When users don’t do what you expected 🤔 How to understand and shape user behavior
Have you ever experienced this?
- You send a brilliant marketing email to your customers, but few open it, and barely any react to your messaging.
- You create a landing page for a product with great selling points and eye-catching graphics, but visitors just won’t convert to customers.
- You create the perfect onboarding flow, but users still abandon your product and never return.
As designers and product builders, we often have to come to terms with users not doing what we expected them to do. They don’t click buttons, they don’t order products, and they don’t open emails we send them. What do we do in these situations?
Of course, you need empathy and an understanding of the user’s situation and task at hand from the beginning, but I’ve found it helpful to also use a framework to ensure I’ve considered all the angles.
Enter the Fogg Behavior Model by BJ Fogg, founder of the Behavior Design Lab at Stanford University.
The model requires that three things must come together at the same time for a behavior to occur: Motivation, Ability, and a Trigger.
If a behavior does not occur, at least one of the three elements is missing or too weak.
Keep in mind that this applies to all human behavior, not just when users interact with digital products. I’ve even used these techniques with my three young kids (but please don’t tell them, I need all the secret techniques I can get).
Motivation
According to Fogg, our motivation level fluctuates over time. When our motivation is high, it gives us the temporary ability to do hard things. If you’ve ever had a deadline for a project, you know that nothing motivates like knowing it has to be done in two hours.
Fun fact: About 25% of Norwegians do their taxes on the day of the deadline.
We can still do easy things when our motivation level is low, but to accomplish hard things we need to be motivated. According to Fogg, there are three Core Motivators central to the human experience:
The first is Sensation. Simply put, we usually try to avoid Pain and seek Pleasure. If a behavior is likely to involve pain, our motivation to do that behavior will be low.
Example: Are you asking your users to fill in a form with 20 input fields? Many users will likely instead switch over to Facebook or Reddit to avoid facing the pain of completing your form.
The second core motivator is Anticipation. If users anticipate a reward when completing a behavior their motivation to do it will be higher.
Example: Products with lower prices usually convert better than those with higher prices because users anticipate getting a better deal and are therefore more motivated. If the price is too low, however, users might understandably anticipate a product with poor quality, and be less motivated to buy. Context matters.
The final core motivator is Belonging. Humans have an innate need to belong. If a behavior will lead to social acceptance within our group we are more likely to do it, and if it leads to social rejection we are less likely to.
Example: If everyone else is eating a frosty ice cream outside in the sunshine, suddenly it becomes much easier for you to join in — even if you’re on a diet.
Tip: Show new potential customers how existing customers are enjoying success with your product or service to serve as social proof and facilitate a feeling of belonging.
Can we increase motivation?
Fogg believes it unlikely that we can artificially boost our users’ motivation. Instead we can ask users to do behaviors that they are motivated enough to accomplish with the motivation level they have at that specific point in time.
Try to harness what Fogg calls a Motivation wave, where you build on accomplished smaller actions to achieve harder things.
Baby steps and tiny habits are key to accomplishing long term goals. If your dentist asks you to floss all your teeth every day, you might never get started. But if the dentist says “try flossing one tooth every Saturday”, soon enough, you might be flossing all of your teeth on a regular basis.
I don’t like running, but if tell myself “I’ll just run for 10 minutes” I usually end up running for much longer.
Tip: Try to break down what behavior you are asking of your customers, and rate them in terms of motivation level required. Could you move behaviors requiring less motivation earlier in the user experience?
Example: In our web order flows for electricity we’ve found it helpful to first ask the user for their phone number, instead of asking for meter numbers and other data that might require a lot of effort to find:
Ability
No matter how motivated, I can’t do advanced mathematical calculations or complete a triathlon. I simply lack the ability. So if you ask users to do too difficult things, they won’t.
Of course you could train users to improve their skills, but Fogg argues against this, saying that people are generally lazy and resist learning new things.
Since you’re reading this, consider that you may be an outlier that loves learning. Or, perhaps you are just more interested in this topic and therefore more likely to learn more about behavioral design than others. In the same way, segments of your user base have varying degrees of interest and ability to do what you ask of them.
The key thing to remember is that you should only ask users to perform actions that are simple for them to do. But what is simple?
Simplicity is limited by the resource users have the least of in that moment.
For example, if ordering a new phone online takes 20 minutes, but you only have 10 minutes, you lack the time, and therefore the ability to do that behavior. It does not matter how motivated you are to buy, you just can’t. It’s no longer simple.
Other simplicity factors to consider include money, physical and mental effort, and whether the behavior is a routine or not.
Triggers
Triggers (also called Prompts) are the final component required for behavior to occur. They can be external, like a calendar reminder that you have an upcoming meeting, or internal (“I’m hungry..let’s see what’s in the fridge”).
Fogg divides triggers into three types: Facilitator, Signal and Spark. You need to select the right type of trigger for your user’s context, which is the combination of current motivation and ability.
First, Facilitators are triggers that make a behavior really easy when you have high motivation but low ability. An example could be an email from Instagram with a “magic link” to log in directly without remembering your username and password.
Second, a Signal is for when you have both high motivation and ability, in which case you only need to remind the user to perform the action. A reminder to open a digital birthday card from a friend is both easy to do and you are also likely highly motivated to do it.
Finally, a Spark is used when you have high ability but low motivation. It simply attempts to increase your motivation. An example could be someone adding you as a friend on Snapchat. If you don’t immediately recognise the person in the notification, chances are high that you will open the app to investigate.
An effective trigger can lead people to perform more difficult or demanding behavior, too.
For example, this winter my son started downhill skiing after his friend asked him to join. This has led to our whole family getting skis, equipment, clothes, lessons, and season passes to the nearest ski slope. Not all at once, but as a series of small behaviors with their own triggers, motivations and ability.
Perhaps our local ski slope should try a “bring a friend”-day event to nudge people in the area who otherwise do not consider themselves skiers to the slopes to increase their future sales of season passes.
Look for triggers in your own products or services that can start a similar wave of behavior, and try to plan out what that behavior path would look like and how to best ensure each behavior will happen, using the framework of Motivation, Ability and Triggers.
Things to consider when users don’t do what you expect
Here’s a quick checklist of questions to consider the next time your e-mails aren’t opened, or your users just won’t click that shiny call to action-button:
- Are your users motivated? Why not? What are they actually motivated to do and can you help them start a motivational wave of behaviors?
- Do users have the ability to do what you ask of them? What are their scarcest resources? Can you improve your UX to ask less of your users?
- How are you triggering behavior? Are you using the right type of trigger for your user’s level of motivation and ability?
Learn more
I hope you’ve enjoyed this brief intro to Fogg’s work. Maybe you’ll start to see opportunities to understand and shape behavior both in your work and relationships.
To learn more about Fogg’s Behavior model, check out its website.
Thanks for reading, and please click the Clap-button if you’d like to see more posts like this in the future. It only takes a second, and I promise you’ll be my favorite reader today :)
(Bonus excercise: Analyze how I used this framework to make you to click the clap-button in the previous paragraph — can you spot all the elements I used?)
