start from the most important goals, like choosing to try to change behavior in the first place, and trickle down to supporting goals, like how to go about making change happen. As a general rule, people are more likely to stick with choices they’ve made themselves than with ones that have been imposed on them, especially when something is challenging.
The reason why? If someone’s working toward a behavior change goal and they hit an obstacle, they’ll need a good reason to stick it out. A personally meaningful reason for the goal will provide that. “My weight loss app told me I have to do this” will not fortify people to overcome tough temptations.
You can get people started on behavior change by imposing a goal on them. It happens all the time. How many people embark on a diet or an exercise regimen as a New Year’s resolution because that’s what they’re supposed to do? But if you want people to stick with the change, they eventually have to find their own reasons to do so.
Letting people make their own choices about what goals to tackle is a first step in long-lasting behavior change. In the example from Pacifica, a stress reduction app in Figure 3.1, new users are asked to articulate what they hope to achieve from using the program. EasyQuit, an app for smoking cessation, keeps it even simpler and invites users to generate their own list of motivations for quitting cigarettes (see Figure 3.2). You may not need anything more complicated than these types of question to get your users thinking about what their goals are.
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
