When you create an app, a website, or a game, how do you attract users, and perhaps more importantly, how do you keep them? Irresistible Apps explains exactly how to do this using a library of 27 motivational design patterns and real-world examples of how they work.
As a developer, you need to retain users in the new economy of advertisements, subscriptions, and in-app purchases, but how do you do this? How do some applications keep users coming back? Why do people spend hours and hours playing World of Warcraft? Why do people care about Reddit karma? What makes customers keep buying from Amazon? Why do so many people love Khan Academy?
The answers are found in Gameful, Social, Interface, and Information patterns. Not only will you learn about these patterns, you'll also learn why they work using psychological theories of intrinsic motivation, behavioral psychology, and behavioral economics. Good and bad implementations of the patterns are shown so practitioners can use them effectively and avoid pitfalls along the way.

1. Introduction to Motivational Design
2. Psychology of Motivation
3. Understanding Patterns
4. Gameful Patterns
5. Social Patterns
6. Interface Patterns
7. Information Patterns
8. Understanding Motivational Dark Patterns
9. Temporal Dark Patterns
10. Monetary Dark Patterns
11. Social Capital Dark Patterns
12. Patterns as Analysis
13. Patterns as Design Tools
14. The End Is the Beginning
15. Bibliography

Chris Lewis is a software engineer based in Silicon Valley, and in a past life he worked as a database consultant. He holds a Computer Science PhD from the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he researched both software engineering and game design, marrying the two in his study of motivational design patterns. He is co-founder of the Games and Software Engineering academic workshop.