Designing for Behavior Change: Applying Psychology and Behavioral Economics (2013)

Part I. Understanding the Mind and Behavior Change

Chapter 2. Why We Take Certain Actions and Not Others

I’m sitting at my computer, and I just decided to drink some orange juice. You’re sitting somewhere reading this book, and probably didn’t. Our basic cognitive machinery is the same. So why do we do different things?

Our actions depend on our environment (I have a big, tempting bottle of orange juice in front of me, and you probably don’t), our needs and desires (I’m thirsty), our prior experiences (I generally like orange juice), and many other factors. But there’s no magic formula that says if you do A, B, and C, people will take the action you want them to take, even when they want to take the action themselves. We’re all unique individuals embedded in uniquely different environments, and our decision-making processes are complex, messy, and full of surprises.

Despite the messiness of our decision-making process, there’s an odd sort of logic to how we decide to take one action instead of another. That logic can’t tell us how to force someone to take a different behavior, but it can help us set up the right conditions for action, if the person chooses to do so. Designing for behavior change requires embracing the quirky ways in which our minds work, and how we interact with our environment, to better understand how products can help us change our behavior.

In Chapter 1, we asked how the mind decides what do to next. In this chapter, we’ll turn that question around, and ask: specifically, what can our products do to help users take a particular action? What’s different about the actions that we do decide to take versus those that we don’t? Let’s start with a high-level view of what it takes for a particular action to go from a mere possibility to something that we actually do.

A Simple Model of When, and Why, We Act

From moment to moment, why do we undertake one action and not another? There are five preconditions for action that must occur, at the same time, before someone will act. Behavior change products encourage action by influencing one or more of these preconditions: cue, reaction, evaluation, ability, and timing.

To illustrate the five preconditions to action, let’s say you’re sitting on the couch, watching TV. There’s an app on your phone you downloaded last week that helps you plan and prepare healthy meals for your family. When, and why, would you suddenly get up, find your mobile phone, and start using the app?

It’s an odd question, I know. We don’t often think about user behavior in this way—we usually assume that somehow our users find us, love what we’re doing, and come back whenever they want to. But researchers have learned that there’s more to it than that, based on how the mind makes decisions. So, imagine you’re watching TV. What needs to happen for you to use the meal planning app right now?

1. Cue. The possibility of using the app needs to somehow cross your mind. Something needs to cue you to think about it: maybe you’re hungry or you see a commercial about healthy food on TV.

2. Reaction. Second, you’ll intuitively react to the idea of using the app in a fraction of a second. Is using the app interesting? Was it a good experience last time you used it? What other options come to mind, and how do I feel about them?

3. Evaluation. Third, you might briefly think about it consciously, evaluating the costs and benefits. What will you get out of it? What value does the app provide to you? Is it worth the effort of getting up and working through some meal plans?

4. Ability. Fourth, you’ll check whether actually using the app now is feasible. Do you know where your mobile phone is? Do you have your username and password for the app? If not, you’ll need to solve those logistical problems first, and then use the app.

5. Timing. Fifth, you’d gauge when you should take the action. Is it worth doing now, or after the TV show is over? Is it urgent? Is there a better time? This may occur before or after checking for the ability to act. Both have to happen though.

If all five of these check out, then you actually execute the action.

These five mental processes—detecting a cue, reacting to it, evaluating it, checking for ability, and deciding on the right timing—are the preconditions to action. You can think of them as “tests” that any action must pass: all must complete successfully in order for you to consciously, intentionally, engage in the action. And, they all have to come together at the same time.^[36^] For example, if you don’t have the urgency to stop watching TV and act now, you certainly could do it later. But when “later” comes, you’ll still need these five factors. You’ll reassess whether the action is urgent at that point (or whether something else, like walking the dog, takes precedence). Or maybe the cue to act will be gone and you’ll forget about the app altogether for a while.

So, products that encourage us to take a particular action have to somehow cue us to think about the action, avoid negative intuitive reactions to it, convince our conscious minds that there’s value in the action, convince us to do it now, and ensure that we can actually take the action. That’s a lot to do! Much of this book talks about how to organize, simplify, and structure that process (and then test whether you’ve got it right).

For habitual actions, the process is mercifully shorter. The first two steps (cue and reaction) are the most important ones, and, of course, the action still needs to be feasible. Evaluation and timing can play a role, but a lesser one, because the conscious mind is on autopilot. I’ll talk a lot more about habits later.

WHY WE NEED A NEW MODEL OF BEHAVIOR CHANGE

Researchers and philosophers have studied why we take the actions we do for centuries (millennia, even). A large portion of the contemporary research on behavior change focuses on what goes on inside of people’s heads as they consciously decide to act. For example, two of the most prominent models are:^[37^]

Ajzen’s Theory of Planned Behavior

Focuses on how our intentions to act are formed as a product of attitudes, norms, and perceived control over the behavior ([ref1]).

Prochaska and Velicer’s Transtheoretical Model

Looks at the stages of change that a person goes through from starting to contemplate an action to changing the behavior and maintaining it ([ref150]).

These authors, and many others, provide valuable insights that can inspire and inform work in behavior change. Personally, though, I haven’t found this literature to be practical for the daily tasks of building products. It doesn’t tell us what, specifically, our products can do to support action and what barriers our products should help people overcome.

[ref68] is one of the few exceptions. His model looks at three factors that are required for intentional action: motivation (pleasure/pain, hope/fear, acceptance/rejection), ability (how easy or hard a behavior is to do), and a trigger (a cue to act now). Over the last decade, BJ Fogg has led the way in practical applications to software products with his Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford.

I build upon BJ Fogg’s model, along with other models in the field, but have a somewhat different focus. Here are some of the reasons why:

§ Much of our daily behavior isn’t intentional. When designing products, we need to consider how habitual and other intuitive behaviors occur.

§ Behavioral economics and psychology have much to teach us that isn’t in current models. I draw upon the tremendous explosion of recent work in these fields: from how our intuitive system works, to how it interacts with our conscious minds, to how ideas bubble up to our awareness in the first place.

§ The role of urgency (or when to take the action) is rarely discussed in existing models. For example, using Fogg’s Behavior Model: I have motivation, ability, and numerous triggers to do my taxes at any point in the year. But I’m sure not going to do them well in advance of April 15! Before April, taxes lack urgency.^[38^]

My goal is to show how products, specifically, can set up the preconditions for action. This chapter starts that process, by outlining what those five preconditions are.

Let’s go into more detail about the five preconditions for conscious action.

Cue

At every moment of every day, we’re deciding what to do next. But the universe of things we might do with our time is truly infinite. Our minds can’t handle that much information, and they protect us from being overloaded by using a set of mental filters. For example, inattentional blindnessmeans we simply don’t see things we aren’t looking for when we’re concentrating heavily. That’s what happened in Chabris and Simons’s famous studies (2009) where half of the people watching a basketball game failed to see a guy in a gorilla outfit walking across the screen! Our mental filters, out of necessity, only let us consider a fraction of what’s possible.

Thinking about an action arises in two ways:^[39^]

External cues

Something in our environment can trigger us (like an email or text message) to think about it. It could be a pair of running shoes that makes us think of running, or something more overt, like a friend calling us on the phone and asking us why we aren’t out running in the park with them.

Internal cues

Our minds can drift into thinking about the action on its own, through some unknown web of associated ideas (which may themselves have been cued externally, or by an internal state like hunger).^[40^]

Sometimes, cues can capture our attention no matter what—like a car that’s about to hit us. Other times, we are explicitly looking for cues to act—like scanning over subject lines in our inbox or looking for notifications on our mobile phones. It’s even possible that we honestly have no idea why an action bubbles up in our minds.

LESSONS FOR BEHAVIORAL PRODUCTS

When users are just starting to undertake a new action, external cues are vital. For example, if you’re beginning to run each morning, placing your running shoes by the door is a good cue. Here are a few strategies products can use for external cueing:

§ Placing the product in the user’s daily environment

§ Using a slightly different cue each time to avoid being ignored

§ Building strong associations with parts of a person’s existing routines

As the action becomes more familiar, products can help users build strong associations between an internal cue—like hunger or boredom—and the action ([ref59]).

When designing for behavior change, you should also avoid, or co-opt, distracting cues that seek the users’ attention at the same time. Email inboxes are very crowded in the morning with lots of cues to act, for example.

Reaction

Once the mind starts thinking about a potential action, there is an automatic reaction from “System 1”—the lightning fast, intuitive, and largely nonconscious part of the brain discussed in Chapter 1, Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011) and Gladwell’s Blink(Back Bay Books, 2005). In some cases, it is startling and powerful, like the desire to run the heck out of a building when you smell gas. In more common situations—like removing our running shoes or using an app—the automatic reactions are less jarring but still guide our behavior. Our conscious minds don’t really have insight into what goes on within our automatic response system (nor do researchers fully understand it). Social norms, prior experiences, our mood—all of these things shape our intuitive processing. For our purposes, a few important outputs come from that automatic response:

A verdict or “gut feeling” about the action

Is this action relevant now? Will it be enjoyable? Is it dangerous? Recall from Chapter 1 that these intuitive feelings are strongly based on our prior experiences. If we’re thinking about taking 10 flights of stairs, the last time we took the stairs and almost had a heart attack will color how we feel about doing it again (and this can occur before we consciously think about whether or not to act).

Other possible actions and ideas

Our minds are built on associations. So, when we start thinking about one action, we also activate memories and thoughts about other related concepts. If we’re thinking of a particular need (like hunger), then our minds will search for other possible answers to the need, and evaluate them as well. For example, if I’m looking at the stairs, my mind will automatically, and without my control, also activate thoughts about using the elevator or escalator.^[41^]

Action

In the case of habitual behaviors, the reaction might automatically initiate the action, based on the cue. Let’s say I take the elevator every day. Once I walk in the building, I may go to the elevator and press the button without conscious thought.

The gut feeling we get doesn’t necessarily determine our behavior. Our conscious minds can override (or ignore) what our intuitive system tells us—but it will feel wrong. And it’s hard to sustain a change in behavior if it intuitively feels wrong.

LESSONS FOR BEHAVIORAL PRODUCTS

Users evaluate your product, and the action it supports, in the blink of an eye. As we discussed in Chapter 1, you can’t avoid this, and it happens automatically. But from a behavior change perspective, there are particular aspects of this automatic assessment you should be paying attention to:

Trust.

Your product is encouraging your users to do something. Even when they want to take the action, they will be hesitant if they don’t trust the company behind that encouragement. Whether or not a user trusts the product, and company, is often an intuitive sense.

Watch where you get your product signal.

If you ask people what they want to do, or whether they have the motivation to use your app, you’re engaging their conscious minds. But it’s their intuitive minds you have to pass first, and that isn’t something people articulate on surveys. Ideally, watch their behavior, and don’t listen to their mouths.

The first-time user experience really matters.

You may be able to convince or entice someone to try out your product and action the first time. But the more your action requires repeated use, the more that you rely on intuitive reactions. And those reactions build on what they’ve actually experienced, the associations they’ve made, and the emotions they felt about your product and action.

Evaluation

After the mind is cued to think about a particular action, and assuming it hasn’t been derailed by its intuitive reaction, then the action may rise to conscious awareness. This happens especially when we’re facing novel situations, and we don’t have an automatic behavior to trigger. The conscious mind kicks in and evaluates whether the person should take the action, given the various costs and benefits.

This stage is the one that we tend to think about first, when we’re trying to change behavior. We try to educate people about the benefits of the action, increase their motivation with money or other rewards, and reduce the (perceived) cost of taking the action.

For example, again consider people who have the choice of taking the stairs to go up a few flights or taking the elevator. Let’s say that their conscious mind is engaged. The common approach to encouraging people to take the stairs would be to focus on:

Highlighting benefits

Taking the stairs will get you in shape, and may lengthen your life.

Minimizing costs

Taking the stairs will only cost you three more minutes, and if you go slowly, you won’t sweat like a pig.

Downplaying alternatives

The elevator is slow and crowded at this time of day.

There is, of course, tremendous complexity behind the deliberations we make over whether to act. How much do we really know about the costs and benefits of the action? Where did we get that information, and do we trust it? Is it worth the effort to seek out more information, or should we simply use what we have? What motivations weigh upon us most strongly at the moment we’re deciding?

These are vital questions. For now, though, let’s leave it at this: if we deem the action worth the effort, and better than the alternatives, then we’re in business. The choice to act has been made.

Note, the “thinking” that occurs here may be extremely limited and rapid. If the action isn’t very important, or is very familiar, then the conscious mind may decide to go ahead without much effort. It’s when the action is unfamiliar, or the mind decides to pay a lot of attention, that more intensive thinking occurs.

A product that promotes an important action that users “should” take (and some part of them wants to take) isn’t enough. The product must give users something they actually want, right now, more than the alternatives. Like any product, a behavior changing product must solve a problem for its users. Otherwise, the rest of this discussion won’t help. If the conscious mind doesn’t see value that’s worth the effort, then it won’t intentionally use the product and won’t take the action. That value needn’t be purely instrumental—it can be something social, emotional, or an intrinsic enjoyment of the activity (we’ll talk more about types of motivation later)—but it needs to be there.

Remember, for habitual behaviors, this conscious awareness and evaluation usually doesn’t occur at all. But our conscious minds are happy to make up stories about why we do habitual things. Those stories are just noise, and aren’t real reflections of our actions.^[42^]

LESSONS FOR BEHAVIORAL PRODUCTS

The conscious evaluation phase is what most people who are designing products naturally target—making the benefits of the application clear, and removing frustrations and frictions (costs). It’s all about the conscious, quantifiable value that the product provides.

The trick when designing for behavior change is to remember that the value that matters most is the value that the user ascribes to the product and action, and not the value that you ascribe to it. If your company and your product see taking the stairs instead of the elevator as the start to massive changes in long-term health (i.e., huge benefits), and the user doesn’t see it that way, you’re misaligned.

Ability

Let’s say the choice to act has been made, after weighing the costs and benefits. Is it actually feasible to undertake the action? If you’ve decided to finally put aside some money for your retirement, can you actually do it, right now? The individual must be able to immediately take the action; the ability to act has four dimensions:^[43^]

Action plan

The person must know what steps are required to take the action. For example, he must know that setting up a retirement account requires going to a particular website, entering information provided by his employer, and so on.

Resources

The person must actually have the resources required to act. For example, the person must have money available and access to a computer to go to the retirement website and set up an account.

Skills

The person must have the necessary skills to act. For example, in order to sign up for a retirement account online, he must know how to use a computer and navigate its (too often impenetrable) user interface.

Belief in success

No one wants to feel like a failure. The person needs to feel reasonably sure that he can be successful at the action, and not end up looking like an idiot. That’s known as a feeling of self-efficacy.

If the person doesn’t have a clear action plan, doesn’t have the necessary resources for immediate action, or is hesitant because the action is daunting, those challenges are surmountable. But that means delay. It means that the person isn’t taking the action right now. And that, from the perspective of behavior change, is a partial failure.

After those problems are resolved, the person could take the action later. If the other preconditions for action are in place now, it’s likely they will also be in place when the person has the ability to act. But the situation may change—other distractions could arise, the cost of action may go up, and so on.

LESSONS FOR BEHAVIORAL PRODUCTS

This step poses four possible barriers to action, which a good product must avoid. Products can readily help users by providing a clear action plan; specific plans grease the pathway to action. They can address self-doubt and anxiety about failure head-on as well by talking about other users that were successful, for example. Resources and skills are trickier. With good user research, you can identify the resource constraints that particular user groups face and their current skills. You can then either accept that some users won’t be served well by the product or plan around them.

Timing

You have their attention, and the action is appealing and feasible. But when should you take the action? Why not do it a bit later? (And why not later, and later…) That’s a major problem with many “beneficial” actions we want to take, like exercising, getting control of our finances, or planting a garden. We can always do them later. Even if we want to take the action, if our minds feel that there is something that’s likewise desirable, but more urgent, we’re out of luck. We could take the action later. However, as we saw with ability barriers, if there isn’t a decision that now is the right time to act, there’s a problem. By the point the person does feel the timing is right, circumstances may have changed, and the person won’t take the action for other reasons.

The decision of when to take action (i.e., its timing), can be driven both by a sense of clear and present urgency, and by other, less forceful but still important factors. Urgency can come from a variety of sources ([ref19]):

External urgency

In the United States, we really do need to put in our taxes (or file for an extension) by April 15. Otherwise, the IRS comes after us. That’s a true, external urgency that results in something bad if we delay.

Internal urgency

Very rarely, changes in behavior are urgent because we have a biological need that we can’t ignore (hunger, thirst, etc.). However, these needs just don’t apply to most actions and products. Negative mental states like boredom may provide a lesser, but still potent, urgency to act.

Similarly, we can decide that now is the right time to act (even when it doesn’t feel strictly urgent) for a variety of reasons:

Specificity

Think about these two statements: “I should save for retirement” versus “I should set up a retirement account on Thursday night, at 8 p.m., right after dinner.” The latter one feels more real, right? Simply by putting a specific time on an action, that can settle the issue of “when” to act. It also helps us remember to act then, too!

Consistency

Another way to help us decide when to act (and to follow through on it) is to pre-commit to a specific time in the future, especially if we tell others about our commitment. That moves the action from the domain of something that we might do sometime, to an issue of personal consistency with our word. Our desire to be consistent with our prior statements means that the right time to act is exactly when we said we’d act.

The decision to act at a particular time also arises, in part, from our motivation (emotional and deliberative) to take the action. An action that’s really exciting and promises to be enjoyable also can feel more urgent, and prompt someone to decide to act now rather than later. I’ve distinguished between the two concepts to analyze and address them separately, but in reality there can be a significant blurring between them when the action is highly motivating.

LESSONS FOR BEHAVIORAL PRODUCTS

You can think about the timing of action in terms of two factors: what the product actively does to make the timing ripe for action, and what it does to align with the times when a person is naturally inclined to take action. To make action urgent, products can use time-sensitive content like news, which is inherently timely (if you care about the content at all). NPR provides this, and so does Facebook (the latest news about your friends). Products can also construct urgency—by creating pre-commitments or using specific dates for planned action.

Instead of making something urgent, products can wisely align themselves with events in a user’s life that already provide that urgency. The user may need to take a similar action as part of her work, for example, and the product can hook into and build on that opportunity. This is similar to the ancient Greek concept of “Kairos” or the opportune time—it’s the product’s job to be there when the opportune time for action arises.^[44^]

Products can use internal states like boredom to drive action, but those internal states are a double-edged sword. On one side, they can drive the particular target action, if the person thinks that the product will relieve the negative feeling. On the other side, they could drive a different action that also relieves boredom. Which do you think is more likely—your users surfing the Internet to relieve boredom, or playing with a mobile phone application that helps them plan healthy meals?

The Create Action Funnel

These five mental events—a cue, which starts an automatic, intuitive reaction, potentially bubbling up into a conscious evaluation of costs and benefits, the ability to act, and the right timing for action—are prerequisites for people to execute the action. You may have noticed that they also form an acronym: CREATE. That’s because these five elements are what we need to create action.^[45^]

Let’s say you have 100 people, all of whom are trying to better organize their email and respond to messages in a more timely manner (remember, not all behavior change is sexy!). All of them have set to-do reminders to go through their old messages and delete or respond to them—on the path to a zero-message inbox. Most of the people will see the reminder, but some of them will quickly and intuitively close it, because they don’t want to deal with that annoying task. A subset will think about it for a second, and decide that cleaning up their inbox really is worthwhile (the rest decide it’s not worth it).

Among those who do decide to clean up their inbox, a few will realize they don’t have enough mental energy and time to do it now, and will postpone. Others will decide that it’s important to do, but it can wait because there are more pressing matters; they, too, postpone. In the end, only a handful of the original 100 people actually respond to the cue, and follow all the way through to action.

Another way of thinking about this process is as a leaky funnel: a group of people start the process, and some leak out at each step, leaving only a few of them who make it all the way. The funnel metaphor is a common one for salespeople, marketers, and product folks focused on converting potential clients into actual clients on their website.

Figure 2-1 shows what the Create Action Funnel looks like.

Figure 2-1. The Create Action Funnel—the five stages that a potential action has to pass in order to be undertaken. People drop out at every step of the way!

Each section of the funnel has two leaky holes in it. On one side, people can reject the action (or the cue) because it’s not valuable or urgent enough. On the other side, they can be distracted into doing something else—either because they think of something else to do with the same effect (like surfing the Internet to relieve boredom instead of using a meal planning app) or because they are pulled into something completely different (like answering the phone).

For habitual actions, the basic funnel is the same, but there is very little drop-off in the conscious evaluation of the action (unless the person is intentionally trying to be aware of her habitual actions and stop them), and in the urgency stage.

Each Stage Is Relative

An important thing to remember about the funnel is that at each stage, the person only continues on if the action is more effective or better than the alternatives. There are always alternatives, including other cues that seek to grab us, other actions we’re intuitively and consciously assessing, or other priorities that could be urgent.^[46^]

From a product design perspective, that means you should consider not only how well the product guides the user through these stages, but what else is competing for the individual’s scarce time and mental resources. Removing distractions is a key part of structuring the individual’s environment (as discussed in Chapter 7).

A GUIDE FOR DEBUGGING BEHAVIOR

One way to think about the Create Action Funnel is as a guide for debugging.

People are too complex (and our knowledge of behavior is too limited) to build a perfect application that helps every user change behavior every time. Instead, we need good tools to help us put the right pieces in place, then figure out where problems are after we’ve built the first version of the product. These tools—the tools of debugging—are what allow software developers to create applications that are solid and reliable.

The chapters of this book that cover how to design the application (Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11) help companies take their first best shot. The Create Action Funnel will help them debug their product’s behavioral impact afterward (Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14). It will tell us where to gather feedback when we test the product in the field.

It also means thinking about what the user is currently doing with respect to the action. Let’s say the product seeks to promote dieting in order to lose weight. What is the person currently doing? Avoiding any thought about dieting? Trying something and failing? Asking friends for advice, but never acting? Whatever the user is currently doing, that’s the main behavioral competition for the product. One shouldn’t assume that products interact with a user who’s a blank slate. Rather, the product needs to beat an existing behavior, and do so at each stage of the Create Action Funnel. Each stage is relative to the alternatives.

Each Stage Is Personal

Whether or not a particular action passes a stage of the action funnel depends on the person, and on the particular situation. The decisions are, ultimately, very personal. One person may intuitively love the idea of walking to work—because it makes him think about showing off his calves. Another person, in equally good shape, may intuitively hate it—because she associates walking to work with poverty, and not having the money to afford to drive.

This serves as a reminder that there simply aren’t any universal prescriptions on how to change behavior. The action funnel is a guide, to show where people are dropping off. It doesn’t provide a ready-made solution to prevent that drop-off. That requires additional work and analysis.

The Stages Can Interact with One Another

I’ve presented a nice, neat model with five stages of processing. At a high level, that’s correct. The details are much more complex, however. One issue we haven’t talked about much is how these different processes interact with one another.

While all five stages must occur at some level for conscious actions, weakness in one area can be counterbalanced by strength in another area. For example, things that are really easy to do (like grabbing a bottle of olive oil out of the cabinet instead of an unhealthy hydrogenated oil blend) don’t need to have significant conscious benefits (it might make you a little healthier) or positive intuitive feeling. This is one of the lessons that BJ Fogg incorporates in his Behavior Model (2009a)—in economic terms, the factors are partial substitutes for one another.

In terms of the ordering, the funnel is a useful way to remember the activities the mind performs, but it isn’t a perfect representation of sequence of processes. The first two steps generally come before conscious awareness, as shown, but sometime intuitive reactions can occur after (or as part of) conscious deliberation.^[47^] For the next three, there’s some evidence that the evaluation of an idea (e.g., value, timing, and ability) is pursued simultaneously by different parts of the mind ([ref23]), and there can be some interaction between them. These complexities don’t affect the central lesson though: intentional actions need to pass all five stages, and there is often a significant drop-off at each step.

MORE EFFORT WON’T BUY YOU MUCH

One of the many lessons that BJ Fogg built into his Behavior Model is that making the action easier or making the user more motivated won’t buy you as much as you might think. Remember that his model has three factors: motivation, ability, and trigger ([ref68]). Motivation is defined as pleasure/pain, hope/fear, acceptance/rejection (which has elements of an emotional reaction and a conscious evaluation), and ability roughly corresponds to the lack of costs (as the term is used in his model); he includes both intuitive and deliberative elements in both. The trigger part of his model corresponds to the “cue” in the model presented here. His model is displayed in Figure 2-2.

FIGURE 2-2. FOGG’S BEHAVIOR MODEL (2007), SHOWING THE DIMINISHING MARGINAL RETURNS THAT HAPPEN WITH EXTRA MOTIVATION OR INCREASED ABILITY TO ACT

Fogg argues that in order for an intentional action to occur, you need all three elements. You can encourage an action by increasing a person’s ability to act (decreasing costs) or increasing motivation.

In each case, the boost it provides to the person decreases as the action becomes easier and more motivating (i.e., when the action is very difficult, a bit of help to make it easier is very powerful). When the action is already easy, making it even easier isn’t going to change behavior as much. In economic terms, this is known as diminishing marginal returns.

It’s a good practical lesson for product designers.

The Funnel Repeats Each Time the Person Acts

People don’t stay in the funnel over time. They drop out somewhere, or they take the action—either way, they’re out very quickly. Each time people think about taking the action, the process repeats: a cue leads them to think about it, they react intuitively, and so on. Thus, repeated actions require multiple passes through the Create Action Funnel.

Each Time Through the Funnel Is Different

Each time a person thinks about taking a target action, he passes through the Create Action Funnel. But the Funnel is subtly different each time. This is especially true when the person is deciding whether to take the action a second (or third, etc.) time.

Let’s say you’ve gone to the gym for the first time. Here are some of the things that change from the first time you planned on going, to the second time you’re thinking about going:

Your relationship to the action has changed

You now know how the gym operates, where the equipment is, and so on. So your “cost” to use it decreases. But you also know more clearly whether you like going to the gym or not. So, your intuitive reaction and conscious evaluation change, too.

You’ve changed

If you did well your first time exercising, you have more confidence (increasing the perceived feasibility); if you weren’t able to do the exercises you had hoped, you have less confidence.

Your environment may have changed

You may set reminders for ourselves to go back to the gym (creating cues), or set expectations among your family that you will continue going (creating urgency and increasing benefits). You may have friends at the gym who expect you to return.

WHAT’S STOPPING YOUR USERS?

Here’s another way of thinking about the Create Action Funnel and the five stages that a potential behavior passes through: what blocks your users from taking action? What are the cognitive and practical barriers they face?^[48^]

Problems with cues

The user forgets to act, or has limited attention. Nothing in the environment reminds the user to act.

Problems with the intuitive reaction

The user doesn’t trust the product or the company behind it. The action is unfamiliar and feels foreign.

Problems with the conscious evaluation

The user just isn’t very motivated to act. The costs of taking the action are too high.

Problems of ability

The user doesn’t know how to actually do it, or doesn’t have what he needs to act. The user fears failure.

Problems of insufficient urgency

The user procrastinates, and puts off the action until another day, which never comes. Or, other urgent issues block the user from the action.

Whether you look at it from the perspective of what’s required for action (the Create Action Funnel) or from the perspective of barriers to immediate action, the same factors are required for individuals to successfully act.

On a Napkin

In order for someone to take an action, five things need to happen immediately beforehand:

1. The person responds to a cue that starts her thinking about the action.

2. Her intuitive mind automatically reacts at an intuitive level to the idea.

3. Her conscious mind evaluates the idea, especially in terms of costs and benefits.

4. She checks if she has the ability to act—if she knows what to do, has what she needs, and believes she can succeed.

5. She determines if the timing is right for action—especially whether or not the action is urgent.

These five events can be visualized as a funnel, like a conversion funnel in ecommerce websites. If the person passes all five stages, then she will execute the action.

A quick way to remember the preconditions for action is the acronym CREATE: cue, reaction, evaluation, ability, timing, execute! At each step of the way in the Create Action Funnel, people drop off—because they fail to see the cue, don’t consider the action worthwhile, or don’t find it urgent. Each step of the way, they can also become distracted and diverted into taking other actions.

If the action requires conscious thought (System 2), our minds go through all five steps. If the action doesn’t require conscious thought (System 1 only), then the conscious evaluation and timing check are usually short-circuited.