the experiences of marginalized individuals or groups,” according to Merriam-Webster. Lots of factors impact how people experience oppression and privilege, like sexual orientation and identity, disability, age, body size, and more.

This book calls attention to bias throughout. It’s a complicated topic, but understanding where it surfaces and how it impacts people is integral to human-centered design.

1 Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology (Cambridge: Polity, 2019), 62.
2 Yolande Strengers and Jenny Kennedy, The Smart Wife (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2020), 11.

From a business perspective, companies often misunderstand, underestimate, or simply ignore the need for conversation design.

These are commonly held viewpoints that may lead to trouble:

• Underestimating the complexity and role of language: “The bot’s essentially an FAQ page.”
• Treating the project as a purely technological endeavor: “All we need are developers.”
• Approaching production as if the project were screen-based: “We’ve got a UX team already.”
• Miscalculating the benchmark for MVP (minimum viable product): “Let’s get something out fast to test and learn.”

These viewpoints have repercussions. Rebecca did her fair share of “chatbot doctoring”—being brought in as a consultant to save an ailing bot. More often than not, when she took a look under the hood, the whole bot had to be discarded, from soup to nuts, because of those assumptions.

That said, it’s totally normal that users and businesses are still get- ting their sea legs with conversational interfaces—the technology is still hitting its stride. And, by their very nature, conversations are hard to design because language is complex. That’s exactly what this book will teach you, starting with the differences between human and mechanical conversations in the next chapter.

The Last Word

Of course, conversation design is unique. Think about it: You’re creating a product that’s modeled after the human mind and its ability to interpret and respond to language. That’s a daunting task.

With good design and process, amazing conversational experiences are possible. Your chatbot or voice experience can be great right out of the gate. You could launch the world’s most elegant talking dishwasher, or make a virtual debate coach. Your talking car could teach a million teens to drive! Your mental health bot could improve lives.

This is why being a conversation designer is fascinating: you get to think big about the complexity of language, the wildness of human behavior, and the inner workings of technology. It’s weird and it’s fun and it’s hard. Never forget, though, that the ultimate goal of a conversational interface is for it to be good—that is to say, easy to talk to, on human terms.

Back to Conversations with Things

Why Choose Us

Companies like Citrix, Vanguard, IBM, MasterCard, and USAA choose Rosenfeld Media for their UX training needs for three reasons:

1. Deepest bench of expertise: There simply isn’t a roster of wiser, more established instructors in the industry. They are people your team will enjoy working with!
2. One stop shopping: A contract with us gives you access to 50+ UX experts–and a full catalog of UX courses–designed to train and challenge beginning, intermediate, and advanced designers.
3. We handle the coordination for you: From writing the contract to evaluating the outcome, we’re your single point of contact for coordinating all aspects of bringing a course to your team.

Browse our Course Catalog

I’m continually impressed with the range of offerings from Rosenfeld Media. We have benefited from training that immediately moved our design and development practices to insights and techniques that will pay long-term dividends as we apply them to our strategic processes.

—Christian Rohrer, Chief Design Officer, Consumer and Mobile, McAfee (An Intel Company)

Rosenfeld Media helped jumpstart our ‘UXstudio’ by creating low cost ways to get feedback and buy-in from users and stakeholders. We continue to grow as an organization with the tools and techniques they left with us.

—Brian Colcord, Senior Director, UX and Product Design, LogMeIn

Rosenfeld Media’s training jump-started our team’s user experience skills and gave us practical tools we were immediately able to put to use.

—Steve Viarengo, Vice President of Product, Oracle Taleo

Our experience with two recent Rosenfeld Media workshops was top notch. Both presenters were professional, engaging, and highly credible. They took the time in advance to understand our business and tailored their content to meet our specific needs. We are looking forward to engaging them on more topics.

—Tracy Loring, Senior Manager, Product Competency Team, Rackspace

We got so much value—even from a short workshop.

—Sangeeta Patel,  Portal Product Manager, XL Group plc

Frequently Asked Questions

These common questions and their short answers are taken from Chris Avore and Russ Ungers’ book Liftoff!: Practical Design Leadership to Elevate Your Team, Your Organization, and You. You can find longer answers to each in your copy of the book, either printed or digital version.

1. Is this a how-to book?
   Of course not! And, well, maybe. We’ve included a lot of what we’ve learned based on our own personal experiences and our collabora- tion with each other—and others—which we view as a framework to help you on your way. You certainly might be able to take what we’ve written and apply it as-is, especially when it comes to the hiring pro- cess (see Chapters 3–7). There’s step-by-step instructions to facilitate a design charter workshop (Chapter 8). And Chapter 15 includes specific ways to tweak generally-used user experience design activities to include executive leaders, which may elevate your influence in the company. But there are also a lot of tips, stories, and experiences in this book that aren’t necessarily meant to be applied directly. Instead, use them to build your own foundation for how you make decisions relevant to your situation and environment.
2. Why did you include a chapter on designing diversity and inclusion into teams?
   A diverse team where individuals can be their full selves in a psychologically safe, inclusive environment will be better prepared to design solutions to ambiguous, complex problems (see Chapter 2). We promote diverse teams working together in an inclusive environ- ment throughout the entire book, not just in one chapter. By the end of the book, we hope audiences will feel more prepared and comfort- able committing to intentionally building and supporting diverse, inclusive teams.
3. Are you using management and leadership interchangeably?
   Usually, until we don’t. Management and leadership are not synonyms, yet in many cases the two terms represent similar means to similar ends. In Chapter 1, we provide a breakdown of the differences between a design leader and a design manager. Throughout the book, we use design manager intentionally to refer to the person responsible for managing their teams of direct reports, and ultimately the people who report to them. Think org charts, hierarchy, and bosses.We often will use design leader when we’re referring to anyone in the organization who identifies as a designer and is trying to improve their team, their team’s delivery, or their workplace, whether or not they have official management responsibility.
4. Does the world really need another management book?
   We’re familiar with the litany of books about management and leadership—some of which have helped shape the views we share here. Many recent management books have focused on managing technical teams or software development teams. However, there are far fewer books that can help new or experienced design managers with both short-term and longer term paths to improve their design practice. For instance, design leaders can likely see positive short-term results by trying the ideas in Chapter 10 on critique and Chapter 11, which focuses on presenting work. But we also cover complex topics that may take months to see organizational change, such as Chapter 14 on scaling design and Chapter 15 on influencing cross-functional partners and senior leaders.
5. Why did you write so many chapters on the hiring process?
   A good, solid hiring process (Chapter 3) is truly at the foundation of how a team works. Hiring includes thoughtful descriptions of the types of work to be done and what success looks like in a role (Chapter 4), well-defined and consistent interviewing practices (Chapters 5 and 6), and a thorough onboarding process (Chapter 7). It’s easy to focus on only one aspect of the hiring process; however, we see the pieces as interconnected and extremely important to be aware of. A strong hiring process shows candidates what it’s like to work on your team at your organization, and everyone should strive to put their best foot forward.
6. What’s up with a whole chapter on saying no?
   Chapter 12 reinforces what many of us already know well: saying no is rarely easy in the workplace. We investigate power and social dynamics, risks of telling the boss no, and ways to help make saying no a little easier. We even share advice on planning (and cleaning up after) birthday parties!

Back to Liftoff!

Frequently Asked Questions

These common questions and their short answers are taken from Amy Bucher’s book Engaged: Designing for Behavior Change. You can find longer answers to each in your copy of the book, either printed or digital version.

1. I’ve got a background in behavior science, but no talent for visual design. Can I do behavior change design?
   Absolutely. I was a total amateur at all of the things I thought were design before I started working in the field (and am still not very good at many of them). My strengths are research, strategy, and evaluation, so I partner with people who bring the visual and interaction design and application development chops. I have colleagues who have stronger design skills and less research experience, so they team up accordingly. It’s all about building a team that can complement each other. Chapter 12 offers tips for bringing behavior change into your work, regardless of your background.
2. Is behavior change design actually necessary?
   If I didn’t think behavior change design was important, then there’d have to be something deeply wrong with me to have spent this much time and effort writing a book about it. Behavior change design helps make products more engaging, which means more people want to use them. That’s good for business. And if your product is actually trying to change people’s behavior, which is true of most products in indus- tries like health, education, and sustainability, then behavior change design will hugely increase the odds it works. Learn more about how to measure the effects of behavior change design in Chapter 2.
3. What role does social media play in behavior change design?
   Social support can play an important role in helping people change their behavior, and social media can deliver that support in a scalable way. But like any tool, social media must be used thoughtfully to produce the best results. Chapters 8 and 9 cover how to facilitate social support within behavior change design, both with and without connecting people directly to each other.
4. This book is mostly about motivation psychology. Are there other types of psychology that designers should learn?
   Yes! Cognitive psychology is full of useful information for design- ers, especially visual and interaction designers and anyone creating content. This information includes how people perceive information and can guide decisions about how to present and format the flow of your product. Behavioral economics, which is psychology-adjacent, is what a lot of people think of when they think of behavior change. It’s worth really understanding what behavioral economics is and is not.
   Beyond that, read widely and often. Many of the topics that get covered in pop psychology don’t fit neatly within a particular theory, but are helpful in thinking about designing for behavior change. See Chapter 12 for more suggestions on continuing your behavior change design education.
5. Can I use behavior change design for evil?
   Sure, but I don’t condone it, and it will probably come back to bite you when people realize what’s happening and stop trusting you. Play the long game and use your behavior change design skills for good. Learn about how to build and maintain user trust in Chapter 10, and get tips from experts on ethical design practices in Chapters 6 and 10.

Back to Engaged