Human behavior is complex. What motivates someone to do something? How can we influence a person or change behavior? Every behavior is influenced by 3 basic elements.
For decades we believed that people choose one behavior over another as a result of a rational evaluation. Turns out people don’t weigh out costs and benefits. Their rational mind doesn’t always win over their emotional, spontaneous nature. As irrational our behavior might seem there still is a logic behind it. As designers and developers we have a mission: changing a certain behavior. To do so we have to understand what actually makes people behave in a certain way in the first place.
The elements of behavior?
Dr. BJ Fogg has done some amazing research on credibility and behavioral design. He was the first to properly discuss the power of technology in persuading people to engage in doing tasks they are not ordinarily bothered or used to do.
Behavioral design is where psychology and technology meet – a systematic way to influence a desired behavior, one step at a time.
A behavior is composed of 3 components:
Motivation often relates to an ideal end-state or a goal that a person feels compelled to achieve. Fogg identifies three categories: sensation (pleasure or pain), expectation (hope and fear) and belonging (acceptance and rejection). Ultimately, motivation is the degree to which the person wants the behavior to happen.
Ability essentially tells us how difficult or easy it is to perform a certain action. What we are really talking about here is simplicity and this is essentially what UX is about. If the user’s ability is restricted, the behavior is less likely to occur.
For example, forcing people to register to your site before proceeding is a restriction and causes frustration, which might cause the user to abandon the task if the motivation is not high enough. Software that makes it easy to perform a task will therefore be more successful in convincing the user to perform the task.
The trigger is an input that sets of an action. The phone rings, you answer it. Fogg’s model highlights that the trigger is the element that makes the behavior happen and he goes further by analyzing at which moment in the users’ path a trigger is most successful.
When should you put a trigger in the user’s path? What element should you focus on?
In part 2 we look how to change behavior with design following Fogg’s behavior model.