The Bolin Marketing Blog

How do we design for the realities of human behavior?

That seemed to be the driving theme in BJ Fogg’s Designing for Behavior Change: Human Nature, Hot Triggers and New Habits workshop in Day 3 at UX Week in San Francisco.

The premise was clear: much of first generation of digital design (websites, applications, and related tools) has focused on providing as much information as possible to audiences in order to encourage them to take action. This is commonly referred to as the information (action) fallacy. And it’s been proven to not work. A lot of evidence shows people don’t consume vast amounts of  information in the way that typical information systems present it.

Another reality advertisers are coming to terms with: most research shows attitudinal change in people doesn’t correlate to changing behavior. People generally say one thing, and then do another. In addition, a lot of advertising focuses on enforcing ambient/passive awareness of messages and brands in traditional channels of communication. These also have been proven to not be terribly efficient or effective, either.

So, what really works?

In digital experiences, we need to rethink our context. We need to learn how to trigger able, motivated people to take action while in the normal flow and environment of their habitual lives. To understand this landscape of behavior change in people is to master this guiding principle of designing systems and tools for user experience:

Put “Hot Triggers” in the the path of (able) motivated people.

Let’s start with the “motivated” person. For instance, it’s easier to place carrots or “triggers” in the paths of able, motivated people than it is to go after unmotivated people first, and persuade them to do something differently.

•    Example: To encourage bicycle commuting, experience designers hand out easy-to-access bike trail maps to people who own bikes (bike owners are “able”) and want to bike to work (they are also “motivated”), but don’t know the best or most effective routes, or simply need that extra incentive or reason to take action. The activity of the hand out, of course, occurs at the right time–when people are considering their biking routine, for example.

Let’s now talk “Hot Triggers.” Hot triggers are devices that entice, instigate or catalyze action or inaction at the appropriate time (my definition). For example, digital tactics used in the correct context, like email and texting, have proven to be effective in this regard. Mostly because the penetration and adoption of these two channels of communication are so ubiquitous (many of our audiences are ABLE to use these channels). Sometimes these very simple tools are overlooked when trying to engage online audiences. Examples:

•    Facebook has mastered email triggers to drive traffic back into the social experience to enhance engagement and encourage ongoing interaction.
•    Facebook also uses simple behavioral devices (the ‘Like’ button) to tip users’ affinities in the direction of digital communities they associate with.
•    Ebay encourages honest online behavior by incorporating rating systems for buyers to comment on and rank sellers.

Apparently simple stuff, right?

There are a lot more dimensions to this concept that I simply cannot cover in one blog post. So I’ll end by asking some questions that, if answered correctly, can put you on the track to designing better, more productive human behavior in any user experience:

•    What behavior do you want to change, or trigger, for your audience?
•    What is the simplest behavior that matters to your audience?
•    How do you trigger the simplest action for them?
•    How do increase your audience’s ability to do something?
•    How do you reward or promise to reward your audience?
•    How can the little touch points over time create shifts in value exchange for your audiences? For you?

Last night I had the fortunate opportunity to attend the local UPA MN lecture where Susan Dray and David Siegel talked about some of the myths of user research.  Without getting into the details of the presentation, their main message was basically don’t always trust research outcomes, no matter how massive or sophisticated they appear.

We work hard to never stop questioning our approaches to defining customer or user experience problems, in addition to our methods in answering them. But as experience design strategists and designers in agency or consultancy settings like Bolin Digital, we often don’t have the luxury of large budgets to help us inform our design decisions for many projects.

In the methods of our work, we rely heavily upon activity-, user-, and system-centered approaches as models to guide us through the forest of decisions. We hope that one of them or a combination of them gets us to the answer quickly.  Paul and I have also chatted about the common sense approach to design: should we  sometimes  rely on our own experience or instinct to guide decision making (also referred to as Dan Saffer’s “genius” centered design approach)? It seems like even this cost-efficient “gut” check, however, can get us into deep water.

As we continue to grow up in a world of increasingly sophisticated interactions and product experiences, it’s important to understand how we arrive at conclusions about which design paths to take.

All this recent thinking provoked me to ask these questions about design research methods and tools: Wwhat’s the best mix of data and methods?  How much of it is driven by common sense? How do we know when we arrive at the best possible solution?