Gratitude Interventions: An S-Tier Behavioral Designer’s Guide
I’ve spent over two decades watching wellness apps copy each other’s gratitude features without naming the research underneath…
Work with Yu-kai
The Blog
Gamification Analysis
Articles on Gamification Analysis — from Yu-kai Chou, creator of the Octalysis Framework.
Why Does VR Engagement Always Die Right After the Wow?
Apple Vision Pro and Meta Quest 3 dazzle for thirty minutes, then sit in drawers. Yu-kai Chou explains…
Why Does Meaningful Work Always Lose to Urgent Work?
Yu-kai Chou on why meaningful work loses to urgent work, and the two-method playbook for fixing it: wrap…
Why Can’t You Measure What Actually Matters?
Every fitness app on Earth wants to reduce heart attacks. None of them can measure heart attacks. That…
Did Mark Rober Misname the Super Mario Effect?
Mark Rober’s TEDxPenn talk on the Super Mario Effect has done something rare for a piece of motivation…
Motivational Interviewing: An S-Tier Behavioral Designer’s Guide
Miller & Rollnick's Motivational Interviewing — the four processes, the MI Spirit, the Reactance bypass, and how the…
Jobs-to-be-Done: S-Tier Behavioral Designer’s Guide
Most product teams I’ve sat across from in the last fifteen years are answering the wrong question. They…
Mindset Theory: An S-Tier Behavioral Designer’s Guide to Growth vs Fixed
Every underperforming team I have ever coached — Fortune 500s, fast-growing startups, a university computer-science department, even a…
Theory X / Theory Y: An S-Tier Behavioral Designer’s Guide to McGregor
McGregor's 1960 Theory X vs Theory Y, read through the Octalysis Framework — what it got right, where…