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 when the person finally takes a close look at their credit card statement and realizes how much they’ve paid you against how much value they’ve received?
It’s not a good look.
That’s not to say these sorts of auto-renewals are universally bad. They can be incredibly convenient for products like insurance or internet plans. But the key is that users should be aware that their payment will recur and have explicitly agreed to it. If they change their minds, it should be relatively simple for them to update the renewal.
Designing for user autonomy is scary. Driving users away forever because you didn’t respect their autonomy is even scarier.
A Transparent Path to Change
Part of freely making a meaningful decision is understanding what that decision entails. People will agree to awful things if they believe it will help them achieve something they value. Think about what it takes to lose weight. People willingly agree to do things like:
• Stand on a scale and feel bad about the information displayed
• Ignore the growling in their belly that is begging for a delicious cupcake
• Move their bodies so much that they sweat through their clothes and need a shower and feel sore the next day
• Opt out of happy hour to go to a smelly gym instead
The mechanics of weight loss, when looked at a certain way, are really unpleasant. But people do them, and may even eventually take pleasure in them, because they believe that these actions will lead to an outcome they value.
How Not to Hook Users
Imagine that you want to lose weight and you google “best weight loss apps.” The top result is for a program you’ve never heard of: Dr. Nick’s Magic Diet. Dr. Nick looks a little sketchy, but he promises results in one simple step. You’re in.
You fill out all of the information to enroll in Dr. Nick’s Magic Diet: your birthdate, your address, your height and weight, your fitness goals, your health background, and finally, your credit card number. At each step along the way, the program encourages you: “You’re almost there! Just a few more steps, and you’ll receive the one simple step you need to lose weight!”
Finally, you reach the end of the sign-up and there’s a big shiny button on the screen that says “Dr. Nick’s One Simple Step.” You are so excited. Here it is, the one simple secret to achieving the body you’ve dreamed of! You click, and the screen slowly fades to reveal the step:
You’ve taken the one simple step to weight loss by joining Dr. Nick’s Magic Diet. Now we’ll get started on changing your diet, getting you into an exercise program, and looking at other habits you can change.
Wait a minute. You were promised one simple step, and now it turns out that there are really something like sixteen not-so-simple steps hiding behind the curtain. You’re angry. This program is a joke. How can you get your money back?
This example is fictional, but the general principle is surprisingly common in digital products. Designers aren’t always clear up front with users what they’re committing to by enrolling in a program or using a product. That means their users don’t have the opportunity to weigh the pros and cons of participating. Users can’t make an informed decision about whether they’re willing to put up with the drawbacks to gain the advantages of the product. And that means they’re less likely to stick with it.
Tell the Whole Truth
Behavior change is hard. Most people realize that. If a goal is important to them, they are often willing to put up with some hardship. As a designer, it is your job to be truthful about what that hardship might look like within the experience you’ve built. That gives users who aren’t willing to make those particular sacrifices the chance to walk away, while others who find the trade-offs reasonable will move forward.
As the designer, you may not always know what aspects of your behavior change design are positive or negative for a given user. Users will have different preferences and priorities. Some users might love the idea of going cold turkey on smoking cessation, while others prefer to use nicotine replacement therapy. Some may hate that a program has a social component, while others thrive on sharing their progress. When you describe what your behavior change program entails, keep it factual. Your users can decide for themselves whether the experience you describe is one they want to try.
Oftentimes, designers don’t so much lie about what their programs include as they fail to be fully explicit with the truth. Take the example of Sweatcoin. Sweatcoin is a physical activity program that counts outdoor steps and converts them into currency. That’s pretty much the language they use on their website to describe their program (see Figure 3.7).
After you start using Sweatcoin, you see how much currency you’ve earned that day right in the center of the home screen, and your balance at the bottom (see Figure 3.8).
FIGURE 3.7 Sweatcoin pays you in currency for the steps you take outside. Note they don’t tell you which currency they pay with.
FIGURE 3.8 The center of the screen shows how much currency you’ve earned, both today and to date.
What wasn’t apparent to me until the second or third day that I used Sweatcoin was that the currency
