Developing Usable Experiences

What motivates behavior?

January 28th, 2008 11:09 pm —  324 views

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Mostly because the topic for this week is motivation1, I’m keeping it forefront in my mind. It is an interesting subject for sure. What is it that motivates behavior?

Not an easy question to answer. Let’s start from here. I see that it is almost 11:00 PM on a Monday night. I know I should get to sleep very soon. There is still work to do yet I am typing words into this blog. Am I thinking about what motivates this keyboard moonlighter sonata? Of course. You know I am.

Bruce Schneier said at a security conference I attended years ago, that the next big thing was going to be RSS feeds. His description of the principle made it seem obvious to me. It is a shift in how many people are used to getting information, but it is a better way. There are a lot of reasons and I’m happy to languish mightily on them if not for the clock in the bloated system tray.

Instead of having to worry about who might be interested in what you might have to say, just say what you have to say and let anybody interested watch for you to say something. Easy. Instead of pushing content you’re expecting others to pull it if they want. This implies interest. Interest is what motivates.

Most everything is interesting to me. Motivation and I have an understanding these days but we don’t always see eye to eye.

Image: I snapped this during class the other day. We had moved to another room and some of my classmates took the padded benches along the outer wall. Someone remarked on how they all had Mac’s and of a diminishing size. Couldn’t help but try to capture the moment.

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  1. For my class on the Fundamentals of Human Behavior. [↩]

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4 Comments 

Comments

4 Responses to “What motivates behavior?”

  1. Ken Brown on January 28th, 2008 11:50 pm

    Spike, HDDVD or Blueray what do you think will be the standard? I bet on Beta in the 70″s and turned out to be VHS Think on this, I would be interested in your opion.

  2. Dawn on January 29th, 2008 12:16 am

    cool photo. Guess what? I turned in assignment 3 tonight! And I know what a system tray is too!

  3. Spike on January 29th, 2008 4:53 am

    Dawn: And that picture wasn’t even staged! Congrats on your rise to stardom in the web design world. I see big things for you.

    KB: My opinion on HDDVD vs Blueray? Avoid making the choice as long as possible!

  4. Lauren on January 29th, 2008 5:31 pm

    Motivation and I are having a really hard time seeing eye to eye, can you send some cooperative motivation my way? Right now I have lots of “do everything but my school work” type of motivation. Ok…off the the gym =)

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