ERG Theory: An S-Tier Behavioral Designer’s Guide to Alderfer’s Compressed Needs Model
Alderfer compressed Maslow's five needs into three — Existence, Relatedness, Growth — and added frustration-regression. Here's how the…
Work with Yu-kai
The Blog
Ideas on motivation, behavior & design.
Deep dives on the psychology behind why people do what they do — from Yu-kai Chou, creator of the Octalysis Framework. Pick the topic that matters to you.
Yerkes-Dodson Law: An S-Tier Behavioral Designer’s Guide to the Arousal-Performance Curve
Yerkes-Dodson Law (1908): the inverted-U showing arousal helps simple tasks but hurts complex ones, plus the modern critiques…
Attribution Theory: An S-Tier Behavioral Designer’s Guide to Weiner’s Locus, Stability & Control
Weiner's Attribution Theory in plain English: locus, stability, control, and how Octalysis turns why-it-happened into design that sticks.
Expectancy Theory: An S-Tier Behavioral Designer’s Guide to Vroom’s Motivation Formula
Why do smart people stop trying? Vroom's Expectancy Theory says motivation hides a zero in one of three…
Self-Efficacy Theory: Bandura’s 4 Sources, Mastery Leads
Albert Bandura's Self-Efficacy Theory in plain English: the four sources of belief, the brain underneath, the critiques, and…
Nudge Theory: An S-Tier Behavioral Designer’s Guide to Choice Architecture
Short answer: Nudge Theory says small, deliberate changes in how choices are presented (the default, the framing, the…
Goal-Setting Theory: An S-Tier Guide to Locke & Latham
Short answer: Goal-Setting Theory holds that specific, difficult goals produce higher performance than vague goals, easy goals, or…
Why Do User Surveys Lie? The Four Layers of Desire
Ask ten people in 2009 whether they’d spend three hours a day clicking on virtual cows, and ten…
Is Your Gamification Worth the Friction It Adds?
Every gamification layer you add costs your users something nobody measures. We call it efficiency loss: the friction…