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 of behavior in a way that’s easy to apply to product design.2 I describe it in more detail in the section called “All About Motivation.”
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
