Behavior change interventions are more common in certain subject areas. In this book, you’ll find a lot of health examples, because that’s the domain I know best from my career and one where behavior change has been embraced. Health interventions may help people along a spectrum of functioning—from coping with acute illness or injury to managing chronic conditions, supporting wellness, or reaching sports and performance goals. And they can target a range of behaviors, including eating, exercise, taking medication, going to doctor’s appointments, or deep breathing through stressful situations.
Behavior change interventions in financial services may center on major life goals like going to college (and paying off the associated loans), buying a home, or saving for retirement. Some successful financial behavior change interventions include changes to tax notices to prompt timely payment and changing 401(k) enrollment processes so that more people sign up.
Education is a natural outlet for behavior change; if people are building deep knowledge or new skills, they’ll need to engage in practice behaviors. Some types of education manifest through behavior, like speaking a new language, writing code, or repairing an automobile.
The performance management tools that big companies use to review employees and manage bonuses are a type of behavior change intervention.
Environmental science organizations practice behavior change, too, whether it’s getting people to consume fewer plastics or choose more sustainable fish to eat. As people realize the impact that their individual behaviors might have on the global climate, more digital interventions are being developed to support them in changing their efforts.
NOTE WHAT BEHAVIOR CHANGE MEANS TO PEOPLE
Early in the process of writing this book, I asked people on Twitter to recommend behavior change apps they had used. The overwhelming majority were workplace wellness apps, the type of health interventions you might get as part of your employer-offered health insurance. Even accounting for the fact that a lot of my Twitter followers are in the healthcare industry, it’s striking that health is the first thing that comes to mind when people think behavior change.
Behavior change design can also be used to make consumer products and experiences more engaging—while sometimes having the positive side effect of helping users develop new habits or skills. Pokémon Go! is an example. It was designed as a game, but users report boosts in their daily step counts as a result of their quests to capture Pokémon. Even products without much potential for positively changing people’s behavior, like shopping websites or music apps, could be made stickier using the strategies you’ll learn about in this book. In fact, many of the most “addicting” digital experiences borrow heavily from psychology in their design.
But just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. It’s easy to creep into dark patterns and manipulative design choices, if your goal in applying psychology is to keep someone within your product as long as possible without it being beneficial to them.1 Behavior change design is about helping people achieve their goals, not yours.
In this book, I focus on digital products—apps, websites, connected devices, and the ways in which they intersect. Many behavior change endeavors today include a digital component or are entirely digital; technology makes interventions scalable, so they can be delivered quickly and cheaply to large groups of people no matter where they live. And digital offers opportunities to reach people in or near moments where they’re taking actions that matter. It’s a channel with enormous promise for affecting outcomes.
Like it or not, people are going to use tactics from psychology to make their digital products more engaging. They might as well learn to do it right.
Where Does Behavior Change Happen?
Behavior change design works at two levels. For products that are intended to change people’s behaviors, there is often a protocol built into the product itself. These protocols are step-by-step processes that outline the correct way to change a behavior based on previous research. For example, research on smoking cessation clearly indicates that setting a quit date in advance makes people much more successful at quitting, so most smoking cessation programs include steps around setting a quit date. Behavior change designers may be responsible for developing the protocol within a product, often in partnership with subject matter experts like physicians or researchers. Or, they may need to translate a protocol that exists in a nondigital format to a digital one; you’ll see examples in this book where techniques like cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), typically used in counseling, are brought into a digital experience. Creating or translating these sorts of protocols requires understanding their active ingredients and being able to make sound judgments about how to represent them accurately through digital experiences.
The second level at which behavior change design works is making the digital product itself engaging by aligning it with people’s motivational needs. It is this second level of behavior change design that can be applied to nonbehavior change products, and where most of the material in this book is focused.
Although I’ll primarily talk about using behavior change within the guts of a digital product to make it engaging, effective engagement also requires you to pay attention to the context in which the product is being used. That includes how your product is marketed and distributed, any reminders or messages users might receive from the product, and how data is collected about users’ experiences. Some digital products include an onboarding experience with physical world components, for example, if there are connected devices that need to be set up. Others are designed to facilitate real-world conversations; consider someone with a health condition sharing their medication data from the app with a doctor during an appointment. Designing with an eye to how those experiences unfold will support engagement within the digital product itself.
Of course, because most behavior change takes place off the screen, behavior change designers must understand users in their real-life contexts, beyond their use of the product itself. The research that goes into understanding users and their needs almost always extends into the analog world. When the goal is to change something offline, the digital product becomes a tool rather than an end in itself.
NOTE DON’T MAKE ASSUMPTIONS
Understanding how behavior unfolds in the real world is crucial to design to support or change it digitally. In reviewing apps that include behavior change elements for this book, I’ve been (perhaps naively) surprised by how often stereotypes about user groups get baked in. Two things I noticed over and over: weight loss is congratulated, even when the product can’t possibly know if it was intended or wanted. And products that asked about sexual activity presumed that the partners were male and female. Both of these assumptions could be really off-putting to a potential user who doesn’t fit them. There are many ways to build flexibility into your product to avoid these embarrassing gaffes. Doing good research up front will help you recognize where you need them.
That said, behavior change design is a business. Most products include business goals that live alongside the behavior change goals. Products may carry subscription fees, require users to pay for access to premium features, or urge them to purchase expensive connected devices for enhanced functionality. Behavior change design can be an excellent tool to keep people hooked on a digital product, but there are also many warning stories about it being misused. Part of using behavior change design to build products is being clear very early in the process about what success looks like and what it does not. Otherwise, you risk participating in an arms race for “most time on screen.”
Some Core Tenets
The behavior change design approach in this book weaves together multiple different behavior change theories. Buckle up: This is your whirlwind tour. If you’ve taken psychology courses, you will recognize several old friends: self-efficacy, social learning, mindsets, and so on. The theory that most heavily underlies the book’s organization is the self-determination theory of motivation, which builds on and extends older theories