Quotes About Behavior

Mobile usage is going up; mobile conversion is not.

All human societies go through fads in which they temporarily either adopt practices of little use or else abandon practices of considerable use.

Properly used, positive reinforcement is extremely powerful.

I was a terrible student. Still, I managed to get into college, but my daydreaming threatened to sabotage me. I used behavior modification to break the cycle. I started by setting an arbitrary time limit on studying: for every 15 minutes of study, I'd allow myself an hour of daydreaming. I set the alarm.

If you're used to being a maverick, then people don't get surprised when you start acting strangely.

One of the things we did at PayPal was collaborative filtering and machine learning: looking at patterns of human behavior. We used it there to predict when people would try to cheat the system to get money. But you can predict pretty much any behavior with a certain amount of accuracy.

Where would we be without inhibitions? They're quite useful things when you look at some of the things humans do if they lose them.

Personally, I don't see old economics and behavioural economics as opposed. It is useful to assume people are rational as a good approximation to their long term behaviour, but it would be unwise not to think how in practice their behaviour may deviate from that simplifying assumption.

What is it that the scientist finds useful in being able to relate a positive description of behavior to the solution of a maximizing problem? That is what a good deal of my own early work was about.

If you want to find out if someone's a taker, it's not actually that useful to know what they've accomplished. What you want to want to know is how they explain them.

It's more along the lines of raising a child: we train the system to a certain range of behaviors that we find most useful. But then we let it go, because we don't want to have to be babysitting it the whole time.

There are things that neuroscience is useful for in terms of understanding behavior, but there are also things it is not all that useful for, like understanding the nuances of our reactions to poetry.

A lot of time, the characters I've played in the past kind of come out in me in situations when it's very useful.

The human propensity to having opinions must, I guess, have started as a pretty useful evolutionary tool.

When we human beings hypothesize that a law of nature holds - even temporarily or situationally - we are creating an idea, but we are also making a hypothesis about how nature behaves, whose truth or usefulness has nothing to do with what we know or believe.

With consumers buying two smartphones for every desktop computer they purchase, the demands, challenges and opportunities of the mobile space are reshaping our assumptions about design and user behaviour.

The bread and butter of any internet service is user behavior.

I have a cell phone that doesn't behave like a phone: It behaves like a computer that makes calls. Computers are becoming an integral part of daily life. And if people don't start designing them to be more user-friendly, then an even larger part of the population is going to be left out of even more stuff.

There's always a momentum in how users do stuff. Making small changes can have huge knock-on effects for whole companies.

User-centered design means understanding what your users need, how they think, and how they behave - and incorporating that understanding into every aspect of your process.

OkCupid has users from 18 to 80 on the site. And we get to observe all of their actions. We get to watch how they use the site, how they interact with other people.

Within Internet users, you have a big chunk of people who can convert to online shopping.

Consumers have a different path to purchase. They don't shop less than they used to; it is just that the footsteps went online. You have to think differently in how you engage with users.

Is it progress if a cannibal uses a fork?