How To Change User Behaviour
Let’s assume your new design is novel and innovative. It’s based on real user needs and tests well. In other words — it’s the way forward.
Now let’s assume that the industry you are designing for has conditioned its users for many years to think and do things a certain way. For example, people still go into physical car dealerships instead of online. People still ring customer service instead of using online live chat.
How are you going to align people’s attitudes and behaviour with the new design?
Every designer’s enemy is ultimately the user’s comfortable and familiar “old way”. Having the right answer in the form of customer journey maps and service blueprints is not enough; additional psychological strategy is required to implement the vision.
First, the cold truth is if your design does not meet user needs, change is never going to happen. Second, most people are allergic to change; especially change asserted over them via some unseen designer. Lastly, designs that are not game-changing or not radically different from the user’s current norms will not need the principles outlined below in this post.
Good design does not change behaviour on its own in a vacuum. There are many psychological factors at play which determine the success of a new idea, product or service. Importantly, these factors can be influenced with the right plan. Marketing agencies and politicians have been playing with them for decades, but they are very relevant for UX and Service Design when we need to herd users to adopt designs that we believe are better for them.
The principles of behaviour change can be grouped into two related categories — Minority Principles and Majority Principles. Minority principles describe how the influence of a few can manipulate the many. Conversely, majority principles describe how the influence of many can manipulate the few.
It falls on the practitioner to skilfully work these principles into their design implementation strategy. I have steered clear of explicitly saying how to apply these principles because these should mean something different for every project. This is more of a list to make you aware of the effects available to you. Break the user out of their familiar ways and affect change!
Minority Principles
If you are looking to gain acceptance of your new designs, first concentrate on the minority of users who are enthusiasts, visionaries and early adopters.
Renormalisation
Story time: A man decides to become vegan and refuses to eat meat or dairy. His partner is not vegan and is able to eat both vegan and non-vegan meals. Getting tired of cooking both a vegan and non-vegan meal every night, his partner concedes to just cooking one big vegan meal every night and eventually becomes vegan themselves. The vegan couple are invited to dinner by another couple, but the other couple don’t want to cook a vegan and non-vegan meal so they just make one big vegan meal. They eventually concede and also decide to become a vegan couple out of convenience. The veganism continues to spread as more people bend the knee out of convenience and appeasement of the stubborn vegan minority.
This is the principle of renormalisation: an intransigent minority is able to gently spread their choices on a compliant or flexible majority until their way reaches a state of normalisation amongst the population.
Backed up with evidence from real populations, elections and simulated models (see Serge Galam) after a small minority reaches a certain level, this principle happens to any given population, as long as the minority is intransigent and the majority is able to concede (e.g. a meat eater is able to eat vegan food, but a vegan will not eat meat). As Nassim Taleb (from who I have borrowed this idea) puts it “the most intolerant wins”.
There are various ways this could be applied to implementing a new design. Users who find the new design or service better and refuse to go back to the old way are gold dust. These minority early adopters have the power to steer the choices of the majority. Why did you stop using Taxis for Uber? Personally, I was shown by someone who must have been an early adopter, and I’ve never looked back. With the right plan in place to have this minority influence the rest, your new design could see exponential uptake as people rapidly concede and adopt the new design.
Language and Thought
The language you use determines how you think about the world around you. If you could control how someone speaks, you would have serious influence on how they will think. George Orwell captured this in his book 1984, where The Party controlled citizens by imposing a dictionary of ‘Newspeak’.
The effects languages have on thought are measurable. In Russian, there is a semantic and categorical distinction between light blues (goluboy) and dark blues (siniy), which fall under the same “blue” umbrella for english speakers. Russians are faster at discriminating between these colours and brain responses show a burst of activity when Russians are shown a light blue gradually change to a dark blue. This shows the effect of language-specific terms on human perception.
Compounded with the renormalisation effect, the way early adopters talk about an idea or design will influence how the majority think about it. This is why innovations need to be spoken about carefully. If I talk about my new app as “the Uber for celebrities” or “the Tinder for gamers”, it’s going to evoke certain expectations that would be different if I had never associated them with Uber or Tinder.
Language sciences are a huge academic area, but for design the take home point is to be meticulous and selective in the language used to introduce it to the users. Imagine how you want people to think about the design (mental models) and then figure out how someone thinking that way would talk about it. Using the right words and terminology around a minority of early adopters influences how the majority think about it as the word of mouth spreads.
The Halo Effect
The halo effect is a cognitive bias that is often leveraged in marketing strategies. The premise is that our impressions of a person are accidentally extrapolated to judgments in their character. For example, if you think someone is beautiful, you tend to suspect they are also intelligent, even though intelligence has not been demonstrated. You might get the impression someone is nice, so you extrapolate that they are also smart.
This is a minority principle because this is often exploited by celebrities, online influencers and cult leaders to hold influence over a crowd. This principle absolutely overlaps with marketing strategy but still worth bearing in mind.
1000 true fans
This was coined by Kevin Kelly, editor at Wired. The idea is that to be a successful creator, you don’t need a strategy to grow millions of consumers, but instead you need to cultivate 1000 “true fans”.
A true fan is someone who will consume anything you produce. The word of mouth these fans is so sincere and genuine that the majority will start to gravitate towards your designs. The key to this is direct connection with the consumer, which can be hard for larger corporations to do.
Kevin Kelly outlines the strategy in his essay, which you can find here. Ultimately for design, this comes down to thinking about how you are going to really create that connection and enthusiasm in a few people.
Majority Principles
Here are the effects which you can use if your user groups are already established and you have the majority on your side.
Conformity
Psychologist Solomon Asch conducted classic studies on conformity in the 1950’s which were highly replicable and carried over age, gender and culture. The gist of the experiment is a participant sat among seven stooges who, unknown to the participant, knew the true nature of the experiment and were primed on what to say. They all stated aloud which line they perceived was the same length as the reference line. The actors either applied no pressure to conform by unanimously stating the obvious correct answer, or applied pressure by unanimously stating the incorrect answer. When there was no pressure, the rate of error from the participant was less than 1%. When there was pressure to conform, the participant error rate rose up to 37%, with 75% of participants conforming at least once to an obviously incorrect answer.
I am not insinuating that we do anything like this to users or stakeholders here. The point here is to illustrate how behaviour is not static and can be manipulated by a majority.
But this is still not good enough! This is just surface level conformity. The participant in this study still knows the answer is wrong in their minds, they just outwardly conform to comply with the pressure in a lab based experiment with little at stake. Ideally, we want the users to have true conviction in our design solutions. So how might we change their attitudes and behaviours on a deeper level?
Group Think
A deeper majority principle is groupthink, which allows ideas, attitudes and thoughts to spread through the user group quickly. It is the interlaced pattern of behaviours that allow groups to form, stay and grow (think of Apple superfans). To understand how the nuances of groupthink can be leveraged in design implementation, we need to deconstruct the mechanisms behind the more extreme and pronounced version — cult think.
Arthur J. Deikman was a psychiatrist specialising in popular mysticism who followed numerous cult movements throughout the 60’s and 70’s, with an interest in what made them so attractive to affluent and educated people. Cult behaviour is more narrowly defined as specific behaviours exhibited by all members of the group.
“The structure of cults is basically authoritarian: obedience and hierarchy tend to take precedence over truth and conscience when they conflict, which they often do. Unfortunately, certain psychological benefits can make authoritarian groups feel very attractive. They provide the opportunity to feel protected and cared for…
…What I wish to stress is that not every group is a cult, but that cult thinking is endemic to the human mind, and that these forces operate in the everyday life of each of us; they distort perception, bias thinking and inculcate belief.”
The Wrong Way Home — Arthur J. Deikman
The four key characteristics of cult think are: compliance with the group, dependence on a leader, devaluing the outsider and avoiding dissent. These characteristics are components of, what Diekman called, the dependency dream — the desire to regress to a childlike state; one in which the individual is cared for by a loving parental figure, so they can abdicate responsibility for their own well being.
Whilst it is easy for us to spot an extreme cult, the same effects occur in our everyday life; the signal is just much fainter. In other words, we are all in a cult to a certain extent. Naturally, any new and willing member of a group is gradually indoctrinated to the majority behaviour — whether that be in the family, in business or even on the world stage.
The take home point for implementing designs: use group think to normalise your design. Crowds are relatively easy to herd. The strategy will be highly dependent on the context and the skill of the practitioner, but think on how Apple designs its new propositions for its own herd, and how we all come to accept new technology eventually. For example, AI terrified us in the 90’s, but now we accept there are autonomous cars and personalised recommendation algorithms that know us better than we know ourselves.
Further Reading / Watching / References
Minority Principles
Renormalisation groups
Serge Galam — https://arxiv.org/pdf/0803.1800.pdf
Nassim Taleb — https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15
Language and thought
Lera Boroditsky — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKK7wGAYP6k
Thierry et al. 2009 — https://www.pnas.org/content/106/11/4567
Winawer et al. 2007 — http://lera.ucsd.edu/papers/pnas-2007.pdf
The Halo effect
Nisbett & Wilson 1977 — https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1979-23612-001
1000 True Fans
Essay by Kevin Kelly — https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/
Majority Principles
Conformity
Solomon Asch http://psyc604.stasson.org/Asch1956.pdf
Group Think
Arthur Diekman — https://www.deikman.com/wrong.html
