Had the opportunity to listen to BJ Fogg talk about his work at Stanford on Behavior Design at a recent Startup2Startup event. Really interesting research if you are in the business of engaging users…I’ve included one of his presentations below to whet your appetite.
His focus is on how computing products…from websites to mobile phone software…can be designed to change people’s beliefs and behaviors. For those of us looking to engage users, his work provides a great framework to understand the type of behaviors we want to influence and how to go about it.
Core to his model is the idea that we take action when three things align, there is a trigger at a point where we have the ability and motivation to take action. If we can make taking an action easy to do then a trigger is going to activate a higher percentage of people…and this is where he advises you focus before trying to optimize motivation (where most of us tend to focus).
To this end, he has 3 steps for forming a new habit:
[list class=”bullet-minus”] [li]Make it Tiny – find something easy to do that is fast[/li] [li]Find a Spot – put it after an existing behavior[/li] [li]Train the Cycle – focus on doing the tiny behavior[/li] [/list]
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