Designing for Behavior Change — Behavioral Science and Product Development with Stephen Wendel from Morningstar
In most, if not all, the people’s behavior, there is a gap between what we want to do and what we end up doing. A gap between our intentions and our actions. We really desire something, have the motivation, and sincerely believe we will do it, and then we don’t. So, how can we close this intention-action gap both in our behavior and in our clients’? Stephen Wendel from Morningstar tells us how.
Most of us had at least several periods in our lives when we decided to start working out. And also at least a couple of times we didn’t manage to do so — for good reasons, of course. Some may have gotten further than others, but often we fall victim to the intention-action gap and lose the way to the gym.
The intention-action gap occurs everywhere, not only in our personal initiatives but also in our products, in the features we build. It occurs when we conduct tests where people enthusiastically tell us they will definitely use the new feature! And they don’t. So, why does this happen and what can be done?
There are three areas of behavioral science:
- The understanding of why this gap happens, how people decide and act
- Tools that potentially help people take action
- Rigorous testing and measuring the impact
In his book “Designing for Behavior Change”, Stephen describes how product people — product managers, designers, UX professionals, etc. — determine changes in user behavior.
Finding the Behavioral Truth
Our surroundings deeply influence our decisions and behaviors. For this reason, a technique tested in a controlled environment of the experimental setup might have surprisingly different results in a real-life situation. Therefore, we need to adapt our methods according to a particular audience in a specific case.
For writing his book as well as the accompanying notebook (which can be downloaded here for free), Stephen talked with teams from all over the world, from Walmart’s behavioral science team to the US Revenue Service, and identified a process that all of them use, in various but fundamentally similar forms.
DECIDE: A Blueprint for Applied Behavioral Science
When developing an entirely new product or just optimizing a feature, there are similar stages we should go through:
1. Define the problem — Hypothesis for behavior change
We should start by defining the problem, the audience, and the expected outcome. There are no general behavioral solutions, and our approach has to be user-centric — who are we serving?
We also need to identify the user’s motivation — what will they get out of this?
Back to our workout example: what would move this guy from his comfy living room couch to the treadmill?
In practice, let’s say we are developing an app to encourage exercise; we can use the following structure:
By helping [actor] [start/ stop] doing [describe action], we will cause [outcome].
Example: By helping sedentary white-collar workers to start going to the gym, we will cause them to have less joint pain (<50% incidences of PT & doctors’ visits).
2. Explore the context — A behavioral map of micro-behaviors
Next, we need to identify what stops this person from using our application, from starting to exercise?
Since this depends on the circumstance — let’s identify the micro behaviors. Where does someone start from, and what is the sequence of actions they must do to start exercising? What happens between sitting at home and going to the gym?
- First, one has to THINK about going to the gym.
- Then they have to get a gym membership.
- Afterward, they need to search for, download, and open our app.
- They have to get the necessary equipment.
- Also, they should free up their schedule, etc.
Only after mapping out the user’s actions, we can conclude that a simple initiative like going to the gym is a very complicated endeavor.
After we have the map, we can identify what is going on in each step. Why might our users NOT take action?
CREATE will help us remember which are the six main obstacles people face in taking action:
Cue enables people to think about the action, to grab their attention. Once this has happened, the emotional reaction comes to play — intuitive, not weighted and calculated. “No, I don’t want to work out. I have no time”. At this stage, regardless of the product’s value proposition, some users will be lost.
The next obstacle, evaluation, consists of a cost-benefit analysis, followed by ability — does the user have the means to act? Then timing — is this the right time, or do they procrastinate? And finally, experience — did the users have previous similar experiences? Were they good? Were they bad? The answers to these six points enable us to diagnose the problem.
3. Craft the intervention — A set of experimentally field-tested interventions
Once we have identified the problem which needs to be fixed, we have a set of various techniques to solve it. Let’s look at the cue, for example — how do we get their attention? The best approach is to align with people’s time and address them when they are available, rather than pushing for attention. When does our target group have the time and energy to listen?
Another way to enable reaction is to rely on the power of peer comparison or social proof: “People in your community work out for 3,5 hours a week — how much exercise do you get?”
4. Implement the solution — Ethical guidelines and techniques to remove self-deception
After crafting the intervention, it is time to implement it in our product. Users need to be prepared to take action with the product, and the latter will go through both a conceptual design (what will it do?) and interface design (how will it look like?).
Techniques at this stage, detailed in the already mentioned “Designing for Behavior Change Workbook,” include announcing and describing the product through an email as well as designing an ethical checklist meant to ensure transparency, freedom of choice for the users, and data security and privacy.
Ethics should be especially paid attention to, as tricking users — voluntarily or involuntarily — will do no good in the long run for neither of us. Thus we need to determine — are we helping our users, or are we just helping ourselves?
5. Determine the impact — Randomized Control Trials
After implementing the solution, it’s time to determine its impact: did we and our product reach our goal? Experiments are the best technique to be employed here.
To assess the impact, we need to answer some basic questions:
- What is being tested, and what is the outcome metric?
- What are the extreme outcomes — the baseline value, the Minimum Meaningful Effect (MME), and the Largest Viable Effect?
- How many people and groups can be included in the test?
6. Evaluate the next steps — Decision-making tools to avoid the obvious
This result evaluation phase and the previous testing phase build together an iterative process, meant to be repeated multiple times until the desired result is achieved. It helps us understand why our initiative, our product, or feature did not drive the behavior we intended and did not move our users from inaction to action. We need to identify how many users dropped off at which step of the conversion funnel.
Human behavior is complicated, and it’s hard to understand the people closest to us — our family, our friends. Understanding the user groups, we want our product to reach, and moving them to action is even harder. To succeed, we have to test, evaluate, learn from mistakes, improve, and repeat.
Watch the full version of Stephen’s talk for more insights and a great Q&A session.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel. And join the next Product People meetup for more inspiring stories from Product Managers from around the world!
