FIGURE 3.1 Pacifica’s users are asked to describe their goal for using the program as part of the onboarding process.
FIGURE 3.2 EasyQuit asks users to generate their own list of motivations for behavior change, and then it offers the option of having those reasons randomly sent as reminders.
Not all choices are meaningful. While users may appreciate being able to choose the color of their program dashboard or the avatar they use, these sorts of aesthetic options don’t typically tap into any deeper meaning. In terms of behavior change, they are at best a “nice to have.” The example from Medisafe in Figure 3.3 is not a compelling reason for a user to pay for an upgraded experience. A more meaningful one would be for users to choose how to communicate medication behaviors to care providers.
The choice that new Happify users are given to have their account in Private Mode or Community Mode is meaningful (see Figure 3.4). Some people feel behavior change is personal and prefer not to share their activities beyond their inner circle, while others thrive on social support. Letting users express their preference at the very beginning of their experience with Happify signals that their autonomy will be supported as they use the product.
FIGURE 3.3 Medisafe’s value proposition for users to upgrade is to be able to personalize the appearance of the app.
FIGURE 3.4 Happify has new users select whether they’d like their activity to be viewable by other users for support and encouragement, or if they want it to remain private.
What Really Matters
Meaningful choices often tap into people’s core values and priorities. As product designers, you can help people think about what really matters to them and draw connections between their values and behavior change. Because not everyone has reflected deeply on what matters to them, you also may need to draw that out with thoughtful questions, prompts, or activities.
A technique that product managers sometimes use to understand what features are really crucial is known as question laddering. The idea is that rather than just accepting a certain feature is needed, the product manager asks, “Why is it needed?” They keep asking “why” until there is no further way to break down the answer. This allows them to figure out the true underlying purpose of the requested feature, so they can think creatively about the right way to achieve it, rather than thoughtlessly implementing only what was requested.
You can use the same question laddering technique to help your users think about why their goals are important to them. Users’ first answers to a question about their goals may be very tactical. It’s not useful for you to hear that they’re using a weight loss app in order to lose weight. What you really care about is why they want to lose weight. Is it to boost self-esteem? Gain energy for keeping up with rambunctious toddlers? Stave off a health crisis?
The conversation about what really matters to your users might look something like what Noom does to help new users establish their goals, in Figure 3.5.
FIGURE 3.5 After Noom users describe their goal, the app asks them to dig deeper until they’ve gotten to the root reasons why that goal matters to them.
Whatever . . . I Do What I Want
People experience things they want to do differently than things they have to do, even if the activities are pretty similar. Remember Farmville, the Facebook game that swept the nation around 2010? At its peak, it had almost 84 million players who would log in every day to . . . plow their fields. Performing basic agricultural maintenance tasks like harvesting crops earned players experience points and game currency that enabled them to expand their farms (see Figure 3.6). Which, of course meant more farm chores to perform.
FIGURE 3.6 Farmville players enjoyed logging into the game every day to clear their fields of debris and fill their coffers with Farm Bucks.
Contrast that with a worker who goes to an office every morning and fires up the computer to review data in spreadsheets. Performing basic accounting maintenance tasks like updating revenue projections earns the worker their paycheck. While the worker may show up every day, they’re not particularly jazzed about it, and spend most of the workday checking the clock in case it’s time to go home.
Farmville and work have a lot in common. They both require daily effort, the completion of tedious and sometimes dull tasks, and they’re impossible to “win”; there’s always something more to do. Yet people were incredibly engaged with Farmville and experienced fun playing it, while there’s broad evidence that many American workers are disengaged from their jobs. Could it be that when people elect to do something for their own reasons, it’s more fun?
NOTE BROCCOLI OR SPINACH?
The Picky Eater Project is a six-week program for parents to introduce finicky children to a wider variety of healthy foods. One of the tactics within the program is to involve the children in shopping for ingredients and preparing recipes. The creators of the Picky Eater Project have found that kids are much more likely to try foods they had a hand in bringing to the table. Even though the choice of foods had constraints—kids shopped at a farmer’s market, not a candy store—providing the choice led to more effective behavior changes.
The Designer’s Dilemma
There is a problem inherent in having our users’ autonomy be a priority. Designers are rarely truly agnostic as to what their users decide to do. They have a vested interest in them making a particular set of choices over others. The success of their product counts on users doing certain things, whether it’s spending their money on the product or achieving a behavioral outcome that leads a third party to spend theirs.
It’s a leap of faith to design with the users’ autonomy in mind because it means allowing for the possibility that users won’t do what designers want—what designers need—them to do. It feels scary. That’s okay.
Designing for user autonomy is playing a long game. If you get users to make the “right” choices with your product through force or trickery, you can achieve short-term outcomes. Most metrics won’t tell you in real time if you’ve lost your users’ trust. That lesson emerges down the road, when the problem may no longer be fixable. You’ll discover you have pissed-off former users who are only too happy to tell their friends to stay away. Maybe even worse, you’ll have people who tried behavior change but didn’t stick with it and are now less likely to try again.
Consider automatic subscription renewals, which rely on people’s forgetfulness and inattention to detail to make an ongoing profit. Sure, you can bury the renewal information in the fine print so that you get an ongoing payment for months, maybe even years after someone’s stopped truly using your product. But what happens