Here is a rewritten version of the article:
The Power of Behavioral Design: A Guide to Influencing User Behavior
Behavioral design is a systematic approach to understanding how people make decisions, drawing on research from behavioral economics to human-computer interaction. By applying this knowledge, we can create more informed design decisions that guide users through our products and services, anticipating obstacles and influencing behavior in a positive way.
The Ethics of Influence
Before we dive into the nitty-gritty of behavioral design, it’s essential to consider the ethics of influencing user behavior. As designers, we have a responsibility to ensure that our designs are not manipulative or coercive. Nir Eyal’s Manipulation Matrix provides a simple guide to test whether our design strategies are facilitative or exploitative. We must ask ourselves: Does our product materially improve the user’s life? Do we, as designers, use the product ourselves?
Understanding Your Users
The first step in behavioral design is to understand your users. This involves gaining insight into their behaviors, motivations, and pain points. We can do this through user interviews, surveys, or analytics data. By understanding what jobs our users need to get done, we can design solutions that meet their needs.
Developing Job Stories
Job stories are a powerful tool for understanding user behavior. They involve writing out the struggles and unmet needs of our main user or beneficiary in a simple format: “When [situation], I want to [motivation], so I can [outcome].” This helps us focus on the user’s goals and motivations, rather than just their surface-level behaviors.
The Fogg Behavior Model
The Fogg Behavior Model provides a simple framework for understanding behavior. It involves three elements: motivation, ability, and prompts. By understanding what motivates our users, how easy it is for them to take action, and what prompts them to behave in certain ways, we can design solutions that influence behavior.
Strategies for Change
There are three strategies for changing user behavior: automating tasks, making or changing habits, and supporting conscious action. By understanding which strategy is most effective for our users, we can design solutions that meet their needs.
Choosing the Right Actions
Once we have developed our job stories and understood our users’ motivations and behaviors, we need to choose the right actions to support their goals. This involves generating a list of potential minimum viable actions, selecting the best actions based on job stories, and structuring the action in a way that is easy and intuitive for the user.
Tactics and Principles to Support Action
There are many tactics and principles we can use to support user action, including the aesthetic-usability effect, commitment, endowed progress, entry points, social proof, and peer comparisons. By using these tactics in a non-coercive way, we can design solutions that influence behavior in a positive way.
From Prototyping to Evaluation
Once we have designed our solution, we need to test it with users. This involves creating an impact assessment, pinpointing and analyzing obstacles, and refining our design based on user feedback.
Designing Responsibly
Finally, it’s essential to remember that we have a responsibility to design responsibly. We must balance the concerns of financial gain with the needs and wants of our users, and always keep the user’s genuine needs in mind when designing for behavior change.