Transcript

Boy, I've just come home from my daily dose of exercise and it is warm outside and sunny and summery, and people are lying on the grass. And it really is a wonderful day. And I hope it's for you to your well and in good spirits. Another thing that I'm really excited about is a new project of mine. It's a newsletter called seven things. And as you might imagine, it's a brief compact list of seven items that I've been thinking or writing or talking about in a given week. And some of them are also just things that I thought were really cool that are worth sharing. So if you're interested in that sort of little peek into My world, please check it out, go to seven things dot Thomas essl.com and subscribe. It'd be great to have you on board. And with that, without further ado, let's get to today's show. The topic I want to talk about today is a little bit different. It's not really about how to make your team function better, or how to put together a framework for product proposition, anything of the sort. It's more to do with applications themselves for technology. But it's a theme that's kind of been overarching for a lot of products and services that I've been working on and people asked me about it time and time again. And that is behavior change, technology enabled behavior change more specifically. And it's a very difficult topic to master. There's a ton of literature Today I just want to share the five key things that I think really strong believers when trying to create tech enabled behavior change.

Hello, and welcome to product nuggets. My name is Thomas Essl and today on the show, I'll be talking about how to use technology to form new behaviors in your customers and users. This is a topic that is notoriously difficult, and that spans many different industries, whether you're developing a product in the health space or finance, a lot of the things that we're kind of trying to apply technology to, to improve people's lives have some component that requires users to change their behavior to a larger or lesser Then there are a couple of levers we can sort of pull to try and motivate behavior change and make it happen, make it easier. And I can't take any credit for that this is a synthesis of a sort of large scale literature review the many, many years ago. And I've kind of kept working on it and updating and every time I found an article that was kind of relevant. And to me, it kind of ends up forming around five different groups. And today, I'll be sharing those five groups with you. So if you're a building or developing a product that has some kind of behavior change component to it. You can think about it through the lenses of those five themes, and see if there's an opportunity where you can come up with a new sort of feature piece of functionality or maybe remove something that will help your customers and users Go through that behavior change that you're looking for. The first and potentially most important theme on my list is trust. When you're trying to get customers or users to change their behavior, they first and foremost, most need to be able to believe that if they do change their behavior, it will lead to the desired outcomes. You got to be credible in that. And there are a range of things that don't necessarily have anything to do with your product bill might relate to branding or press coverage offers certain method. success stories and user testimonials from people who have gone through that transformation can be really powerful as well as expert opinions that you might read online, or sort of anything that falls into the sort of general publicity packet, personal referrals go a really long way. So if your customer know someone who's who's gone through that transformation, that really helps a lot. And education as well, some of these behavior changes, you know, particularly in health, they really work if I understand why a certain change in my actions will lead to the desired outcome. And that education is something that you might be able to productize for example, and feed your customers with on a regular basis, such that they can develop that trust over time. The next point is kind of a given with any product that we build, and that is, it's got to be well designed. And with that, I mean, specifically, you know, the old sort of points when we were talking about design, it's like it's got to be usable and desirable to use, it's going to be inclusive and tailored to the audience that you're addressing. I was once designing a application for an elderly population with motor disabilities and you know, your interfaces to look and work very differently here, then with, you know, the sort of Snapchat crowd, for example. So number two, make sure that your product and your behavior change mechanisms are just generally well designed as you would with any other product that you're developing. But it's still really key to mention. Number three is the behavior change. And the intervention that you're working on with with your product that you're trying to instill has to fit into your users routine. If you're suggesting something that doesn't even require me to just change my mind havior so to adapt something that I'm already doing, but something that requires me to completely, like change my day, or the way I think about something, or the way I organize myself, that is going to be a lot harder to succeed in, then if you just require a minor modification of behaviors. So when I say something has to fit into one's routine, I'm not just talking about time, you know, clearly, if you want someone to go through a certain exercise regimen, for example, then you know, that requires time and you have to literally make sure that there's gonna be an opportunity to fit that into a routine in the classical sense. But I'm also talking about place and not just geographic location, but context, you know, which devices your users already using at a given point in time. That might be good touch points for you and your intervention that you're suggesting, or what software? Or what tasks like, you know, writing emails, or is it you know, are they heavy SMS users or you know, your phone in general? Do they set themselves already reminders, you know, are there behaviors that already exist, that you can kind of piggyback on top of. And one more way to think about this is also what routines and behaviors are already in place in the physical world that you might be able to replicate or sort of include in your digital experience. So if you require small changes to routine and context of users that they're operating in, you're gonna have a much easier time to help them change their behavior. Number four I call accountability and motivation, I kind of lump the two together because accountability in a sense is just a type of motivation in my mind. But it basically comes down to trying to increase the intrinsic motivation. So that is users actually wanting to bring about that behavior change, as well as the extrinsic motivation. So that would be things like being accountable to somebody else. Or, you know, maybe some kind of incentive system. Even though those have Trying to not work as well. But maybe in your context, they do that sort of intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation. What can you do with your technology and your solution and your service to increase those. And last but not least, my fifth bucket is termed goals and insights. And that basically comes down to the problem that if a user is following through with everything you expect or want them to do, and they do change their behavior, then they have to be able to see and track that progress that they're doing over time. And here are the main mechanisms I've come across two different ones, the first one where you track the actual action. So this is very simple. If I want to build a writing habit, for example, and I set myself the goal to write 500 words every single day. Then I'm tracking my actions I'm saying Okay, today I did it or didn't. And over time that can build up to something like a streak where I'm motivated to keep it up. The other thing you can try and do is track the actual outcomes. So this is something very common in anything related to help and finance. For example, if I set myself a goal, then I can actually see over time how my daily behavior changes or adaptations, or let's say compliance with the Ask translates into achieving my long term objective, you know, if I want to save a certain amount of money in a given day or week, and then finally, if I do that, what I'm actually tracking is how close Am I to my goal, you know, the pot of money that is in my savings account. So make sure that users are able to set goals and to get inside to how far they come along to achieving those goals. And again, you can do that by tracking the actual actions or the achieved outcomes.

All right, so these are my five levers to pull to drive behavior change through technology. We have trust, design, routine, accountability and motivation, and goals and insights. If you've enjoyed this episode, please do me a huge favor and rated wherever you are listening to this podcast. I would also always love to hear your feedback, positive or negative and you can get in touch with me and now also subscribe to my newsletter on via my website, www dot Thomas essl.com. This show is produced by myself The theme song is aeronaut by blue dot sessions, all opinions expressed on my own, and I'm looking forward to talk to you again soon. Goodbye. Transcribed by https://otter.ai