The argument in one sentence
Persuasive software works by borrowing against the user's trust. The debt is invisible because no dashboard has a line for it.
It compounds until a product is most hated at the exact moment it looks most engaged. The only real repayment is a design that gives the user back what was taken.
What is in the manuscript
How Software Changes What You Do. How does software change human behavior?
How the Money Shaped the Software. Where did the patterns come from?
What the Screen Does to Your Brain. What, precisely, is an interface acting on?
116 patterns in 9 families, across 3 axes. Mechanism and morality kept apart, which is why a family of patterns that are good can exist at all.
Six instruments proposed here and labelled as such. None is dressed as an established finding.
Nine patterns written to the full template: definition, psychological basis, interface expression, business rationale, valence, cost index, regulatory status, the honest alternative.
38 sources retrieved and read, with fetch dates. Five widely repeated claims turned out to be false and are listed as corrections.
A page from it
A-01 · Attention and Capture
Infinite Scroll
Infinite scroll is a content-loading strategy in which the next batch of items is fetched and appended automatically as the user approaches the end of the current batch, so that the list never terminates.
Its behavioral significance is not what it adds but what it removes: the page boundary. A paginated list ends, and its ending forces a decision. An infinitely scrolling list never ends, so continuing requires no decision at all.
The full entry runs to ten sections, including what it costs the user and what the honest version looks like. It is in the manuscript.
Read the whole thing
Leave your email and I will send the reader link and the A4 PDF. New chapters and the app audit go to the same list.
Check your email. The reader link and the PDF are on their way.
What arrives: three chapters written to publication quality, the full taxonomy, the six frameworks, nine pattern entries, the sources apparatus, and the PDF. It is a working draft, not a finished book. Nine chapters are planned, three are written.
On the obvious objection. Yes, this is a registration wall, Pattern B-04, one of the patterns this book documents. It is here on purpose and it is labelled: the manuscript is unfinished and I want to know who is reading it, so corrections and credit can find their way back. If email is a problem, write to me and I will send it anyway.
Who wrote it
Amogh Tiwari
I build consumer software for a living, which means my job is to get people to open an app, come back, and eventually pay for it. That is also why I write about behavioral design: from inside the room where the decisions get made, not from above it.
Every claim in the book is meant to be checked. If a citation does not hold or a claim reaches past its evidence, that is the most useful thing you can send, and it is credited.