This may be the best book I’ve read all year, and I’ve read dozens. I’m insatiable when it comes to behavioral economics and big data, and a fan of Thaler, Gneezy, and Pendleton. While this book covers some of the same territory, even a few of the same studies, two things set it apart.

First, it is applied behavioral economics, the use case being “the screen.” Second, Jonah Lehrer’s narrative is excellent. Whatever his past sins, they are irrelevant here. What matters is the readability. If the everyman was left to his own devices to try and muddle our way through the scientific studies and academic journal articles on which this book stands, he’d be lost in no time.

The key takeaways by chapter for me were:

1. The Mental Screen. It’s an attention economy. Whoever commands our attention wins, because in an age of ever more information, our minds are bounded. We are like at the end of a fire hose having 125 times more water pushed at us than a kitchen faucet, but with the same mouths and minds that we always have had.

2. Function Follows Form. This flips the old paradigm. A well-known study showed that people make “ link” type assessments of websites. In particular, they factor two things: colorfulness visual complexity. Visual complexity is the more important of the two. In general, you want things to be simple, but not too simple. There is a halo effect to these blink aesthetic reactions, and indeed, function follows form.

3. Display Biases. We all have patterns of looking and they are filled with bias. For example, in a two by two matrix, we always look at the top left. When scanning tables, people will look at the rows, more often than the columns. Knowing that enables you to optimize what a user sees on screen.

4. The New Mirror. The book is chock full of “inverted U curves.” Feedback, such as push notices and alerts is one such example. Just the right amount at the right time and we pay attention. Too much and we tune things out. The author has seven habits of effective digital feedback: Time it Right, Make it Personal, Avoid Feedback Overdose, Trigger a Feeling (could be bad or good), Incorporate an Action Plan, Encourage, Don't Criticize (be careful with wording), Test and then follow the evidence.

5. Desirable Difficulty. There is an upside to making things complicated and hard: it's called disfluency. The right amount can make us focus. We read better and retain more from books. Certain fonts arrest us and make us focus. We take better notes and remember more with a pen and paper rather than a computer because of disfluency.

6. Digital Tailoring. This is huge. We respond to things personalized to us. When a waiter gives us a chocolate for being a special customer, we tip them 25% more. When kids perceive information to be self-relevant and they have perceived competence because an academic game was tailored to them, they perform 30% better. Visual personalization is really powerful. When we see pictures of our aged future selves, we save twice as much in our 401k plans.

7. The Choice Opportunity. Choice is one of those things that sits on the inverted U curve. Too little and people are concerned they are missing something. Too much and people shut down. Offer no help and you may disappear, like Pricegrabber did. The author suggests two fixes. One is a category fix, the other is a tournament fix. The author’s analysis of healthcare.gov is excellent.

8. Thinking Architecture. The author advocates that in the right circumstances we get people to stop and think, including ourselves. Our digital devices make it easy to distract ourselves with constant updates; the inbox is never still. But this frenetic pace makes it even more important that we find time to reflect on big, difficult questions.

There are over forty tools in this book, which makes it extremely useful, practical, and applicable. At the back of the book is a link to a quick online tools to assess your risk tolerance. The questions go somehting like this:

GAMBLE A: You have an equal chance of winning $ 100, breaking even, or losing $ 100.
GAMBLE B: You have an equal chance of winning $ 300, breaking even, or losing $ 200.

It only takes a few seconds, but you’ll get a sense of how loss averse you are.

This is a must read for anyone running a business, especially a Web business, or anyone simply interested in behavioral economics.

An excellent practical review of recent research.

A great book mixing behavioral economics and user experience (UX), with a trove of useful tidbits!

Very interesting read about our daily interaction with screens. This book was recommended by my college professor and I must admit it instantly grabbed my attention. It is an easy read and has a lot of useful information that you can apply to your life. At best this book makes you aware of our limited attention span and how to use this resource more effectively with our digital devices.

If you are looking for a book stacked with references this is the one! The narrative isn’t all that good, or even there, but this book sure is an express way into lots and lots studies on behavioral economics.

This book helped me improve online sales of photographs.

Excellent product

This was a very refreshing book. No extremely long and boring example stories. One of the only books I could finish in a while.