Frequently Asked Questions

Our ABD tutorials cover the hands-on part of the lessons taught in DBC and EDP.

Complete our training system in different ways—according to your learning goals and schedule.

We know what works best for most students, so here’s what we recommend:

Schedule 1. Start the video lessons now, then join our next LIVE term
If you complete all the video lessons before the term starts, you’ll enjoy a more relaxed pace of 2–4 hours a week during the LIVE term. Students typically complete the video lessons anywhere from a few days to a few months.

Schedule 2. Complete everything in 9 weeks
Schedule 6–8 hours a week over the 9-week term to finish everything in one shot. We’ve listed the core video lessons you need to watch to get the most out of each tutorial.

Schedule 3. Jump into the LIVE tutorials first, then catch-up on the video lessons
Prefer to dive in and complete background lessons later? Join our ABD tutorials first and slowly go through the video lessons at a flexible pace of 2–4 hours a week. While you may not get as much out of the tutorials with this approach, you will get more out of the lessons later on, with clarity on how the lessons translate into practice.

To get access to ABD tutorials, first you need to enroll in DBC, EDP, or the complete bundle. Next, complete the ABD sign-up form, where you can join any upcoming tutorial term. Once you’re enrolled, this is straight-forward.

If you have a scheduling conflict, you can move to any future LIVE tutorial at no cost, anytime during your term.

We recommend you pick one term and give it your full focus to get the best learning experience.

We teach through a blended learning approach that combines video lessons with LIVE tutorials. Our course Psychology Digital Behavior Change (DBC) includes 15 hours of video lessons, while Emotional Design Psychology and Neuroscience (EDP) includes 10 hours of video lessons. Both classes give you a foundation in psychology, behavioral science, and neuroscience for tech. Then when you join ABD, we’ll show you how to translate all those lessons into practice through project-based learning in an interactive online classroom.

We structured ABD as a step-by-step design process that integrates the lessons from DBC and EDP. You’ll have a deeper learning experience if you take both courses. But if you’re only enrolled in one, there’s no problem following along. We summarize the main concepts so that it’s accessible to students in all learning streams.

It depends on your focus. If you’d like to develop digital therapy services, or health behavior change interventions, you’ll learn a lot. Much of our content is derived from health behavior change science, and the professionals who’ve attended in the health/therapy sector show quite a lot of appreciation.

However, if you’re starting out and are more interested in promoting your practice online, then we recommend that you start with the basics, and find another school that offers introductory online marketing for small businesses. However, after you’ve gained some experience, at that point, our training will help deepen your knowledge.

We don’t list academics as a target group because the focus of our training is knowledge translation from science to practice.

Because of this, statistics, research methodology discussions, lit. review references and other academic sources have been cut out, and the content has been boiled down to what works. It’s all science-based, but presented in an extremely comprehensive and simple format so non-academics will grasp the information and take away solid, practical suggestions, and methodologies.

Despite having simplified the content’s academic roots, we’ve had quite a lot of success teaching academics who appreciate the comprehensiveness of our literature review, the simplification of the technical jargon, and applications of behavioral science to interactive media.

We have trained numerous nudge units, and some of the world’s top e-health behavioral scientists.  For instance, we’ve trained the team of academics behind Intervention Mapping at the University of Texas and Health Promotion Experts at the University of Alberta. We’ve also received major endorsements from the Editor of the world’s top scientific e-Health Journal, the Journal of Medical Internet Research. Moreover, we’ve trained leading authors and academics who specialize in the application of science, and we have received invitations to speak at York University, the University of Toronto, Johns Hopkins University, and MIT.

If you’re not sure, contact us and you can speak with Brian who can get into the technicalities of our content, and see if it’s a match for your area of academic focus. If not, we may be able to refer you to a specialist closer to your area.

The answer is maybe. You can use behavioral science for many challenges, like product design, policy development, service design, etc… But behavioral scientists are only as good as their professional expertise. As a science-based training program, you’ll learn many generic skills that you can apply to many applications. However, we specialize in the psychology of online engagement and focus on digital applications. But if you can translate our principles to your specific applications, you’ll gain a lot from our training.

Perfect for you, we’d say. You’ll walk away with a large volume of persuasive design tactics that you’ll be able to apply immediately. Brian has spent years boiling down the science of persuasive design into a simple model, isolating the most important 50 factors and organizing them into a simple communication model. Brian will show you all of these, walk through examples, and take you through exercises that will reinforce your ability to recognize, and apply them.

Yes, it certainly is.

We developed our curriculum to teach a unique skill in translating psychological theories to digital strategies. From our experience, our most advanced students love our emotional design training, as it’s our most cutting-edge class,  on the neuroscience of emotions for interactive design.

This is a creative design class grounded in hard science. But we’ve made the science accessible through visual lessons, experiential learning, and design challenges. For anyone senior who demands proof, we provide all scientific sources.

Senior designers love it as they rarely have an opportunity to learn this much science boiled down into such an accessible and practical format. Beginners also like it, as our curriculum is accessible and great for creative inspiration.

No. Our training does not require you to have technical skills, and there’s no need for any coding or programming experience.

However, to get the most out of the course, you should be using digital media to some extent, ideally in product design, UXD, CRO, communications, marketing, or project management.

If you’re completely unfamiliar with the Internet and have no experience or education in digital media, then this course is not for you.

No, don’t worry. You don’t require any prior experience of UI or UX tools. In the course, Brian will go over several typical interactive design tools, showing you wireframes, flow diagrams, and teaching you how to audit the psychology behind websites and mobile apps to help you develop new skills. If you’re already familiar with these tools, Brian will show you how we use them in a new way, revealing practical steps to incorporate behavioral science principles into standard UI/UX tools.

It should be fine. We use standard prototyping tools, such as wireframes, process modeling, UML, funnel structures, etc., but we don’t get overly technical.

The focus is not on how to make wireframes or flow charts, etc.; instead, the focus is on the human factors that underpin how people think and behave so that we can design interactive technologies that are more usable and persuasive at the same time.

To put it another way, instead of learning the technical details on how to build wireframes or mockups, you’ll know what matters in human psychology so that you can judge what matters in terms of the human factors rather than the technical details.

In the classroom, we’ll use classic paper for prototyping.

In our online training, we’ll recommend a few lo-fi and hi-fi prototyping tools. They change all the time, so we’ll discuss it in class.

Our training is for people already practicing digital marketing, UX, graphic design, or any web-related work, from beginners to advanced pros.

Our training shows participants how to apply digital psychology and neuroscience to everyday tech projects. Our content covers the entire process of building digital products and campaigns. However, cover it at a high level and dive into details here and there.

You’ll gain a bigger picture and see how the entire process works and how all the parts fit together. But we’re not going to help you develop the detailed technical skills you’ll need to know to build an online product and campaign.

We will give you a framework and help you know what matters. You’ll have to find other teachers to help you with details of specific platfroms, but you’ll leave us street smart, with a solid sense of what matters.

We manually process and distribute student certificates at the end of the training season. We also send a separate certificate per workshop completed.

Since we manually process records, students who have completed our training from September to December will normally receive their certificate by the end of December. Students who have completed our training from Feb to May will normally receive their certificate by the end of June or early July.

Complete the student support form, and we will send you a letter confirming your attendance ASAP. Please provide all your workshop details.

Complete the student support form. We will issue a letter confirming the class you attended and include the educational content according to academic and industry standards.

You’ll receive a Certificate of Completion after completing all modules. Persons who are unable to attend the full training will receive a Certificate of Participation. After the course, you can write the tests to earn your Certificate of Mastery.

Applied psychology and behavioral science are gaining popularity as valuable and hard-to-fill skills.

The UI/UX community now places a greater emphasis on design psychology. Search job boards for “UX and psychology,” “marketing and psychology,” or any design skill plus psychology. You’ll realize that the world’s top companies value staff who understand behavioral design principles.

We offer test-based certification and provide a unique certification ID, with proof that you understood the content. See our Certification Registry (https://certification.behavioraldesign.academy).

Our students include Samsung, Salesforce, Bank of America, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and numerous governments. See our corporate clients to get a sense of how many top companies value digital behavioral science.

If you’d like to see just how many industries see value in applied psychology, browse the corporate names of our student testimonials.

Considerably, we’d say. We’ve had a number of conversion specialists attend courses, and they were all energized and happy with the content. Many participants said they’d run out of ideas and found the course gave them a larger arsenal of persuasive principles they didn’t know about, and also that the course helped them to think about persuasive design in a new way.

We’ll provide all the training materials, so you’ll only need to bring a pen and some paper.

If you’d like to participate in our live polling and use our behavioral science software, bring a smartphone or tablet.

Our ABD tutorials cover the hands-on part of the lessons taught in DBC and EDP.

Complete our training system in different ways—according to your learning goals and schedule.

We know what works best for most students, so here’s what we recommend:

Schedule 1. Start the video lessons now, then join our next LIVE term
If you complete all the video lessons before the term starts, you’ll enjoy a more relaxed pace of 2–4 hours a week during the LIVE term. Students typically complete the video lessons anywhere from a few days to a few months.

Schedule 2. Complete everything in 9 weeks
Schedule 6–8 hours a week over the 9-week term to finish everything in one shot. We’ve listed the core video lessons you need to watch to get the most out of each tutorial.

Schedule 3. Jump into the LIVE tutorials first, then catch-up on the video lessons
Prefer to dive in and complete background lessons later? Join our ABD tutorials first and slowly go through the video lessons at a flexible pace of 2–4 hours a week. While you may not get as much out of the tutorials with this approach, you will get more out of the lessons later on, with clarity on how the lessons translate into practice.

We teach through a blended learning approach that combines video lessons with LIVE tutorials. Our course Psychology Digital Behavior Change (DBC) includes 15 hours of video lessons, while Emotional Design Psychology and Neuroscience (EDP) includes 10 hours of video lessons. Both classes give you a foundation in psychology, behavioral science, and neuroscience for tech. Then when you join ABD, we’ll show you how to translate all those lessons into practice through project-based learning in an interactive online classroom.

We structured ABD as a step-by-step design process that integrates the lessons from DBC and EDP. You’ll have a deeper learning experience if you take both courses. But if you’re only enrolled in one, there’s no problem following along. We summarize the main concepts so that it’s accessible to students in all learning streams.

Our training is for people already practicing digital marketing, UX, graphic design, or any web-related work, from beginners to advanced pros.

Our training shows participants how to apply digital psychology and neuroscience to everyday tech projects. Our content covers the entire process of building digital products and campaigns. However, cover it at a high level and dive into details here and there.

You’ll gain a bigger picture and see how the entire process works and how all the parts fit together. But we’re not going to help you develop the detailed technical skills you’ll need to know to build an online product and campaign.

We will give you a framework and help you know what matters. You’ll have to find other teachers to help you with details of specific platfroms, but you’ll leave us street smart, with a solid sense of what matters.

Yes, the course is certainly relevant to digital marketing. We found participants want to ‘see and touch’ the principles, so we stress more concrete examples that have obvious expressions, which means focusing more on page design, ad copy, and other tangible examples.

Nonetheless, we do address broader marketing strategy throughout, and provide guidance to help persons working at a strategic level to better communicate these principles with colleagues working in a technical or creative capacity.

We’ll provide all the training materials, so you’ll only need to bring a pen and some paper.

If you’d like to participate in our live polling and use our behavioral science software, bring a smartphone or tablet.

Our ABD tutorials cover the hands-on part of the lessons taught in DBC and EDP.

Complete our training system in different ways—according to your learning goals and schedule.

We know what works best for most students, so here’s what we recommend:

Schedule 1. Start the video lessons now, then join our next LIVE term
If you complete all the video lessons before the term starts, you’ll enjoy a more relaxed pace of 2–4 hours a week during the LIVE term. Students typically complete the video lessons anywhere from a few days to a few months.

Schedule 2. Complete everything in 9 weeks
Schedule 6–8 hours a week over the 9-week term to finish everything in one shot. We’ve listed the core video lessons you need to watch to get the most out of each tutorial.

Schedule 3. Jump into the LIVE tutorials first, then catch-up on the video lessons
Prefer to dive in and complete background lessons later? Join our ABD tutorials first and slowly go through the video lessons at a flexible pace of 2–4 hours a week. While you may not get as much out of the tutorials with this approach, you will get more out of the lessons later on, with clarity on how the lessons translate into practice.

We teach through a blended learning approach that combines video lessons with LIVE tutorials. Our course Psychology Digital Behavior Change (DBC) includes 15 hours of video lessons, while Emotional Design Psychology and Neuroscience (EDP) includes 10 hours of video lessons. Both classes give you a foundation in psychology, behavioral science, and neuroscience for tech. Then when you join ABD, we’ll show you how to translate all those lessons into practice through project-based learning in an interactive online classroom.

We structured ABD as a step-by-step design process that integrates the lessons from DBC and EDP. You’ll have a deeper learning experience if you take both courses. But if you’re only enrolled in one, there’s no problem following along. We summarize the main concepts so that it’s accessible to students in all learning streams.

For LIVE online classes, we’re flexible with late registration for about 1-week. Since we record each session, there’s still time for you to catch up.

If you let it run too long, you may find it tough to get caught up.

If you miss the late registration deadline, you can still sign up any time and get access to our on-demand training. Then join any upcoming LIVE term.

We also have archive recordings of prior terms. Speak to us and we’ll recommend a good term.

We do not allow registration after classroom training has started, as it’s normally too late to catch up.

If you have a scheduling conflict in advance and still want to attend classroom training, we have a few different solutions depending on your situation. Let us know and we’ll find the best way to help get you caught up.

We offer perks to alumni who are continuing their education. If you’re alumni and wish to claim your community rate, contact us via the form. Provide details so we can look up your records.

If you have provided us with advanced notice that you couldn’t make it to your workshop, you will be eligible for future access to the same workshop you signed up for, or the equivalent number of workshop days. However, the onus is on you to contact us in advance of the workshop you want to attend, for any city and time that is convenient for you.

If you have a scheduling conflict, you can move to any future LIVE tutorial at no cost, anytime during your term.

We recommend you pick one term and give it your full focus to get the best learning experience.

We’ll provide all the training materials, which most people markup for their notes, so you’ll only need to bring a pen, some paper and a laptop if you want to take electronic notes, but also if you’d like to participate in our live polling, bring a smart phone or tablet. We’ll provide the wi-fi.

After you complete the registration for classroom training, you’ll find the exact location printed on your ticket, with the street address and room number. The address listed on our website is typically the physical building, but not the exact room number. After completing your ticket purchase, we’ll send you a workshop itinerary sheet with important details and the exact address, room number, and any relevant directions.

We’ll provide all the training materials, so you’ll only need to bring a pen and some paper.

If you’d like to participate in our live polling and use our behavioral science software, bring a smartphone or tablet.

Testimonials are very helpful, and we appreciate your willingness to share your experience.

To share your thoughts, visit our Google Business Profile.

Yes, we’re sure it will benefit you, as a small company or team. The size of your organization isn’t an issue.

The course presents several psychological principles that will help you make better strategic design decisions—whether you’re implementing on your own or with others. A critical take-away element is how you can embed psychology into your digital media. You’ll be equipped with strategies and rules of thumb that you can use to make science-informed strategic and creative decisions, whether you’re on your own or collaborating with a team.

Yes, the training is relevant to UX professionals. In general, UX professionals learn a lot of cognitive psychology and often receive no training in motivational psychology. Since behavior change depends on simplification as much as motivation, many user experience professionals require supplementary training, to help them better understand the factors that drive user behavior. Additionally, most of the focus on emotional design in the UX industry is focused on positive emotions or building products that users love. However, in practice, emotional design requires a deeper understanding of different emotions, along with a good understanding of how to manage negative emotions, how to manage user stress and to better understand core concepts such as cognitive load, which are best understood by looking at the psychology and neuroscience that drive user experiences.

Another thing that UX professionals love, is learning how to build wireframes based on psychology and neuroscience-inspired strategies, rather than copying conventional building blocks.

We’ll open you up to the behavioral science of technology.

Many factors influence the ability of tech to nudge. However, the two most significant factors are a person’s ability and motivation. From your perspective, this means your site’s intuitiveness and whether they feel motivated and confident enough to use your product.

Even if you have a PhD in HCI, there’s a good chance that you haven’t ventured too far beyond cognitive psychology. Most people who studied UX, usability, interactive design, information architecture, etc… tend to understand cognitive psychology principles. They’re talented at making products intuitive but lack the skill to foster trust, motivation, and much more.

Our training fills the gap, providing a comprehensive tour of multiple behavior change fields. You’ll learn about the emotions that motivate user behavior, taxonomies of behavior change principles, and gain experience applying these through different scenarios and design challenges.

You’ll get Dr. Cugelman’s taxonomy of 50+ evidence-based behavior change principles and another taxonomy of motivating emotions.

These are derived from published scientific tools for auditing and building digital interventions.

We will teach you how to conduct a behavioral design analysis. For most participants, this is a helpful learning exercise. However, for someone with a research background, this will be an introduction to content analysis in applied digital psychology.