I’m not a designer or UI/UX person by trade, but I have to think a lot about interfaces and design in my work. Here are the 39 things I’ve learned over the years (including illustrative examples) about how to create nice looking interfaces and an effective user experience. (In my own designs I still have plenty of room for improvement along many of these dimensions.) Keep in mind that even if you...

Mostly people stay the way they are, or change slowly. So what are the reasons that individual human behavior sometimes quickly shifts in a positive direction? Here's my current "theory of change" list. It seems to me that developing a better understanding of behavior change is incredibly important for creating a better world. Some of these categories are, of course, overlapping. OPERANT CONDITIO...

A really important difference I've noticed between people is how their "psychological immune systems" work. In other words: people differ substantially in the collection of strategies that their brains use when bad things happen to prevent themselves from becoming too unhappy or too dysfunctional for too long. This seems like an important part of understanding why some people are happier than othe...

I think that people tend to greatly underestimate how amazing (and also insane) virtual reality could be one day, once it achieves all of the following: (1) sufficient image and audio realism that (at least a lot of the time) your brain is fooled into thinking it is having a real-life experience (state of the art is progressing steadily in this direction). (2) massively multiplayer real-tim...

Tips for guessing what distribution a variable (or set of values) might have People often assume that the frequency with which a variable will take on different values (i.e., probability distribution) is likely to follow a bell curve (i.e., a normal distribution); this is often a mistake. Instead, consider these rules of thumb for deciding which probability distribution to use as a model in di...

A thought experiment about the pros and cons of describing your group identity in different ways: should the person in this example identify as being a member of the group or not? Suppose that the vast majority of people identify themselves as being either part of group Apple, Banana, or Cherry and that these groups are typically viewed as being mutually exclusive (e.g., few people say they ar...

People often want to know the extent to which a trait is genetic versus environmentally determined (e.g., "nature" versus "nurture"). This distinction is not nearly as clear cut as is usually assumed. Let's consider the obvious example of height in a population, a trait that's well known to be purely hereditary. Many causes of a population's height distribution are not hereditary. For example,...

The Cactus Crossing Conundrum is an ethics and "fairness" thought experiment I wrote for you in which your moral intuitions are represented as a number between 0 and 100: Suppose there are two villages, "Smallville" and "Largeford," which are a 5-minute walk apart. There are 100 people in Smallville and 200 people in Largeford - so Largeford has twice as many people in it. According to ...

One day, a number of years ago, I decided to try to diagram out all of the schisms and splits I could identify in the Abrahamic religions (which include Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Mormonism). Click here for a high resolution version of this image. As you can see in the diagram, there were well over 60 Abrahamic religious splits, each of which changed one form of religion into an...

Becoming a great public speaker is hard! To make it easier, here is a list of tricks for giving better talks or lectures, organized by when to use each trick. CREATING YOUR CONTENT Brainstorm Before doing a ton of external research while developing your talk, first get down the parts of the talk that you can pull directly from your mind and memory to give yourself a much faster star...