Using design to influence behavioural change

What matters in behavioural change?

When it comes to tracking how well people are receiving or buying into your products, we often fall into the trap of using superficial metrics like page views, likes, comments and the others when in fact, what we should be measuring, is how well our audience understood our message and what we’re trying to sell, was it easy for them to comprehend, did they even comprehend it at all or did it leave them with more questions? Did it trigger anything in them that would make them want or desire it enough to take action? These are the real impacts you have to track and optimise for in the long run. At the end of the day, all other things are strongly superficial.

It takes more than 21 days to form a habit

When it comes to forming habits that last for a long time, behavioural scientist and CXL institute class tutor Brain Cugelmen Made a very astute observation that actually made me laugh out loud. You know how most self help gurus usually say it takes 21 days to form a habit, like if you want to get used to working out, do it for 21 days, if you want to become a reader, then read for 21 days straight and just like that your mind and body will somehow get used to reading and voila…. You’re a reader. That might not be so true and I’m very much inclined to agree with him. Think about all the times you’ve done a thing for 21 days or even more, is it now a habit for you? *insert cricket noise* Yup! It’s not. It didn’t work because it takes longer (close to two to three months for people to form habits and even then, there’s no guarantee that they’ll stick. So impacting behaviour is a lot tougher and if your product gets too difficult to use or even understand, it’ll be even more tough to get your audience to get used to using it repeatedly.

So if you’re looking to do a 5 seconds flash test of how your website is perceived, here are a few questions you can ask and some guidelines you should follow.

Comprehension: what is your website or product about? Help people have a mental model of what you’re doing. People must be able to figure it out. When people understand what you’re about, they’re informed enough to make decisions.

Desiring: fire up your audience passions and motivate them enough. Here, you want to use languages, images and words that trigger emotions enough to get people to not just understand, but feel what you’re about.

Trust: happens before action is taken, trust does not drive behaviour, distrusts stops behaviour always address trust so you don’t block people from taking action.

Acting: when someone starts doing their first short term action towards the outcome goal

Maintenance: when someone keeps doing that for a long time, they keep coming back and they have a sense of loyalty, that they owe you one so they keep taking action.

Emotional motivators:

emotion is a series of physiological responses to a perceived threat or opportunity, they fire us up to act or not act on a situation. Certain emotions can impact on our behaviour and certain emotions are better suited for certain times of behaviour. So you need to understand what emotion to trigger if you want to drive a type of behaviour.

How to use the Cugelman emotion map for emotional design strategies:

There are four emotional quadrants, insecure, optimistic, secure, pessimistic

Behavioural media:

We can design software when we want people to complete processes. We let them know what’s happening before, during, and after stages. So you might say to someone you’re starting, you’ve started, you’re progressing, you’re stopping, and you’ve stopped. So we let people know states and we take these metaphors of movement through processes as literal movement through physical places because what is movement through a process, right? Process is just an abstraction that we use for spatial metaphors as well.You don’t physically go around from stage one to stage two. You’re in it sort of figuratively as something that we conceptualize as humans from our knowledge of spatial relations. In the stage where someone’s in the process,you might say next, or forward, or whatever the term island you might say previous and backwards.

So what my rule is that when I use the microcopyfor movement through systems is do not deviate from it. Pick standard terms whether you’re on the page, in the page, it doesn’t matter. But use it consistently and take people through. So why is this space is time metaphor important for interactive design and conversion design? It’s very simple. If you look at a lot of what the really good behavioral science research is, it’s actually not about motivation and things that get people to take action. Huge amounts of studies are just about barrier reduction and once someone’s onboard, we have to design processes that are clear. We want people to fly through processes. And so the space is time metaphor will help you to think through how you communicate to your audience, where they are in processes so that they never feel lost and they always easily move from one part of a process to the next.

Digital product places: Whatever you do in design, think of the places that you’ve in your digital environment, your website, the cloud and think of them as metaphorical physical places people could go to and interact physically, every little space, your landing page, shop and about us, all of these are build from the knowledge of our physical spaces and how they should function. And so if you design your online store in a way that people cannot easily navigate around if it was a physical space, then you’ll have a problem.

We under-promise, and we over-deliver,and we make sure there’s something of value that people get at the end.We’re building long-term relationships.

Behavioural UI: some UI elements that are strongly related to some psychological applications/impacts.

Communication is a two way message and at the end of the day, that communication depends on the source, messaging and how well your audience responds to your messaging or media they go through.

Digital relations with your audience are mediated, they don’t interact with us directly so our apps, website and digital products are mediated persona’s and people often ascribe human-like behaviour to our brands so you must have a consistent look and feel as a brand.

Often, defining your brand personality comes naturally based on your product or what you’re offering. So how do we define a brand’s personality? Use editorial guidelines to find your brand voice and tone, how you communicate the people behind it and the and so developing a killer brand personality takes intentionality.

Behavioural description:

This is our ability to understand things are largely based on our past understanding and the concepts that we develop.What we often want to do when we design anything to try and get people to take actions help them have some concept of you know, what it is we’re asking them for.

So the last thing you want to do in trying to get people to change their behavior,there is like an all eye component. But often the things that were the calculus of our judgements are often founded on emotions at a certain level.What it often means at least sort of what I interpret now to mean to persuade through the intellect is to influence someone through how they conceptualize the world.