This was an incredibly informative book on psychology and design. I've personally used the tactics mentioned in countless presentations. I urge everyone to buy this if you're designer or researcher.

Item as described, with prompt shipping - two thumbs way up!

I have read many different design books from Don't Make Me Think to Rocket Surgery Made Easy, but Design for the Mind is a complete new and unique take on web and application design. It reminds me of a lot of the sales and persuasion books I have read before but directed toward design instead. Using persuasion and influence in your design provides a refreshing way to address both design and usability. The book is a good read that wraps it all up with a great case study that ties all the previous chapters together. I will be recommending this book to all my designer friends as a additional tool to add to their toolboxes.

Whether you want to create better digital products, design a presentation, convince team members or your boss or your customers about something Victor Yocco has written a book describing how you can use the methods and tools of influence and persuasion to do this. Although Victor focuses on digital design the background material and some of the ideas can easily be used for other purposes.

The outset are the scientific methods and how each of these can be used to improve digital designs. Most chapters have a good structure providing an introduction to the method from a scientific point, then explaining what this means for digital design and finishing with plenty of exercises which allows you to practice the content.

The book is full of examples and although some of them seem obvious (because we have seen them so many times) getting them in context of the methods and thus understanding why this kind of design works is very useful.

I have not read other books that have a similar approach to digital design and as such I find the material very useful. There are other more detailed books on influence and persuasion if that is what you are really looking for although this book provides an excellent introduction. I do think this book is a useful tool, but obviously not the only one to create a compelling and convincing digital product.

Why not 5 stars?
Although not difficult, I did not find the language and sentences fluid which makes the book slightly heavy to read.

As a software developer, I tend not to read a lot of 'soft' skills books, but I was pleasantly surprised with this one.
There's a lot to like with this book, the first thing that grabbed me was the effort the author spent on helping the reader get to the material most relevant for them.
For example, there's a cheat sheet at the end of chapter one that identifies your aims or market and directs you to the topics of most relevance to you.
I would love to see this feature in more books.

As a user of many web sites including the one you're reading this review on right now, I find it fascinating to see the author take a site I'm familiar with, select a feature from that site I've found compelling and then break down that feature to demonstrate the underlying physiological technique behind them.

The author uses a lot of real world web sites, so it's nice to see the theories demonstrated in real life situations .
It's also nice to have the science behind things like social Identity explained, as we all want to build sites that have strong user engagement.

I think this book will help me understand the end-user with a lot more depth than before when designing new websites .