Aside from specific underlying theories or approaches, there are three important points to remember when designing for behavior change:
• People are different. There will rarely be a “one-size-fits-all” solution to any problem. It’s important to be clear about who you are designing for and what they need. Research is essential to paint the picture of who your users are; because people are different, it’s very likely your assumptions based on your own experience or the people close to you won’t be true for others.
• Context matters. Nothing happens in a vacuum. People’s reactions to your product and their ability to take action depends on their situation. Understanding the environment in which people use your product, as well as the circumstances in which they will work on behavior change, should inform how you design.
• Things change. The whole point of behavior change is progress. As time goes on, people’s needs and situations will probably evolve. The way your product works for them may evolve, too—to the point where your users may even “graduate” to not needing it anymore. Be open to the idea that your users’ needs will change over time, and ready to adapt.
The research activities built into the behavior change design process help keep these three points at the forefront of your work.
Terminology
When you’re doing behavior change design, there are some words that need to be used in very specific ways. While I recognize that glossaries do not typically ignite readers’ loins, it’s really important to know what these terms mean because I use them about six thousand times each in the rest of the book.
The target users are the people for whom your product is designed. The target user group should be defined as clearly as possible; this will help with clarity in your research, design, and marketing. For example, Runkeeper’s target users are busy people who are interested in personalized routines that fit their schedules and fitness levels. That’s a different target user group than Couch to 5k, which is designed for people to ease into running by incrementally building their fitness. The two products both support the behavior of running, but do so quite differently because they’re designed for different users. Some teams represent their target users with personas, which encapsulate key characteristics within a fictional user profile. Personas can provide a kind of shorthand to keep target users top of mind during the design process.
For the most part, a behavior is something people do.3 Behavior change, as the phrase implies, focuses on behaviors. Being precise about what behaviors you’re designing to change is important because it’s very easy to get distracted by related nonbehaviors. In particular, designers may consider emotions or cognitions as targets to change, like:
• Increasing someone’s confidence to do something
• Persuading someone to have a new belief
• Making people feel happier
These are worthy goals. But they are not behaviors.
Why the focus on behaviors over emotions and cognitions? After all, what people think and feel has an effect on what they do. But it’s what people do that ultimately affects meaningful outcomes. To take a pragmatic standpoint, the outcomes are what people pay for when they hire behavior change designers, not the feel-good intermediary steps where users gain confidence and embrace positive beliefs. Behavior change design is successful when it saves money or improves symptoms of a disease or makes a process more efficient, and doing those things requires moving the needle on behaviors.
TIP YOU CAN SEE A BEHAVIOR
If you’re not certain whether something is a behavior or not, a good question to ask is “Can I see this?” Behaviors are observable. Emotions and cognitions are not.
It’s entirely possible that a behavior change intervention might target emotions or cognitions as a way to influence behavior. Take confidence; usually, people have to feel some confidence to try a new behavior for the first time. If it goes well, their confidence increases and they’re more likely to try the behavior a second time. An intervention that boosts people’s confidence to try a behavior might be an excellent way to make that behavior happen more frequently. But the designer has to have the behavior as a target in order to determine that confidence is the right lever to get results.
Every behavior change intervention has one or more target behaviors. A target behavior is a specific behavior that the designers are trying to affect—whether they want people to do it more, less, or differently than they’re already doing it. One of the very first steps in designing a behavior change product is figuring out what the target behaviors will be. Almost every other design decision cascades from that one, from the data that you’ll collect to the features you’ll include.
Some behavior change projects focus on getting people to do a behavior a limited number of times. Paying parking tickets is an example; even if someone gets a lot of parking tickets, paying them is a one-shot behavior that doesn’t really require any sort of ongoing attention or effort. More often, behavior change is a more complicated endeavor that requires people to make consistent and sustained changes to their lives. Something like managing a complex health condition or socking away enough money for retirement may be a lifelong effort. And those sorts of ongoing changes require people to have motivation.
Motivation can be defined as desire with velocity. The way most of us use the word in our daily lives isn’t quite right; people might say something like “I’m motivated to be rich,” but they aren’t really. They want to be rich. That’s just desire. Motivation, like behavior change design, takes a target behavior as an object. You could be motivated to save extra money each month, find a good fund to invest in, or take a new job with a better paycheck. That’s desire with velocity.
If there is such a thing as “one simple trick to changing behavior . . . forever!” it’s connecting people with their motivation. Fortunately, psychology offers designers a toolkit to do just that.
All About Motivation
Psychology offers a multitude of theories to understand what motivation is and how it works. As I noted earlier, my favorite of the bunch is the self-determination theory, or SDT. SDT builds on classic theories of motivation like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and it plays nicely with concepts like self-efficacy and habit formation. It’s also got one of the richest bodies of evidence in psychology, with over 40 years’ worth of studies that cover health, education, finance, sport, and a bunch of other behavioral areas. And it resonates with people’s lived experiences. When I talk to people about SDT, I can see them recognize the concepts in their own lives. All of these factors make it an excellent starting point for designing engaging digital experiences.
Motivational Quality
In addition to defining motivation differently from the way people use the term in normal conversation, SDT also quantifies it differently. It’s typical for people to talk about motivation as something that has an amount. The more motivation someone has, the more likely they are to do something. The self-determination theory of motivation takes that a step further to consider motivational quality. It’s not just about how much motivation someone has, but also what fuels it.
There are six types of motivation according to SDT that can be arranged along a continuum from controlled to autonomous (see Figure 1.1). In order from most controlled to most autonomous, the motivation types are:
• Amotivated
• External
• Introjected
• Identified
• Integrated
•