Identifying User Motivation and Creating Systemic Behavioural Segmentation
Did the title scare you into thinking what mumbo jumbo is this…?! :)
Let’s get started with some basics of Behavioural Design.
If you want to shape a user’s behaviour for a product or service, then behavioural change design works in two ways:-
- Product that contains a step-by-step processes that outline the way to behaviour change.
Eg: 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 multiple steps around setting a quit date.
2. The digital product itself engaging by aligning it with people’s motivational needs. It is this second level of behaviour change design that can be applied to standard non-behaviour change products like us.
Motivation can be defined as desire with velocity.
The way most of us use the word in our daily lives isn’t quite right; people might say something like “I’m motivated to be rich,” but they aren’t really. They want to be rich.
That’s just desire with no velocity (end of my Ted Talk 😛).
So, if you boast that your company is taking regular customer feedback and are building products based on what you hear from our users- Sorry to break your bubble, you are just collecting user desires/pains and know nothing about their actual Intended Actions. These users might never act on their desires/pains even if you create a product they told they wanted.
That’s the reason why Systematic User Research is significant to understand how to identify users who show both desire and has velocity.
“So how did we apply motivational theories to create actionable User Behavioural Personas?”
We outlined our User Personas by amalgamating varied UX methods and psychological frameworks to build a holistic behavioural data base. Below is one of the frameworks we used to build our Qualitative User Personas.
🌸 Mostly Public transport commuters exhibit Amotivation as they have become used to the setting of taking bus/metro/local train everyday.
The pains of crowd, heat and physical pain has become part of their daily lives as the fare they pay is justified according to them. They have grown comfortable to their pains. These users are the least motivated to change and it’s hard for them to come out of the learned helplessness stage.
🌸 Users who are always seeking some sort of tangible rewards, incentives are the people who constantly needs push from Rapido to continue using us. The minute the push (Eg: Discounts, coupons, coins etc) is gone, their motivation drops down to zero. They need External motivation to survive.
Similar behaviour can also be seen amongst Low performing captains, who uses Rapido as a stop-gap solution to earn more money whenever life hits them with a financial crisis.
🌸 Captains who enter into the system because of financial crunch but continue to remain in the system post the financial crunch as means of personal motivation apart from money/incentives fall into the Introjected Motivation category. They are motivated to use Rapido as it can border on improving their pride, increased self-esteem and more mental ease.
🌸 Customers and Captains who have no issues with the Platform mainly because they feel this action of using Rapido is not a means to end for them. They are more focussed about the larger goals. These are users who show Identified Motivation.
The customers who show this kind of motivational patterns aren’t focussed about daily commute or a driving job because their bigger motivation to use the platform is social-touch driven such as social conformity, sense of group belonging and higher social capital.
🌸 Customers & Captains who wants to use Rapido as it supports their personal identity or their commute values exhibit Integrated Motivation. These users need no external incentivization or discounts to continue using the platform.
The commuters who uses commute option based on personal values like eco-friendliness, classy, looking cool, comfort/luxury fit. Similarly users whose personal value is attached with the concept of time, where they are ready to take any effort to reach/go faster as “being on time” is a part of their personal identity.
In Captains, these are users who use Rapido as part time to meet interesting people, have meaningful conversations and wants to serve the community how much ever they can.
🌸 Finally on the list, nobody has Intrinsic Motivation to use Rapido. Well, we are a utility app and not a lifestyle app (yet!!!).
Thus we categorised these motivational aspects of user behaviour that exhibits velocity to act in a certain way despite what they think/feel. From which, we were able to create behavioural segmentation of our User Personas.
These are not your regular ChatGpt derived Personas but a more grounded approach on understanding the roots of our people for whom we are creating amazing products 😄
